Ernest J. Gaines

Um, probably in the top 10 somewhere.

I wrote to him about like, what would be the best Ernest Gaines book to read? Because he talks about Ernest Gaines' work and how he was a friend.

It's like, where should I begin? So, uh, Gathering of Old Men was the top suggestion he made.

And I read that and wrote back to him, um, But so also in between there with meeting them, so I've been two times to, as of this recording, to Kentucky Arts and Letters Day that the Berry Center does.

But I think that's a part of Southern charm.

I think it's part of the, you know, the tradition that goes back to, you know, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor, and Ernest J. Gaines, and Alice Walker, and all the way down through Tom Franklin and, uh, you know, Jesmyn Ward and folks like that.

That sort of Southern s- tradition of, of storytelling, of, of being a raconteur, so to speak, so I try to work that into my style as well.

Yeah.

Knowing that his wife was sinking into bitterness with her stalled vocation, my father asked if she could take a class.

Studying under Stegner, alongside talents such as Ken Kesey, Ernest Gaines, and Wendell Berry, gave my mother the confidence that she could hold her own.

Her block lifted.

She began to write stories again, and to publish them in quarterly magazines.

And one was AME and one was Baptist, but that didn't matter because they wanted me to be the best possible one.

And I don't know, uh, maybe some of the people who are listening in, and maybe you know, in that wonderful, wonderful book, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, there's a scene in that book, and Lord knows there's a scene in the movie, where Miss Jane talks about whenever a baby is born in the quarters, we pass the baby around to the old folks and ask, "Are you the one?" Well, I didn't need Ernest Gaines to put that in a book because that's the culture I grew up in.

And I knew that for some reason or other, between the nuns in the school, my classmates, and my family, I was gonna be a teacher.

So it's been a while now.