I posted it on my blog, and linked it to my Facebook page. While on sabbatical from a teaching job, I wrote a story about my father and a dog I convinced him to adopt. It forced me into solitary confinement with myself, and with a core truth: I hungered for my own company.
#LISTENING BY EUDORA WELTY HOW TO#
I knew I had one, but had no clue how to distinguish between the impressionist and the source.
#LISTENING BY EUDORA WELTY SERIAL#
I learned to invent the truth.Īnd finding a voice? That felt like an uneasy courtship with a serial shape-shifter. The visible world distorts, pulled between what you want to see and what is truly there. Possibility becomes more potent than reality. Physical eye and the mind’s eye vie for supremacy. It became a kind of superpower working in the theater, especially as a director. Learning to see with ADHD is like making sense of a kaleidoscope.
Though impressive on its surface, my mimetic ability distracted me from discerning pure tone.
I spent decades (poorly) imitating writers whose voices sounded authentic: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s nuclear intensity, Isabel Allende’s heirloom embroidery, Toni Morrison’s effortless power. To cope, I learned to listen outside myself, and became an expert mimic. But all my life, there have been any number of voices inside my head clamoring for attention. The designation was new when I was a child, as were medications designed to treat it. The struggle - and drive - to writeįor someone with ADHD, listening can be a strain.
All I had to do was listen, learn to see, and find a voice. She made me think I could - and should - be a writer. “One Writer’s Beginnings” reads in three parts: “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice.” Through each section, Eudora Welty’s alchemy distills generations of experience into gold. Her lucid calm hushed the fretful voice inside that told me over and over again: You should write. It became both a talisman and a homing device. During that fitful era, I returned to Ms. I wrote monologues and fragments of plays. Then I became a director and a teacher, both slightly steadier versions of the same sharp tempo. The staccato rhythm of the profession suited my ADHD-challenged attention span. Though trained as a director, I first became an actor. Con mucho cariño, José.ĭespite his clear directive, my career progressed like hopscotch. He eviscerated my work with devastating tact, but left me with a treasure: a used copy of Eudora Welty’s “One Writer’s Beginnings.” He pressed it into my hand and, in his toneless voice, insisted I read, aloud, what he had inscribed to me.įrom one without a voice, to one in search of his own. Our time together taught me how little I knew about directing. His intense gaze, however, focused and propelled that disembodied voice, and taught me to listen with my eyes. The electronic device mimicked larynx function, but produced an eerie, digital sound, devoid of timbre and pitch. When cancer took his larynx, he learned to speak with a Servox held against his throat. Quintero was the kind of man who sent himself flowers, and who once climbed the stone steps of a Mayan temple on his knees to atone for sins. A slender, black-eyed Panamanian, José Quintero was a legend in the American theater and a guest artist at Florida State University, where I earned an MFA in directing and management. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Eudora WeltyĮudora Welty Foundation I learned much of what I value about writing from a man who lost his voice.
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