Millsaps College professor and Eudora Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs will appear on National Public Radio’s The Diane Rehm Show from 11 am-noon June 25. She wrote about it and lived it. I was hooked on the right and wrong approach to every situation and there was someone or something that was always causing me pain and aggravation. I hope encountering Eudora Welty’s world will excite participants and suggest new ways of approaching Eudora Welty’s fiction, said Suzanne Marrs, Millsaps’ Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence and Welty biographer.

I appreciate the world I have within myself and explore it everyday. I continue to expand and feel the excitement that living my truth brings me through the interaction I have with all living things. She was a photographer, Pulitzer Prize winning writer, and a gracious lady from Jackson Mississippi. She dedicated most of her life to writing fiction and her works immediately established her as a leading figure in American Literature especially the American South.

The workshop is one of 20 programs funded nationwide by the National Endowment for the Humanities in its Landmarks of American History and Culture Series. The connection of my spirit to All There is in a web of love that continues to expand and grow as I do. Two separate sessions of the workshop are scheduled for July 6-11 and July 20-25. I followed the crowd in order to conform and found myself in a cell of insanity looking for help and wanting permission to live.

“The goal of our Landmarks Workshop is to give school teachers an in-depth experience with important topics in American history, an experience they can then share with their students, said Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our workshop will help teachers to link the study of literature to the concrete world of a writer’s daily experience. The K-12 educators will come from New York, Vermont, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Missouri, New Jersey, Florida, Michigan, Iowa, Oregon, Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, California, Colorado, Wisconsin and Indiana to attend the workshop, Eudora Welty’s Secret Sharer: The Outside World and the Writer’s Imagination. The radio show will focus on Eudora Welty’s autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings.

Workshop participants will visit Welty’s home and garden, the Medgar Evers House and the Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Museum to learn more about the world in which Welty lived and wrote. Other panelists are Mississippi writer Jack Nelson and author Kate Lehrer. About 100 teachers from 19 states will visit Jackson in July for a week-long workshop hosted by Millsaps College and the Eudora Welty House to study the world, characters and events that sparked the imagination of one of America’s greatest authors. Marrs is one of several well-known historians and literary critics who will direct the workshop.

The sheltered life is the life we all want to experience, for it is real. It is real because I know who I am. In our diversity we become one, because from that contrast we learn to become grander versions of ourselves; the version that starts from within, the spirit that is having a human experience in order to remember. The shelter of unity changes my thoughts and I see without judgment, fear or anger.

From my choices I learn lessons and grow from the changes that the lesson teach me. We all do it at different times and in different lives. The time to start living is a personal choice. I expand my sheltered existence into a world of color and beauty where there is consciousness in everything.

Well, that’s all behind me. I overlooked that concept for many years, the external world had a grip on me and I fell into the trap of materialism. Remembering is awakening. I captured the daring life by wrestling with judgment and fear, the self-created feelings that arise from being separated from my inner world.

It is a world of probabilities and possibilities where things form into matter and manifest into things. Others include Peggy Prenshaw, Minrose Gwin, Alferdteen Harrison, Michael Kreying, Leslie McLemore, Rebecca Mark, Pearl McHaney, Noel Polk, Harriet Pollack and Charles Sallis. It is a journey of consciousness that brings me to many crossroads and choices. Her words above bring a sense of unity to life; we all live a sheltered life to begin with, for we all start our journey from within.

Some only do it in dreams and others do it all the time. I did live a sheltered life because I only lived in one reality, which held me captive because I was too weak to listen to my inner voice. Each experience is an expression of daring where I guide myself with gratitude and appreciation. I understand who I am.