2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
THE ART OF BECOMING AN AUTHOR a review by Sharon E. Colley Michael K. Brantley. Memory Cards: Portraits from a Rural Journey. Castroville, TX: Black Rose Writing, 2015. Lee Smith. Dimestore: A Writer’s Life. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2016.
SHARON E. COLLEY is an Associate Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University in Macon. Her publications include “Crossing Boundaries, Shifting Selves: Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill” for the Ellen Glasgow Journal of Southern Women Writers. Her PhD dissertation for Louisiana State University explored social class and status in Smith’s works. LEE SMITH is Professor Emeritus of English at North Carolina State University. She is the author of twelve novels and four collections of short stories. Her novel Oral History (G.P. Putnam’s, 1998) is discussed in essays in NCLR 1998 and 2008, and The Last Girls (Algonquin, 2002) is discussed in NCLR 2014. Read Barbara Bennett’s interview with her and Jill McCorkle in NCLR 2016.
schoolteacher and her merchant husband, Smith felt both warned away from and drawn toward mountain culture in her hometown of Grundy, VA. Smith depicts recent recognition of Appalachia as “culture” through Carnegie Hall performances from the soundtrack of the Coen brothers’ Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. Smith recalls hearing Ralph Stanley provide entertainment at the local drive-in when she was a child, then watching him masterfully belt out “O Death” to a stunned New York crowd. As thrilled as she is that Appalachian culture, whether through music, festivals, literature, or film, is receiving deserved attention, Smith remains ambivalent about its commercialization and availability to the larger culture. Smith reiterates her ambivalence about change in “Dimestore.” Grundy, which had been routinely decimated by floods, was literally relocated across the Levisa River and higher above the river bank. Smith returns to Grundy to take pictures of her late father’s dimestore, which, along with dozens of Main Street businesses, were
The essay collection/memoir Dimestore: A Writer’s Life by acclaimed author Lee Smith and Memory Cards: Portraits from a Rural Journey by newly published Michael K. Brantley follow the model of Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings (1983). Both collections reflect on the authors’ development as writers; Smith’s volume features a mature author looking back over her life, while Brantley’s book traces the emergence of a new writer. Both writers mix ambivalent nostalgia and quiet courage as they examine how their home communities influenced their identities as artists. Lee Smith’s Dimestore begins, appropriately enough, with an epigraph from Welty’s celebrated literary memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings. Smith includes a story of hearing Welty read at Hollins College, where, “[w]ith the awful arrogance of the nineteen-yearold” (68), she realizes that her materials of small town and rural Southern life are not that different from Welty’s. Smith’s own fiction is best known for texts centered in Appalachia, such as Oral History (1983) and Fair and Tender Ladies (1988); her canon includes books with significant North Carolina settings, such as On Agate Hill (2006; reviewed in NCLR) and Guests on Earth (2013; reviewed in NCLR Online 2014). Mountain culture and small town life have remained staples of her work. Smith’s preface, “Raised to Leave: Some Thoughts on ‘Culture,’” explores how Appalachian culture has expanded into American culture and Smith’s mixed feelings about this phenomenon. The only child of an eastern Virginia
COURTESY OF LEE SMITH
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ABOVE Infant Lee Smith with her mother,
Virginia Marshall Smith