''There's a saying around here,'' the fiction writer Eudora Welty once said. ''If you hear it, tell it.'' "Around here," was Jackson, Mississippi, where Welty heard everything: the comedy and music in the language, the evasions, self-deceptions, and willful misunderstandings, then told all with humor and affectionate-but-unsparing insight. In 1983, when she was 74, the famously private Pulitzer-Prize winning author surprised her public by delivering three personally-revealing and rapturously-received lectures on writing at Harvard. Later she gathered them into a memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, which spent nearly a year on the New York Times best seller list. Welty died in 2001, but for 90 minutes on Saturday evening, as part of Spencertown Academy’s Spoken Word series, Broadway veteran Sloane Shelton will bring her to life in Jan Buckaloo’s play, Eudora, based on Welty's memoir. Developed as part of the Workshop Productions program at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, NY, the play will soon embark on a nationwide tour. Spencertown Academy Route 203, Spencertown; 518.392.3693 Tickets $15; $12/members
