A Jones for E. Fay Jones

Sometime in the decade before I left Academe (my mother's death in January 1982 freed me to check out completely) I began to think Southern again.

It happened fortuitously because of an out of control passion for quilts and a serendipitous meeting with Jim Wayne Miller. Miller I met at an Appalachian Writers Workshop near Hazard, KY. (I just had to check out that eponymic venue.) Appalshop, the creative media center also caught my eye. But it was Jim who turned me on to App Lit.

He was something. When he came back from the war, the high-toned Vanderbilt English Department was having none of this uppity cracker boy. But the German department was dying on the vine from the Nuremberg Syndrome. So pragmatic Jim majored in German, got a job teaching at Western Kentucky in Bowling Green, and never turned back. He mentored far and wide in the Midsouth, an exemplary pro bono critic whom the Vanderbilt snobs taught to be demotic.

I have never met Wendell Berry, but his kind of authenticity was the breath of fresh air I needed after stifling in the hot air of Upper Academe. My first quilt I bought in Little Rock, when I was researching a four part series that appeared Horizon (Tuscaloosa, AL) called Twenty Museums You've Never Heard Of (1981). In Arkansas I also discovered E. Fay Jones, that quirky original from Fayetteville, when he got the Gold Medal from the AIA. Fay Who? I asked myself astonished, until I saw his chapels in the woods with my own goggled eyes.

I remember him telling me how a snooty New York critic had asked him condescendingly when he got the Gold Medal, Don't you think it's a bit anomalous that you haven't even done a museum? Unfazed, Fay pointed out that seventy five percent of the members of the AIA worked in ateliers of fewer than five people and they did good work of the kind their clients asked for, thank you very much. It was this freedom from bushwa that appealed to me on several Southern fronts.