Page 30 - July18LivingSCCLmagazine
P. 30
Lee Smith –
A Fine Southern Writer
By Nick Suhr
Iwas sitting in my brother-in-law’s family room in Roanoke, Virginia, two years ago, when I spotted a Garden & Gun magazine. I thought to myself, this must be another hunting magazine, but I was wrong. The magazine introduced me to a writer who could have been any of the girls I met in the early sixties when I was a student at the University of Virginia. In the years since I subscribed, it remains among my favorite sources of excellent writing.
I read an article by Lee Smith titled “Finding My Way Home.” The subtitle was “How two Southern literary giants led a young Appalachian writer to
her own voice.” What she wrote impelled me, a New Yorker by birth, to read the literary giants
she was talking about. They are Eudora Welty and James Still. I have read many of Welty’s short stories and essays on writing and bought an inscribed copy of Still’s River of Earth. Both authors are master storytellers. Their stories are brimful of colorful settings and characters with real depth. As a member of the SCCL Writer’s Guild, I have done some presentations based on Eudora Welty’s essays.
This article honors Lee Smith. Whether or not you want to learn how to write or to write better, I think you
will enjoy her most recent book, Dimestore – A Writer’s Life. It’s about growing up in the little town of Grundy,
Virginia, but the best part is not the story but the telling of it. The telling is in such beautiful words that you don’t want to stop reading. I can’t say that without quoting something from the book that tells everything about why and how she writes:
When Joan Didion published
My Year of Magical Thinking, with its close observation of her life during the
painful year following her husband’s death, a friend wondered “How can she do that – write at such a time?”
“The right question is, how could she not do that?" I answered. Writing is what Joan Didion does, it’s what she has always done. It’s how she has lived her life.
When you read Lee’s work, you quickly realize that while here she is writing about another writer, she is
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30 LIVING @ SCCL, July 2018
