History Is Lunch: Kasey Mosley, "Eudora Welty's Sense of Home"

On July 8, 2020, Kasey Mosley presented “Eudora Welty’s Sense of Home” as part of the History Is Lunch series.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty left Jackson time and again to explore new places. But she always returned to her home town. “There is no doubt that Jackson and the South helped shape Welty’s experiences, her writing, her voice, and her life,” said Mosley. “The question is not whether Welty was a Mississippian and a southerner, but rather why she chose to stay that way.”
Welty wrote in a 1956 essay that the “home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all.”
Mosley, an education specialist at the Eudora Welty House and Garden, suggests that Welty’s conception of home was less about a physical space and more about the people who lived there. “Welty’s metaphorical compass pointed her not to the geographical space of Jackson or the South, but to her family,” Mosley said. “Her ‘blood ties’ called her home.”
Kasey Mosley is a native of Quitman, Mississippi. She earned her BA in history from MSU-Meridian and her MA in history from MSU, where she is a PdD candidate in U.S. history.
History Is Lunch is a weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building in Jackson. MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page, / mdahofficial .