"Stir-fried Bee Chrysalis and the Soul Stories of Bright Beaded Hats" by Mary Alice Dixon

 – “Call her Amah. Grandmother.”

The hat carries stories, mother to daughter, many generations.

Mary Alice Dixon is a Pushcart nominee who taught architectural history in the U.S. and China. She is an award-winning poet and finalist for the NC Poetry Society’s 2023 Poet Laureate Award. Her writing appears in the PSPP anthologies Twists and Turns, Curious Stuff, Trouble, and That Southern Thing. She has recent work in County Lines, Kakalak, Mythic Circle, Pinesong, Petigru Review, and elsewhere. Mary Alice lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she volunteers with hospice, participates in Charlotte Writers Club and Charlotte Lit, and loves hats, honeybees, and old stories. 

Author’s Talk

Mary Alice Dixon

“Someday,” C. S. Lewis once said, “you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” 

I think I’ve reached that age. I realized this when I revisited my notes—and memories—from a long-ago experience in which I, the teacher, became the student, the student not allowed to learn.  

My experience took place in 1986.  

I was visiting the Indigenous Hani People in Yunnan, China. I wanted desperately to hear the stories an elder-woman tried to teach me. But her stories were dismissed by my government overseer as “fairy tales.” He would not allow me to hear them.  

I was whisked away from the storytelling, empty-handed and wordless. I had nothing scholarly to report, no women’s history to preserve, nothing.   

Ever since, I have carried these missing stories like a wound.   

But this changed.  

This changed as I began to meditate on the meaning of “Sooner or Later.” This theme struck a deep chord in me where I thought there was only a silence. I realized, yes, I had been denied the chance to learn specific stories from the Hani elder-woman. But I had been given a story about belief, patience, and hope.  

You know how they say when life hands you a lemon, make lemonade? Well, “Sooner or Later”—and in my case much, much, much later—I found the lemonade hiding in my lemon.   

And so, my PSPP story about the metamorphosis of bees, about histories unwritten, and about faith in an afterlife is the true story I was told in 1986. It just took me many decades to hear it.   

After all, as Hans Christian Andersen said, “Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.”  

Thank you, Randell Jones, for helping me remember this.—Mary Alice Dixon