From an obit of the novelist Michael Malone:
Mr. Malone recalled that “the most important thing ever said to me as a writer” came from author Eudora Welty, whom he met at a Yale literary gathering in the late 1970s. When Welty learned that Mr. Malone had written three novels, none set in his native North Carolina, she advised him to “let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.” He soon started working on “Uncivil Seasons,” which he described as “the first novel of mine to be set in that Red Clay country, that landscape of my childhood imagination.”
A few years later, he drove from his home in North Carolina to Welty’s house in Jackson, Miss., to say thank you. He sat there for hours but “was too shy to go ring the doorbell,” he told the Journal. Eventually he drove home. He didn’t tell Welty about the episode until years later, when he happened to spot her in the lobby of New York’s Algonquin Hotel. “She looked at me and smiled,” he recalled, “and she said: ‘Oh honey, was that you? I almost called the police on you.’”
