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"In
the South," Smith says, "sense of place implies who you are and what
your family did. It's not just literally the physical
surroundings, what stuff looks like. It's a whole sense of the past.
Even if I write a short story, I have to make diagrams of what the
character's house looks like and where the house is in relation to the
town."
(In fact, Putnam recently returned to her a map she drew when she
wrote Oral History, depicting not only the physical setting
for the novel, but also the geographical relationship of all the
characters.)
Her
first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, came out of
her senior thesis at Hollins College published by Harper and Row in
1968. "Harper and Row had published my second and third novels
[Something in the Wind, 1971, and Fancy Strut, 1973],
when my wonderful editor, Cass Canfield, retired. I was young,
living in Alabama, and my books had lost money for the publishers. I
had been published in Best Writing From American Colleges,
had won a Book-of-the-Month Club Writing Fellowship, and I had a
good agent, Perry Knowlton. But nobody would take my new novel,
Black Mountain Breakdown. Not even my agent believed in it.”
Also
during this time, Smith’s marriage to poet James Seay began to
deteriorate. They had two sons together. Needing to support her
young family, Smith taught high school English from 1973 to 1981
and enrolled in graduate school for training as a special education
teacher. Her friend Roy Blount, Jr. introduced her to a new agent
and her literary career took off.
She
made a name for herself in mainstream literature with the
publication of
Lee
Smith Oral History. With that novel, she became the face of
the new Southern regional movement, which Peter Guralnick, writing
in the Los Angeles Times Magazine (May 21, 1995), defined as
a "simultaneous embrace of past and present, this insistent
chronicling of the small, heroic battles of the human spirit, a
recognition of the dignity and absurdity of the commonplace."
Guralnick includes among the movement's members Larry Brown, Kaye
Gibbons, Cormac McCarthy, Jill McCorkle, Jayne Anne Phillips, Anne
Tyler, and James Wilcox. Though they may have varied literary
styles, all these authors, like Smith, write stories with an
exceptionally strong sense of place and Smith understands, as well
as anyone and better than most, the complexities of the phrase
“sense of place”
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