Join us November 24 at the Orange County Public Library for the Hillsborough Local Author Book Fair! Today we hear from one of our guests, Lee Smith!
Tell us about your most recent work.
My most recent book is “Dimestore,” a memoir about growing up in a small, remote coal mining town in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia. By extension it is also a love song and an elegy for the death of so many small towns all over America today—for Main Street with its string of family-owned stores like my daddy’s dimestore; for the kind of big, extended family I grew up in; for the kind of unfettered childhood my cousins and I had—running free all over town and up in the mountains where the only kind of “twitter” we knew was the sound of birds. I know some of the older Hillsborough residents will identify with this kind of smalltown childhood. My town, Grundy, Va., almost became a ghost town due to the decline of the coal industry and frequent flooding caused by strip mining and mountaintop removal mining, but other single-industry small towns all across America have met a similar fate, such as some of North Carolina’s textile mill towns or copper mining towns out West. It’s a universal story. “Dimestore” also has sections about my own family and my later life here in North Carolina.
What motivated you to try your hand at non-fiction?
Many people have asked me why I turned to nonfiction after publishing fiction for over fifty years. Why now? And which is easier? That’s easy to answer—fiction is a LOT easier. In fact, I have always felt that I could tell the truth better in fiction than nonfiction because you are free to rearrange the facts to prove your point, or emphasize your theme, or just make the story work better. Real life is messy—with fiction we can more easily create an order, a shape out of the chaos of our real lives. So why nonfiction, then? Simply to remember my own life, because at this age, that’s getting harder and harder to do! In fact, we DON’T remember until we put ourselves into the position of HAVING to remember—writing every day at the same time, for instance—and THEN it really starts coming…and coming….and coming. The secret is, the more you write, the more you remember. The floodgates open. And this is such a pleasure. Memory is the real gift. And here’s another surprise, too: I often find that I never know what I really think until I go back later and read what I’ve written. Try it!
If we were to tweet a single sentence from your writing, what should it be?
Here’s a sentence to tweet. I’d prefer you quote this whole bit, but you can use just the first sentence if you want.—-This is Granny Younger speaking, a mountain midwife from my novel “Oral History”—
“There’s tales I’ll tell, and tales I won’t…..I know moren you know and mought be I’ll tell you moren you want to hear. I’ll tell you a story that’s truer than true, and nothing so true is so pretty. It’s blood on the moon, as I said. The way I tell a story is the way I want to, and iffen you mislike it, you don’t have to hear.”—–Granny Younger, a mountain midwife in my novel “Oral History”
Read more about Lee and her work at http://leesmith.com/
