Meridian lost its nationally-recognized novelist and short story writer, Brad Watson, last week. He died of an apparent heart attack at age 64. Brad Watson had been the director of creative writing at the University of Wyoming for the past 15 years, living with his wife, Nell, and their horses south of Laramie, and had not lived in Meridian since the mid-1970s. But his literary contribution to Meridian has been vastly underappreciated.

If you live around Meridian and you’re not familiar with Brad Watson and his fiction, you’re not alone. He no longer had family here. But it hardly seems right that a writer whose two novels were both finalists for the National Book Award (every bit as prestigious as it sounds), who was published in The New Yorker, and was favorably reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, should remain unheralded and unsung in his own hometown.

My own brief acquaintance with Brad came from a visit he made two years ago. He was in the area to lecture at the University of West Alabama, where I teach, and he took an evening to read for a gathering of 50 or so Meridianites at Weidmann’s. It was clearly an emotional reunion for many, and Brad was modest and unassuming, happy to be here, and grateful for the moment. He read from one of his novels and answered some questions, but he was mostly interested in catching up and reconnecting. He was looking forward to returning again.

Brad was born in the old Riley Hospital in 1955, and he had what looks in many ways like a pretty idyllic childhood, roaming the woods with his two brothers just north of his house on 46th Street, the woods that used to exist where the North Hills commercial district lies now. He was, by his own account, “something of a delinquent,” as a youth, though he got involved in the Meridian Little Theatre, graduated from Meridian High in 1973, and took his wife and baby boy out to give Hollywood a try. He knocked around a while, working construction and other jobs. He returned to Meridian in the late 1970s and enrolled at Meridian Junior College, after his marriage had ended and his older brother, Clay, died. At MJC he fell under the spell of a teacher, Buck Thomas, who introduced him to Faulkner, O’Connor and Welty. That’s when he decided he’d try his hand at fiction.

His first collection of short stories, the 1996 “The Last Days of the Dog Men,” illustrates many modes of companionship between dogs and their owners —as accomplices, as victims, as confidantes, as alter-egos. This collection led to a five-year teaching position at Harvard University, where he wrote “The Heaven of Mercury,” which takes Meridian (“Mercury”) as its setting. This novel is a hearty, lyrical, generous tale about love, sex, death and family, with a healthy dose of the gothic surreal and magical realism (and readers should understand that though I recommend the novel highly, it is not necessarily a Meridian Chamber of Commerce product, and parts of it it also deal with human sexuality in frank and sometimes shocking terms). The central character of the novel, Finus Bates, a newspaperman for The Mercury Comet, is struggling to write an obituary for Birdie, the woman he has loved all his life, dating back to when they were teenagers when Finus accidentally caught a revealing sight of Birdie turning a cartwheel. Finus’ obituaries for various characters frame the novel, which is filled with tales of fish camps, cemetery trysts, mysterious premature deaths, marital indiscretions and infidelities, secret potions, issues of race, trips to the Gulf, memories of the 1906 cyclone, and visits from ghosts.

“Miss Jane,” Watson’s last published work (2016), set in the outskirts of Meridian in the early 20th century, traces the life of a woman afflicted with a congenital abnormality that renders her incontinent, unable to have sex, and unable to bear a child. But rather than sensationalize this condition, as other writers might have done, Watson treats it with dignity, wisdom and grace, befitting the quietly heroic figure living that sheltered life.

After Watson’s fellow Mississippian, William Faulkner, finished his third novel, “Sartoris,” in 1929, Faulkner had a major epiphany: that he could write about his own landscape and territory:

“I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”

Where Faulkner was able to mine his hometown of Oxford, transformed into Yoknapatawpha County, for material in his next 15 novels and dozens of short stories, it’s fair enough to observe that Watson took Mercury, or Meridian, to be his own Yoknapatawpha. It’s also tantalizing to imagine what Watson had left in the pipeline — according to his longtime editor at Norton, a memoir, another Mercury novel, and a collection of short stories.

Now that I’ve read Brad’s fiction, it’s easy to see not just how imaginative, but also how literal Watson’s vision is. I never pass by the Magnolia Cemetery the same way, I regard the Threefoot Building in a new light, and I have an appreciation and awareness of the old 13th hole on the Northwood golf course, to name just three examples.

Meridian has a proud heritage in the arts. Our native musicians are almost too numerous to mention — from Jimmie Rodgers to David Ruffin to the Big K.R.I.T. (not to mention the happiest surprise of the quarantine period, Todd Tilghman). In theater and acting, we have Sela Ward, and Meridian sparkles with The MAX, as well as the performing arts in our various stages and theaters. In literature, the star of Barry Hannah, a native Meridianite has perhaps shown brighter, but Brad Watson truly grew up and lived here, and embraced it as a setting, as a local habitation and a name, for his mythic fictions. It’s high time we remembered and celebrated the life and accomplishments of Brad Watson as well.

Kendrick Prewitt is a professor of English and chair of the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of West Alabama.