English & Creative Writing

The Storyteller's Tale

Hollins graduate and Southern novelist Lee Smith listens to the voices of her past to chronicle small heroic battles of the human spirit. An article by Peter Guralnick featured Smith in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, 5/21/95. Excerpts that pertain to Lee Smith's educational experience (she wrote her first novel while a student at Hollins) follow. Reprinted with permission of the Los Angeles Times.

[Lee Smith] felt a sense of release when she got to college. It was the old Jane Russell-Adlai Stevenson story: containment or flight. "I think I had just felt so circumscribed and pigeonholed. By the geography and by the sense that your life is totally determined by who your family is. It's like, you have to go home with the one that brung you. Don't get above your raisin'. All this sense of determinism. So I had this kind of breakout period, I just went kind of wild."

At the same time, Hollins, Class of 1967, was exuberant enough en masse to promote a sense of wildness in almost anyone with the capacity to dream. "This group came in the fall of '63, and they cut a wide swath," says Louis Rubin, who had begun his teaching career six years earlier. "There were seven or eight of them who kind of grouped together. I think three have Ph.D's; one of them became a good newspaperwoman; Lee, of course, writes fiction, and Annie Dillard writes various things. Remarkable group of kids -- they were there for four years, and they just took the place apart."

For Lee, the experience offered not just liberation but reinforcement. "What I fell into at Hollins was like a womb. It was like the warmest, most nourishing possible surroundings for a writer, or a would-be writer. I was with other girls who wanted to be writers, we had a creative writing program that was totally nourishing -- I mean, they read a work like it deserved to be read. Which it did. And it was just wonderful. I mean, a women's college was really important for me. Because I was raised as a Southern girl, where you're not supposed to put yourself forward, you're not supposed to be too smart; if you're weird, you try to hide it. And I can just see myself never having written -- or written with the enthusiasm, or come out into the open as somebody who was passionately interested in this, if I had gone to a co-ed school. I really think that's true."

She read passionately, and all over the place, both for her classes and for herself, working her way, alphabetically, through the school library: Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf (she and Annie Dillard were go-go dancers for an all-girl rock band made up of English majors called the Virginia Woolfs), Harriette Arnow and Marcel Proust. There was a strong commitment to work but an equal commitment to exploring the broad "terrain of the imagination," wherever that voyage might go.

The summer after junior year, Lee and a half dozen other girls decided to emulate "Huckleberry Finn" and take a raft down the Mississippi. They succeeded in constructing it in Paducah, Ky., then ran into bureaucratic red tape, which required them to have a licensed captain. "So we were all on TV crying, right? And Captain Gordon Cooper -- he was a riverboat pilot who had retired into the Irvin S. Cobb Retirement Home and never expected to go on the river again -- he saw us on T.V. and emerged from the door of the Irvin S. Cobb in his white outfit and said, 'I will take these girls down the river.' And he loved it -- I mean, he just had the best time. He was a real storyteller, and he never shut up." The story of that journey, how a free-spirited voyage of exploration was transformed into a media field day ("Well, you know, we had imagined just floating along the river, and then we were on 'Huntley-Brinkley,' and we got famous and people bugged us, and we were met by a jazz band from Preservation Hall when we got to New Orleans, and it was all different than what we thought") makes for a wonderful tale, both in their clarity and in their confusion.

Because at the heart of Lee's Hollins experience, of course, was her writing. The stories that she composed to start off with, and for which she received encouraging Cs, dealt with "stewardesses living in Hawaii and evil twins," nothing to do with Grundy or the mountains or the world she came from, until she was assigned a story by Eudora Welty and then, in her sophomore year, heard Welty read. She has described the impact of the experience in a number of different ways, including the manner in which Welty disarmed a passel of academics seeking to know how she had come up with the powerful symbol of a marble cake. "Well," declared the author, "it's a recipe that's been in my family for some time." A response that would have had to delight Lee Smith, who revels in " the things of this world" while raging against abstraction to this day. Probably, though, her first response was her truest. "It was like a revelation, really, kind of like, oh, well, OK, well, I can write about just anything. I can write about the people that I knew growing up and everybody I heard my daddy talking about -- I mean, I can write stories about this!"

She devoured Welty's work, and the work of James Still, a transplanted Alabamian who had come to Knott County, Ky., in 1932 to "keep school" and whose 1940 "River of Earth," an Appalachian "Grapes of Wrath," she discovered all by herself under the S's in the Hollins library. "At the end of the novel," Lee has written, "I was astonished to read that the family was heading for -- of all places -- Grundy!... I read [the] passage over and over. I simply could not believe that Grundy was in a novel!... Then I finished reading 'River of Earth' and burst into tears. Never had I been so moved by a book. In fact, it didn't seem like a book at all. 'River of Earth' was as real to me as the chair I sat on, as the hollers I'd grown up among."

What she had found in these writers was not just an echoing voice but an echoing sensibility. The first story that she wrote after her revelation reflected this newfound sense of kinship. "It wasn't even a story, it was just a sketch. It's funny, my last image of leaving Grundy to go to Hollins was, I kept waiting for my dad to come home from the dime store so we could drive over. And some of my aunts were there, too, and they were having what I felt was this totally interminable conversation about whether my mother had colitis or not, and it just went on and on, and I thought my father would never come, and I would be stuck on this porch forever. So I just wrote a little sketch about some women sitting on a porch and talking about whether one of them had colitis. And then later, in the next course, I wrote something about this club we'd had in my neighborhood when I was a kid, and it later turned into my first novel."

Reprinted with permission of .

082404