When I was 22 years old I received a prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. I was the youngest recipient that year, the only one not yet published, and I still wore clothes my mother would have approved of. At our first meet-and-greet, one of the other Fellows assumed I was an assistant and asked me to get him more wine. I tried to look grown-up and said stiffly, “I won a Stegner Fellowship, like you.” The woman in charge, Nancy Packer, remarked, “We assumed you were older.”

For the first weekly meeting of the group — a writer named Herbert Gold had been hired to lead a workshop — I butched my hair, showed up wearing all black, and smoked a cigar. I couldn’t even keep it lit, but the same guy asked me to get a beer with him later.

I remained at Stanford for 3 years, received an MA in English, and continued to sit in the writing seminars with the new Fellows as they came and left. Various writers got brought in to try to manage our unruly groups, and the most charming and effective was Wendell Berry, a writer I’d never even heard of. Wendell had an accent like me — he was from Kentucky and I’d grown up in South Carolina — and he exuded joy and love for literature. A tall, gangly man, he’d come into the seminar room and say something like, “I want to read you another great piece of writing!” and he’d proceed to read to us in his loud, wonderful voice, stories or segments of novels that he cherished. I remember best him reading Faulkner’s story “The Bear,” the whole thing, and it’s long. Sometimes he’d stop for a line or passage and repeat it — “You hear that? You hear it?” — and, if there was time left, one of the us would read aloud a piece of our own work. This was a humbling learning experience, and, to my memory, it was Wendell Berry’s main teaching method.

He was a deeply moral man, full of joy, tender about literature, and consistently kind toward others. He once said to me, “Blanche, writing is a lonely thing. You must find a way to enjoy it.” So I remember crying in the grocery store later that day, standing by the tomatoes and mumbling, “Not only do I have to write this stuff, now Wendell says I have to enjoy it….”

Later I taught creative writing for many years, and my teaching method was mostly modeled on his. I would read great writing aloud to my students and stop to repeat lines: “Hear that? Do you hear it? You see how she’s doing that?” And I’d say, “You have to seize your talent and try to enjoy it.”

Some of the writers who emerged from those classes include David Grann, Ann Napolitano, Russell Rowland, William Lychack, Jazmine Hughes, Hannah Tinti, Soraya Palmer, Soon Wiley, and there are many others. They may not know that threads of their accomplishments might trace back to Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry returned to his roots in Kentucky to live out his life and write from there. He died yesterday, on my 81st birthday, which felt like a sweet connection. He was a great human being, and I honor him, I honor him, I honor him.