A Very Special Lecture

Gertraud, Ginny, and I met at the National Cathedral to have a bite to eat before attending the Inaugural Eudora Welty Lecture. The author chosen to give the lecture was Salman Rushdie.

We ordered our food in the Open City (formerly the Herb Cottage) and took it into the Bishop's Garden for a lovely picnic. It was a surprisingly warm evening, almost 80 degrees, perfect for eating outside.

Almost 1000 people attended the lecture in the nave of the Cathedral. Rushdie's assignment was to talk about his beginnings as a writer.

The event was sponsored by the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series.

This lecture was inspired by the lectures that Welty delivered in 1983 at Harvard in which she surveyed her own life as a writer and discussed the links between her childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, and her literary voice.

She had said, "The events in our lives happen in a sequence of time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily -perhaps not possibly - chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow; it is the continuous thread of revelation."