Mary Chapin Carpenter excited about Welty tribute

That explains the five-time Grammy winner’s delight at the prospect of an encore show Saturday as part of the AJC Decatur Book Festival. Once again, the four highly literate songwriters will swap songs and stories and celebrate their shared affection for the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Yet while the spirit of Welty may fill the air, Carpenter said, “You don’t need to have read something by Eudora to enjoy the show. It’s just four songwriters who love to be together, and you can’t lose with that.”

“It happens that Kate and Claire and Caroline all have very deep roots in Mississippi. My tenuous connection is just that I’m a fan of Eudora,” she said, laughing.

That fan status dates to Carpenter’s days as a struggling musician still trying to find her way. She needed creative encouragement and found it in Welty’s words. She began reading “One Writer’s Beginnings” — the late author’s memoir of becoming a writer — and was transported by “this book of wisdom.”

“I was living in this horrible, scuzzy walk-up outside of D.C., playing in clubs and bars and also working part time as an office temp, and I was a bit lost,” she said. “But I would read that book and savor it every night, and it just made me realize that having a passion for something and pursuing something is really what it’s all about. It’s not about what you get when you finish pursuing it.

“It made me feel validated — that it was OK to feel a little lost and OK to wonder and to be discouraged at times — and helped me believe in myself, even though I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to do. Anyone who has a creative desire of any kind, I think that book will speak to them.”

Carpenter went on to write a song and a children’s book, “Halley Came to Jackson,” based on Welty’s encounter with Halley’s comet. Later, when she made a tour stop in Jackson, Welty invited her over for a visit.

“I was completely tongue-tied,” Carpenter admitted. “It was surreal. I have no other way of describing it. I think about it now and wonder, ‘Did that really happen?’ But I have a signed photograph she gave me that I pass by every day in my home, so I know that it really did happen.”

An avid reader and lover of books, Carpenter has previously taken part in public writing discussions with Kaye Gibbons, Billy Collins and Anne Lamott. She is excited about Brad Gooch’s recent biography of Flannery O’Connor and can’t wait to get her hands on Lorrie Moore’s new novel, which she’s anticipated for years.

“She’s one of my favorite authors,” Carpenter said. “I love her and everything she does.”

What she admires about Welty, she said, are her powers of observation, her sense of humor, and the warmth and humanity that flow through her work. Every time she re-reads “One Writer’s Beginning,” Carpenter said, it reminds her to build her lyrics around accurate, evocative details. For example, in a just-finished song about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, she references their favorite Paris food and wine pairing— oysters and Sancerre — to ground the character in reality, she said.

Much to her fans’ relief, Carpenter returns to the studio in October, with a new record due out next spring. Her April performance in Jackson was her first in two years since a life-threatening pulmonary embolism.

“It’s exciting to be working again,” said Carpenter, who lives on a Virginia farm with her husband and their menagerie of cats and dogs.

Some of her new songs, she said, “reflect on the strange quality of going through something like that — the sense of loss and the sense of utter terror and fear, but in more metaphysical terms.”

“It’s never entirely far from my mind that it could happen again,” she said. “So it’s left me with a renewed sense of gratitude.”