[MUSIC] The short story is an especially challenging literary form. It's much briefer than the novel and it requires a keen sense of detail. And southern writers, like Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, have been among the very best short story writers who've ever taken pen to paper. We might speculate that Eudora's keen eye as a photographer. Inspired and certainly influenced her writing eye, as a short story writer. She achieves this in an extraordinarily beautiful way in her short story, Why I Live at the P.O. This is a dramatic monologue in which only one voice is heard, the voice of the postmistress. And, as she speaks, we become aware of all of her family and her community, through her voice. One can suggest that the best way to understand Southern writers, even the most difficult like William Faulkner, is to read their work aloud, as you would tell a story. Because they, tell stories and are shaped, in very powerful ways, by storytellers who they hear and they translate the oral tradition into the written word, from oral tradition to literary tradition, in a very important way. And Eudora not only talks about, how she writes, but she also reads her work with great skill, as we'll see here, where she reads from the short story, Why I Live at the P.O. >> An editor a long time ago told me don't ever have the moon in the wrong part of the sky. And that's important. And I noticed when I read, other people's works. Often a man will have something blooming at the wrong time because he's never has been out in garden, he doesn't think it matters. He just named some flowers. Well that destroys something for me when I read it and I try not to make these mistakes. I'm, you can't always know that you've made a mistake, but I do believe in action. And not only that but I just I'm a natural observer and, to me the detail tells everything. One detail can tell more than any, descriptive passage in general, you know. This story's called Why I Live at the P.O., mainly it was an exercise in using the spoken word to tell a story. Tell you what was turned Papa Daddy against me. Papa Daddy, she said. He was trying to cut up his meat. Papa Daddy. I was taken completely by surprise. Papa Daddy's about a million years old and has got this long, long beard. Papa Daddy, sister says she fails to understand why you don't cut off your beard. So Papa Daddy lays down his knife and thought, he's real rich. Mama says he is, he says he isn't. So he says, if I heard correctly, you don't understand why I don't cut off my beard. Why, I says, Papa Daddy, of course I understand. I did not say any such of a thing, the idea. He says, hussy. I says, Papa Daddy, you know I wouldn't any more want you to cut off your beard than the man in the moon. It was the farthest thing from my mind. Stella Rondo sat there and made that up while she was eating breast of chicken. But he said, so the postmistress fails to understand why I don't cut off my beard, which job I got you through my influence with the government. Bird's nest, is that what you call it? Not that it isn't the next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississippi. I said, oh, Papa Daddy. I says, I didn't say any such of a thing. I never dreamed it was a bird's nest. I've always been grateful, though the say this, it makes it smaller. It's P.O in the state of Mississippi. And I do not enjoy being referred to as a hussy by my own grandfather. I still around he actually did say it, too. Anybody in the world could have heard you, that had ears. Stop right there, says Mama, looking at me. So I pulled my napkin right straight back through the napkin ring and left.
