Free Dimestore by Lee Smith Page A

beginning and then Phoenix’s little grandson near the end: “He got a sweet look. He going to last. He wear a little patch quilt and peep out holding his mouth open like a little bird.” I sat stunned when it was over.
    Miss Welty had seemed perfectly composed as she was reading; her face was luminous, lit from within. Now, having finished, she looked nearly shy, though her huge blue eyes were shining. “Well,” she said, looking all around, “any questions?” Hands waved everywhere.
    She chose the young man who seemed the most impassioned. Knowing what I know now, I’ll bet anything his dissertation was riding on his question. He leapt to his feet to ask it.
    â€œI wonder,” he said, his dark curly hair going everywhere, “if you could comment upon your choice of marble cake as a symbol of the fusion between dream and reality, between the temporal and the eternal, the male and the female, the union of yin and yang . . .” He made yin-yang motions with his hands.
    Miss Welty smiled sweetly at him. “Well,” she said slowly, considering, “it’s a lovely cake, and it’s a recipe that has been in my family for years.”
    Marble cake! My own mother made the best marble cake in town.
    It would be years before I would understand that exchange, and what really took place in our classroom that day. Later, in the final section of
One Writer’s Beginnings
, Miss Welty would put it best when she wrote that “the outside world is the vital component of my inner life. My work, in the terms in which I can see it, is as dearly matched to the world as its secret sharer. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world.”
    Immediately after Miss Welty’s visit, I read everything she had ever written. And it was like that proverbial lightbulb clicked on in my head—suddenly, I knew what I knew! With the awful arrogance of the nineteen-year-old, I decided that Eudora Welty hadn’t been anywhere much either, and yet she wrote the best stories I had ever read. Plain stories about country people and small towns—my own “living world.” I sat down and wrote a little story myself, about three women sitting on a porch drinking iced tea and talking endlessly about whether one of them does or does not need a hysterectomy. I got an
A
on it.
    BASED ON EUDORA WELTY’S INFLUENCE upon my own beginnings, I have always felt that one of the most important functions of any good writing teacher is to serve as a sort of matchmaker—“fixing up” a new writer with the fiction of a successful published author whose work comes out of a similar background, place, sensibility, or life experience. A certain resonance, or recognition, occurs. This can be an important step in finding a voice. Especially when we are just starting out, we encounter other writers who are like lighthouses for us.
    For instance, when I introduced young Kentucky writer Silas House to the work of Larry Brown. Silas recalls, “
Father and Son
had a profound impact on me. The way his characters were so intertwined with place—they couldn’t be separated. I recall shortly after reading the book that a major reviewer said Brown wrote ‘about the characters with whom you’d never want to have supper.’ I thought: ‘Those are the folks I’ve been eating with my whole life!’ And so Larry’s work really gave me permission to write about my people in all of their gritty glory, a grit formed by the rough land where we lived.”
    But even though my reading of Eudora Welty had led me to abandon my stewardesses, setting my feet on more familiar ground, telling simpler stories about small-town Southern life, I was never able, somehow, to set my first stories in those deep mountains I came from, or to write in my first language, the beautiful and precise