A 
A CONVERSATION WITH LEE SMITH, PART 1
Interviewed by Dale Brown
Roger Haile Photography, Mebane, NC
I met Lee Smith at the Hindman Settlement School on the banks of Troublesome Creek in Eastern Kentucky for our conversation. To get there, I had to pass near Rowdy, Fisty, Talcum, and Dwarf. The town names like the mountains and shaded valleys seemed especially right, because Lee Smith has given us the cadences and rhythms of southern speech along with the beauty and terror of southern places. And her chronicle, in such books as Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, Black Mountain Breakdown, The Devil’s Dream, and Saving Grace, captures the courage and character along with the foible and fun of these mountain folk.
Lee Smith’s stories are about remembering where you came from, about enduring, and sometimes even about winning through despite overwhelming odds. She is Grundy, Virginia and Chapel Hill, North Carolina and thereabouts, but her work resists the Grit Lit label. Her stories are, finally, about all of us.
Smith’s career reaches back to 1968, the year she published The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, a story of the complicated life of a nine year old girl as told by the girl herself. Written while Smith was finishing her studies at Hollins College, the book won a Book-of-the-Month-Club award and launched a career. Other awards and prizes have followed alongside the ten novels and two short story collections.
The writer now divides her time between working on new stories and talking about the old ones. I caught up with her at the Settlement School where she had come to spend a week reading manuscripts and talking with fledgling writers. She seemed to be glad for all of it—the would-be writers, the demanding schedules, the books both written and waiting to be written, and even my annoying tape recorders.
DB: Well, here you are wearing yourself out teaching in this workshop. And exuberance is certainly one of the first things people notice about you, exuberance for writing and teaching. Why keep writing when the rewards are pretty meager? Where does that energy come from?
LS: I don’t know. I started when I was a girl. It’s just what I do. It’s the way I make sense of my life. I think I write fiction the way other people write in a journal. It’s as necessary to me as breathing. And I will sometimes try to not write for a while. I think you can publish too much and all of it’s not good. It’s just the way I go through my life. It’s a way of processing experiences and a way of having vicarious lives. There is no other activity that I have ever come across that I find as intense or as exciting as writing a story. The moment when I’m writing fiction, I’m not really myself. I’m really out of myself into some other realm which is profoundly exciting. And there’s nothing like it.
DB: You’ve called it a process of self repair.
LS: Yes. I think it’s therapeutic for me. I think I write for many reasons. I write for intensity and joy. I also write because I think it’s therapeutic. For self repair. I think I process a lot of things that I have in my mind. Instead of going to the psychiatrist, I write a story.
DB: You’ve said that if you hadn’t been a writer, you would have been a psychiatrist.
LS: I think so, because what interests me are people and the choices we make, how we try to live our lives, and how we try to do good.
DB: How does your own life come into your books?
LS: It is just part and parcel. I think up the books, and I’m not what you would call an autobiographical writer. I don’t write out of exact experience. I have certainly never been a serpent handling believer, nor have I been an old lady living back in the hills at the turn of the century, but everything I write about is of enormous importance to me emotionally. It corresponds psychologically or emotionally to things I am going through myself. For instance, when I wrote Black Mountain Breakdown, which is about a girl who is physically paralyzed and can’t take control of her life, I was in a very bad marriage. And I was unable to do anything about it. I was unable to leave. So instead of doing anything, I wrote that novel. The book was an almost unconscious working through those issues of the marriage. Later, I was able to understand a lot of things because I had written that book. The book was like a cautionary tale.
DB: So the book is more autobiographical looking back than you thought it was at the time?
LS: Yes. I didn’t think it was autobiographical at all, because there were a lot of things about my situation I was not facing.
DB: When you work with young writers in workshop settings, do you find that this business of autobiography is a problem? Do beginning writers tend to be too close to their own lives?
LS: Most people are writing too close to their own experience when they begin writing, often because they are compelled to write out of pain. So sometimes I know when I’m discussing a story with somebody that the protagonist is really her or him.
DB: Robert Olen Butler says you only begin to be a writer when you can get past that first level of experience.
LS: I think I agree. My first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, has definite autobiographical elements in it. I was an overly imaginative child who found it difficult to grow up. Then there were autobiographical elements in my second novel, Something in the Wind, which was horrible. It’s a disaster. It’s the worst novel ever written. I think I did have to get past myself at that point or I wouldn’t have been able to continue writing. It’s true.
DB: But the storytelling goes back into your family heritage and especially your Uncle Vern?
LS: Yes. We told stories. There wasn’t anybody else in my family writing stories or reading much. My mama was a school teacher, and she subscribed to Readers Digest Condensed Books, so we got books. But neither she nor my dad really read them much. My dad liked to do dramatic readings of Rudyard Kipling. But nobody was reading literature or talking about it. But, boy, they were telling great stories. So to me a story has a human voice.
DB: I wonder how one develops an ear for that? Do you go around with a notebook and listen for the good story? I was talking to my 92 year old aunt recently, and she told me about finding a bargain on shoes. She bought six pairs of shoes. I thought if you’re 92 and you buy six pairs of shoes, that’s incredible optimism. That ought to be written down somewhere.
LS: Yes. Of course I do write things like that down. I don’t carry a notebook with me all the time, but I keep track. A doctor told me the other day the way he could judge the health of his elderly patients. When they came in, he’d ask them if they had planted their gardens. If they had not, he would know that they were really sick. But if they had, then he would figure they were good for another year. So there’s that kind of thing you’re listening for all the time. It’s just a way you go through the world.
DB: This sort of wakefulness ties to religious issues too. Your books seem to be full of an awareness of the significance of faith.
LS: Yes. And that goes back to my childhood too. I think it also has to do with my writing because I first came to appreciate language via the King James Version of the Bible. My whole sense of language, I think, was formed by church, and those responsive readings in the Methodist Church and the Bible and the sermons. It really was. It’s just always something that’s a kind of a given in my childhood and in my background, so I can’t really imagine writing a story, particularly set in the region where I’m from, without religion as an absolutely important feature.
DB: Do you feel some ambivalence about the church, the influence of the church, as you look back?
LS: Not now. But I think some ambivalence shows in "Tongues of Fire.’ That is my most autobiographical story. I really was very drawn as a child to those emotional services, the Pentecostal kinds of services, and I was a nervous and emotional child. I really did believe that I heard God speak to me at church camp, and they put me in the infirmary. That is true. And several other times I felt I heard God speak to me. And somebody might say I was having a nervous breakdown. I don’t believe that. But it scared me.
DB: So they might say you were being abused by these religious fanatics?
LS: Yes, but I wasn’t. I was choosing to go there. I was choosing not to go to my own home church, the Methodist Church, and go into these other churches and get myself all worked up. And I was choosing to read the Bible over and over. I think I did succeed in scaring myself. Not as specifically as in "Tongues of Fire,” perhaps, but scary. Then I turned to the Episcopal Church. In those earlier years I had come to associate religious fervor, that kind of intensity, with something scary. So I pulled back from it. My parents sent me off to an Episcopal school, and I found myself relieved. But I was still always drawn to the more passionate religious expressions, and in a certain way that’s why I wrote Saving Grace. I don’t attend a church where anybody is laying on hands. I don’t practice this. But I am certainly a believer.
DB: And you say that writing is like prayer?
LS: Yes, because of this state that I’m talking about when I’m writing, this intensity. I don’t get that anywhere else. It’s the same feeling in a way, I think, as prayer. I remember Annie Dillard and I were having this conversation one time and I said, "Well, what do you think prayer is?” and she said, "I think it’s just when you think real hard.” And that’s what you do when you’re writing. You’re thinking so hard that you’re sort of outside yourself. You know, there’s a similarity there, for sure.
DB: Do you get letters from the fundamentalists who are angry at you for attacking fundamentalism or from the irreligious who wish you wouldn’t be so tied up with things religious?
LS: Oh sure. It’s very dangerous, I think, to write anything that has to do with religion, because you’re going to step on everybody’s toes. With Saving Grace I had a woman who stalked me. I was on a book tour, and she was in the crowd when I was reading at a bookstore in Memphis. She had a stark, sort of obsessed face. She looked very different from everybody in the bookstore so I noticed her. Then she disappeared. Then in Oxford, Mississippi, there she was again. And I began to get really nervous. And at the end of the reading she pushed people aside and got in front of the line. She started yelling and said she had come there to tell me that I was going to hell because of what I’d written in Saving Grace. And I said, "Have you read the book?” And she said, "I don’t read no book but the Bible.” It turned out she had read something about the book, some description of it in an ad or something. She didn’t want me making fun of snake handling religion. And then she knocked the books off the table and stormed off.
DB: Do you think much about the audience for your books?
LS: No, that’s not something that I think about when I write. Religion, for example, has been such a part of my own life and a part of the country I’m from that it will inevitably work it’s way into things I’m writing about. But I certainly don’t think of myself as writing to a religious audience or something. I guess I don’t actually have an audience in mind when I write. I’m just a person who’s compelled.
DB: You don’t have some vision about who goes to the bookstore and buys these books.
LS: I don’t. And I remember having this conversation with Denise Giardina. She told me that she has in mind the person who walks into the bookstore and picks up the book. I don’t have a clue. I don’t even care.
DB: I’ve read a good bit about your years at Hollins College with Annie Dillard, Louis Rubin and “the Virginia Wolves.”
LS: It was a hotbed for wonderful writing, a very nurturing place. I think a lot of it was simply chance.
DB: It sounds like an electric time.
LS: It was great. And for me it was wonderful. I always thought that I was weird because all I ever wanted to do was read and write. And I just met these people who were like me. And I wasn’t weird.
DB: And you really had a singing group called "The Virginia Wolves?”
LS: Oh yes. And we were in writing groups with teachers who were also writing, and they were sharing their work with us. There were very few creative writing programs then. And it was in Louis Rubin’s Mark Twain class that we decided to raft down the Mississippi and got ourselves arrested. That was the kind of nurturing that we got. And that’s why I do think that women’s education was something wonderful for me. You know, the idea that if you want to do this, you can figure it out, and you can do it.
DB: Were you surprised by the success of The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, that first novel?
LS: It won some award, but it wasn’t successful. Only 3000 or so were published. It was kind of a fluke, that it was ever published. It had been picked for publication by a very old man, Cass Canfield, who was a famous senior editor at Harper & Row, and he was already on his was out. The book attracted his attention. But other people at the company were not much interested in books that he found. He had had his day in a certain way. And I didn’t know anything about this. I didn’t know that I should get to know people at the publishing house. And so the book did get a couple of good reviews, but it sank like a stone.
DB: What’s wrong with it?
LS: I don’t know. I was just so unaware of publishing at that time. Maybe the publisher did absolutely nothing to promote it. And I did nothing to promote it. It got some notice because James Kirkpatrick, the columnist, wrote a column about it. He did that because I had worked for him in Richmond.
DB: You were praised for your skill with the narrative voice, the little girl.
LS: I remember at Hollins I kept writing a series of stories that often seemed to be about the same little girl.
DB: It gets labeled as a “loss of innocence” novel. Do you get nervous when people start making thematic statements about your novels?
LS: No, because I’m in that same business. I’m not able to make those statements very well about my own work. The Last Day the Dogbushed Bloomed is so long ago that I can see that. But that’s the kind of thing I do when I teach other writers’ work.
DB: You don’t sit down with a book and say, "The theme of this one’s going to be this or that.”
LS: No. I never think about theme. I just think about the stories.
DB: Something in the Wind, the second novel, really does have that late sixties feel. There’s some lovely satire there. My favorite passage is when Brooke is taking notes in Mrs. Poole’s English class. She’s going along, determined to be studious, and then the notes dwindle off into doodle. There’s this sort of college experience that has nothing to do with books. She’s really not learning anything in the classroom.
LS: Actually I’ve been taken to task for that a couple times. People say that I make fun of education, that I seem to think that real knowledge is out somewhere among the peasant folk. And the criticism is not entirely untrue. I have known several older, mountain women who seem to me so much wiser, wiser than the academics I’m around. I haven’t really intended to denigrate educational institutions, but there it is.
DB: What is disappointing in Something in the Wind when you revisit it?
LS: I wasn’t ready to write another novel. I had just sort of used up my whole life and my whole childhood in the first book. And I didn’t have another story to tell. I just didn’t have a novel. I had two separate things going on. I had this sort of supernatural thing gleaned from my summer job down at Carolina where I worked for the Institute for Psychic Research. And the other a sort of story of grief and the college experience and identity and figuring out who you are. And they don’t fit.
DB: When did you start thinking of yourself as a writer?
LS: You know, only very recently.
DB: I remember reading about your coming to a point around the time of The Devil’s Dream when you realized you needed to promote yourself as a writer. Maybe Clyde Edgerton and Susan Ketchin had something to do with this?
LS: Yes. And this was amazing to me. What they did for me was incredible because realizing the publisher wasn’t going to promote the novel, they said, "Let’s just put on a little show. " It was great. I just loved it. That was really important to me. You don’t have to act like you’re a teacher who writes on the side.
DB: Do you ever sit down and think, what would it take to write a best seller?
LS: I don’t think that you can even try to do it. I mean you either have the touch or you don’t. And I think I’m too weird and idiosyncratic to fit into any category of genre writing. So if I were to write a best seller, it would be something that would appeal to people out of some merit. I can’t sit down and try to do it because I’m unable to fit a formula. And actually I went through several periods where I tried. I was broke so I tried to do it. And I couldn’t.
DB: You were interested in the mystery novel?
LS: Yes. I have an unpublished mystery novel; it’s terrible. It’s called Children of Chronus. It takes place in an experimental school, where a charismatic, mythology teacher is mysteriously murdered during a snow storm. But it just doesn’t work.
DB: And you can tell that yourself? Nobody needed to tell you that?
LS: No. I know that it doesn’t work.
DB: Some southerners have expressed concern about the Grit Lit school as employing hillbilly stereotypes to get a laugh. I know that’s been something of an issue in your books. I heard some people sharing Jeff Foxworthy jokes last night. Foxworthy has one that says, "You know you’re a redneck when you go to your family reunion to meet women.” Now that’s an interesting kind of joke. It’s funny if you’re with family and tell that joke. But in another context, that’s a cruel joke. It sort of depends on where you are.
LS: Oh, yes.
DB: The reviews of Fancy Strut kept raising this issue. I remember the phrase, "satiric but not mean.” You’re always walking the line on this—satiric, but not cruel.
LS: I don’t think of myself as a satirist. I will poke fun, sure. But is it satire?
DB: I remember the majorettes in Fancy Strut, and Frances says that the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen in her life is this line of majorettes marching across the field. And Theresa’s title, Miss Fancy Strut, is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to her. That’s a pretty deep jibe. You’re certainly questioning what sort of people these are.
LS: Yes, but I understand these people.
DB: And you like them?
LS: Oh, yes. And I’m trying to go beneath any stereotype. You just have to go deep enough to find out all the ways in which people don’t fit the categories we like to put them in.
DB: Roy Blount has a famous line about you. He says reading Lee Smith is like reading Madame Bovary while listening to Loretta Lynn and watching "The Guiding Light.” Does a line like that help or hurt?
LS: I think it is helpful.
DB: It doesn’t make you into the Dolly Parton of the literary world?
LS: That’s fine with me. I really admire Dolly Parton. Obviously I try to do serious work. But I would like to be read by regular people. I want to be read by people that go to Dollywood, you know, as well as some blue-haired book club or academics and the like. I would really like to be accessible because I think of myself as an average person. When I wrote Fancy Strut, I was living in Alabama. I had young children, and I wasn’t much aware of all the big issues. I didn’t think of myself as having a career, a writing career. I just never thought of it.
DB: The race question shows up in that book and in most of your books. Has that been controversial at all?
LS: No. Race is a real issue with a lot of writers from the deeper south who can’t avoid coming up against it if they’re going to be writing honest books about the south. It just hasn’t played as much of a part in my life. I grew up in an all white area. But in Alabama I got really interested because I was working for a newspaper. This was just after the civil rights era.
Dale Brown’s interview with Lee Smith will continue in the next issue of Southern Writers.
