Eudora Welty to Reynolds Price, August 6, 1955

Don't worry about the "professional" feeling -- you may never have it. I haven't after all these years. That is, if the feeling of something new, fresh, difficult, and strange which comes to you with each story is the mark of the amateur spirit, then I still have the amateur spirit. The excitement comes from what's still to be learned at least as much from what's been struggled with before or partway, for the time being perhaps, mastered.

-- quoted in Eudora Welty: A Biography by Suzanne Marrs (p. 251)

[Side ramble: in this book, and in Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters; Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence (ed. Emily Herring Wilson), there is a lot about women coping with the care of aging parents. I am witnessing friends and clients coping with being those parents or children. I find myself praying about it: be it 1952 or 2012, the solutions are rarely easy and too seldom acceptable to all involved, and sometimes the conversations veer into comfortless territory.

Two more books on my kitchen counter: This is Not the Life I Ordered (found on sale at a Franklin Covey store some years ago) and Crucial Conversations (mentioned by Havi Brooks in a recent post that has already done me some good). I can only handle a few pages a time from either book, but y'know, a little bit at a time can add up to good things.]