It was a homecoming of sorts for writer Elizabeth Spencer, who read from her latest collection of short stories at Greenwood’s Turnrow Books Wednesday evening.
Among the standing-room crowd who turned out to hear the Carrollton native were “cousins by the dozens,” in the author’s own words. Spencer, 92, signed books, answered questions and read a portion of “The Wedding Visitor,” a short story from her latest collection, “Starting Over,” published in January.
The story, Spencer told the crowd, used a familiar and local setting.
“I just used the house I was brought up in,” she said. “I felt safe and at my ease wandering through that house, but the people are all made up.”
Several audience members asked Spencer whether she draws on real people while crafting her stories — perhaps a loaded question in a room of so many with personal or familial ties to the author. She insisted she doesn’t.
“People around home, though, are always very quick to say, ‘This must be so-and-so you’re writing about.’ Maybe people you don’t even know, but just the same, they’re certain they’re right and you can never talk them out of it,” Spencer said. “If you’re writing about an area you know, you’re bound to invent people that are like people that live there. I never intentionally, except maybe in my first novel, wrote about real people.”
Spencer also recounted meeting William Faulkner while she was living in Italy, shortly after the Oxford novelist was awarded in 1949 the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“He was in Rome, and I was invited to a party that somebody at the embassy gave for him,” Spencer said. “I don’t know if I saw him much. He stood in a corner, held a drink in his hand and didn’t say very much to people.”
Spencer, who has lived in Chapel Hill, N.C., since 1986, said she was pleased to be back in her home state. It was her first visit in more than a year.
She spoke fondly of her parents and her childhood in Carrollton. “I think I was pretty spoiled without knowing it. ... It just seems to me, looking back on it, that I didn’t appreciate all the things they were able to give.”
Asked what her favorite thing about coming back to Mississippi was, Spencer laughed and said, “All the folks that I love here and am so comfortable with.
“I feel like they know me and forgive me my faults. I feel like I’m at home with them.”
