An Interview with Lee Smith

An Interview with Lee Smith by Tom McKnight MCKNIGHT. How do you find time to teach creative writing to students and still find time to write for yourself? SMITH. Teaching has been helpful to my writing. Since I started teaching on the college level, I pay much more attention to the basics. I remember when I first got a job teaching wnting at UNC-Chapel Hill, I was in a panic. I audited the classes 57 of Doris Betts, and I learned all about things such as plot and other elements of writing. I learned to isolate the elements of fiction and concentrate on the various parts. I am more aware of what I do as a writer now that I teach writing. MCKNIGHT. I know that you wrote short stories before writing novels. Was the transition difficult? SMITH. The first time I conceived of a novel as a novel instead of an elongation of a short story was when I wrote Oral History. I learned from reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury that I could have different segments that would not stand alone by themselves but could combine to make a story. MCKNIGHT. How do you choose the personal names and place names for your writing? SMITH. In writing Oral History I made a map of a holler, but I used the place names that appealed to me most. This is sometimes confusing for people who actually know where these places are-Pound, Raven, Dismal River, Tug River, Hurricane, Grundy, Vansant, and the Breaks. A graduate student once came to Grundy with a map I had placed in the hardback edition of Oral History, and he almost went crazy trying to figure out where all the places were. All the family names are the most common names in Buchanan County, Virginia, so you'll hear names that sound like real people. I went through the phone book and made a list of first names and a list of last names. I mixed up first names and last names that sounded good together, so no one is a character you actually know. MCKNIGHT. Why did you choose the mountains of southwest Virginia as the setting of Oral History after finishing Black Mountain Breakdown with the same setting only a few years before? SMITH. I tried to show the changes-the way the land changed, from the way it was when chestnuts grew wild and when panthers roamed, until the way it was when the outside lumbering interests came in and then the coal and strip mining. I wanted to show what happened to the people, how the people changed from almost a mythical existence in remote hollers, almost self-sufficient, and changes that society brought. A third thing I wanted to show was what happened to the language-because I am an English teacher. The language was full of beautiful and exact terminology which is now vanishing. I wanted to show what the language was like in southwest Virginia before television and before everyone began talking like Harry Reasoner on the six o'clock news. For example, a verb like "turkey-tails." Have you ever heard it said that a creek "turkey-tails' out when it reaches the bottom? Or have you heard it said that a man "daddied" more children than any other man in Grundy? Another example is the gradations of words for little children. To say that somebody is a "knee-baby" when he's so little you can hold him on your knee. Or to call someone a "set-along-child" that you can take along and set on a pallet while you work in the garden. And then to say that someone is a little "shirt-tail-boy" when he wore shirts with long tails before he was old enough to wear long pants. MCKNIGHT. How closely does your writing reflect the childhood of Lee Smith from Grundy, Virginia? SMITH. I collected the material for Oral History by reading diaries from older people in Grundy and gathering bits of speech, remedies, customs, tales, and yarns 58 from my family and anyone who was willing to talk about the past. Many of the...