For many years Eudora Welty wished to produce a book about country churchyards.<BR>Published at long last, in her ninety-first year, this collection includes ninety of her photographs along with a conversation in which Welty shares her impressions and her memories of the 1930s and 1940s when she rambled through Mississippi cemeteries taking these pictures.<BR>Accompanying the photographs are selected passages about graveyards and funerals from her fiction - Losing Battles, The Golden Apples and Other Stories, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, and The Optimist's Daughter - and from her essay "Some Notes on River Country."<BR>In the introduction Elizabeth Spencer, a Mississippi writer who has been a life-long friend of Welty's, explores the photographic images for the meanings they yield, for the light they throw onto Welty's fiction, and for her own memories of their home state's evocative graveyards and burial customs.