Girls Like Us

"Though Eudora Welty never claimed to be a feminist, her life was an example of what I felt feminism could do for someone like me."

Occasionally, we publish “lagniappes,” bonus issues filled with original poetry, prose, and/or photography with a connection to Mississippi. Today, we have a personal essay from Victoria Richard, a soon-to-be graduate of Millsaps College, originally from Progress, Mississippi.

The author in Progress, Mississippi circa 2012.

The first time I went to the Eudora Welty House & Garden in Jackson, Mississippi, I was sixteen years old, attending a creative writing workshop for high school students at Millsaps College, just a short walk from the author’s home. Three years later I enrolled at Millsaps as an English and Creative Writing major. Since then, I’ve worked alongside Dr. Michael Pickard to create a spreadsheet of all 5,280 of the books the Pulitzer Prize-winning author owned at the time of her passing. I’ve co-taught a class on Welty’s fiction, interned at the home where she lived and wrote, and done research for an article published in the newly released Eudora Welty and Mystery. But w…