A Clean, Well Lighted Place

Nick’s Family Restaurant, East Tennessee © 2021 Stephen Newton

When I think of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" it’s the title that speaks to me as much as the story. Published by Scribner’s Magazine in 1933, it deals with age, loneliness, alcoholism, and suicide—and the importance of public spaces that provide succor from the cold.

Places like Nick’s in East Tennessee. A humble eatery that has been serving honest to goodness wonderful food, and plenty of it since 1938. Or the Ridgeway Barbecue in Bluff City, serving hickory smoked ham and much more since 1949. Then, there’s Betty’s Stockyard Cafe where everyone knows your name, and you sit on stools around a horseshoe shaped counter. The walls are crowded with local art, and plenty of homilies. Betty, now in her seventies, has been serving authentic cooking to faithful generations of customers since the 1960s.

They are all clean, well lighted places that provide refuge from the cold. Places the public and writers of any age can spend time re-connecting with themselves and with everything and everyone else that is still wholesome in the world.

—Stephen Newton