Listen Here (66 page)

(March 21, 1929–)

Barbara Smith was born in Wisconsin but has lived in West Virginia for much of her adult life. She and her husband moved from New York City in 1960 to take teaching positions at Alderson-Broaddus College in Philippi, West Virginia, “because we both wanted to teach in a church-related liberal arts college away from the city streets.”

Smith earned degrees from Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and the University of Wisconsin. She has published more than three hundred poems, short stories, and articles in a wide variety of publications including
Antietam Review, English Journal
, and
Appalachian Heritage.
She has published seven books of nonfiction.

Smiths first novel,
Six Miles Out
, was published in 1981. A second novel,
The Circumstance of Death
, was published in 2001. Novelist Lee Smith describes Smith as a “fearless writer. She has always been willing to take on the really tough themes, the themes most of us turn away from.”

Smith is Emerita Professor of Literature and Writing and former Chair of the Division of Humanities at Alderson-Broaddus College. She makes her home in Philippi, West Virginia, where she works as a freelance writer and editor.

Novels:
The Circumstance of Death
(2001),
Six Miles Out
(1981).
Nonfiction:
Community Ministries, Work for Today: Ministering with the Unemployed
(1990).
Poetry:
Demonstrative Pronouns
(unpublished collection).
Poetry editor:
Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry, 1950–1999
(2000),
Coming Together
(1995),
Weeping with Those Who Weep: Poems of Bereavement
(1986, 1998),
What the Mountains Yield: A Collection from West Virginia Writers
(1986, 1998).
Plays:
With Blissful Hope, Miss Emma and E.J.
Autobiographical essay:
“Inside Discoveries,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 273–76.

Joyce Dyer, “Barbara Smith,” in
Bloodroot
, 272. Genie Jacobson, review of
Circumstance of Death, Now & Then
20.1 (spring 2003), 35. Parks Lanier, “A Conversation with Barbara Smith,” 21st annual Highland Summer Conference [videorecording], Radford University, 18 June 1998. Felicia Mitchell, “From Image to Epiphany: Barbara Smith's Poetic Moments,” in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 288–97.

from
Weeping with Those Who Weep: Poems of Bereavement
(1998)

So there I was simply filling the gas tank
When you cruised in and calmly reported
You are dying of cancer.

So what was I supposed to do,
Straining to hear your husky words,
Trying not to flicker an eyelid
Nor imagine the bleeding, the vomit, the pain,
While the gas was spilling and filling my shoes?

Well, I'll tell you tomorrow, as I told you today,
We're all dying, some just a little faster than others—
And missing more—
Like singing and watching the children grow up—
And I asked about Martha and paid for the gas,
Registering forever the look in your eyes,
Wanting me to say just something, more,

So I'll tell you tomorrow, as I told you today,
We're all dying. But I won't believe it
As I tear through the gears driving back up the hill
And split the hell out of the firewood in the yard
And scrub floors until my knuckles are red
And as raw as your throat.

Then I'll bake two blackberry pies,
And I'll bring one warm to the shadows on your porch
And offer it, still not saying the words,
But you'll know,
And I'll know.
We're all dying.

from
Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel
(1998)

Wearing the same jeans and T-shirt
And the purple plastic earrings
Bought for a quarter at the Salvation Army.
Buying Big League Chew
So your kids will think candy
But won't swallow the bubblegum
And won't cry for hotdogs
For at least ten more minutes.
Asking for gas in one gallon shots,
Pretending you don't want to change a twenty.
Paying the water bill after three warnings
And disconnecting the telephone instead.
Using the food stamps for day-old bread
And year-old sans-label cans of whatever.
Smelling not half as good as the woman in front of you
And wondering why the hell you came
To see the teachers, the principal, who smile tight-lipped
And tell you that Georgie is doing just fine
When you know he can't even read a cereal box
And nobody gives a damn.
That's poor.

from
New River Free Press
(1997)

It has to twang,
Snap back and sting your fingers
When it breaks or gets away from you,
Elastic with emotional pressure,
Its fibers clasping each other,
Reaching for a fit as perfect
As Paul Tillich's grave in Harmony, Indiana,
Where the cedar trees, the native rocks,
The needles that you walk upon
Speak even as they draw you in
And pull you back when you try to walk away.
I feel them, hear them even now,
The syllables of aspen leaves,
The words of waterfalls,
The stanzas of stones.
They make the whole world vibrate.

(January 6, 1879–January 2, 1960)

Eastern Kentucky poet Effie Waller Smith was the daughter of Sibbie and Frank Waller, former slaves who saw to it that all of their children received an education, even though educational opportunities at the turn of the century for black and white students in Pike County, Kentucky, were extremely limited. Smith and her siblings all attended local segregated state schools and then earned teaching certificates at the Kentucky State Normal School for Colored Persons in Frankfort.

Smith was writing poetry by the time she was sixteen. Her diction reflects her reading of classical literature as well as popular, contemporary writers of the day.

In February 1908, she married Charley Smith, a deputy sheriff. The marriage was an unhappy one, and although it survived the death of a child, it ultimately ended in divorce. Charley Smith later died of a shotgun wound in the line of duty during a moonshine raid.

In 1918, she joined a religious commune in Waukesha, Wisconsin; although she left the commune after four years, she remained in Wisconsin until her death in 1960. Smith was the author of several short stories and three books of poetry.

Poetry and short stories:
The Collected Works of Effie Waller Smith
(1991).
Poetry:
Rosemary and Pansies
(1909),
Rhymes from the Cumberland
(1909),
Songs of the Months
(1904).

David Deskins, “Black Pioneer Poet: Effie Waller Smith,”
Appalachian Heritage
(fall 1991), 66. David Deskins, “Effie Waller Smith: An Echo Within the Hills,”
The Kentucky Review
8:3 (autumn 1988), 26–46. David Deskins with Jennifer Kovach, “Introduction,”
The Collected Works of Effie Waller Smith
(1991), 3–26.

from
The Collected Works of Effie Waller Smith
(1991)

Thoughts of the dear old homestead
Haunt my memory to-day;

Thoughts of my home, my childhood's home
Far away, far, far away.

Far away in East Kentucky,
There beneath her towering hills,

Rich in forestry and beauty,
Watered well with brooks and rills,

On a farm—the old, old homestead—
Which to me is still endeared,

I was born a baby tiny,
And to womanhood was reared.

Lilacs purple, roses yellow,
Massive blooms of snow-balls white,

Beautiful the ample door-yard
In the sunny springtime bright.

Woodbines sweet and morning-glories
Rife with butterflies and bees

Climbed and clambered round the doorway
In the sunshine and the breeze.

Often rang through that old farm house
Childish voices gay and sweet;

Oft its walls of log have echoed
Patter of the childish feet.

Down below the apple orchard
From a fern-clad mossy bank

Where the naiads love to linger,
Where the elders, tall and rank,

And the willows cast their shadows,
Where the night-birds sweetly sing

To the moonlight and the starlight,
Bubbled forth a sylvan spring.

Oh, my eyes are getting tear-filled,
As before my memory come

Those scenes of my early childhood
In my East Kentucky home.

Which is now fore'er deserted
By my father's bright household;

It has now been changed and altered,
Into strangers' hands been sold.

Some of that dear homestead's members,
Many past-gone years have trod

In a far and distant country:
Others sleep beneath the sod.

O'er the graves of those dear dead ones
Marked by moss-grown chiseled stone

All the years in wild luxuriance
Have the grass and flowers grown.

(November 1, 1944–)

Fiction writer Lee Smith was born in mountainous southwest Virginia, in the town of Grundy, where her family goes back four generations. Her mother, Virginia Marshall Smith, a home economics teacher from eastern Virginia, married Ernest Lee Smith, a businessman who owned a Ben Franklin department store. She went to boarding school at St. Catherine's School in Richmond and then to Hollins College. During the summer of 1966, inspired by Huck Finn, she and thirteen other Hollins College women took a raft trip from Paducah, Kentucky, to New Orleans; the trip was the inspiration for Smith's most recent novel,
The Last Girls.

Lee Smith says that in college she tried at first to reject the advice to “‘write what you know.' I didn't want to write what I knew…. I wanted to write in order
to get away from
my own life.” Eventually, she admits, she was surprised at the approval she won from her teacher and classmates when she “sat down and wrote a story about some women sitting on a porch all afternoon drinking iced tea and talking endlessly about whether one of them did or did not have colitis.” Her study of writers like Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and James Still helped her to see the artistic value and potential in the details of women's lives. In each of her novels, she creates memorable female protagonists, many of whom live in Appalachia and struggle to discover their identities in the family and community.

She graduated from Hollins in 1967 and married several weeks later. While her sons were young, she worked as a newspaper journalist, an editor, and a teacher. In 1977, she joined the creative writing faculty at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. In 1981, she began work in the English department at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, a job from which she has now retired.

From the beginning of her career as a writer, Smith has received recognition, earning O. Henry Awards for “Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach” (1978) and “Between the Lines” (1981), which appear in her first short story collection,
Cakewalk.
She has also been the recipient of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction (1983), the North Carolina Award for Fiction (1984), the John Dos Passos Award for Literature (1987), the W.D. Weatherford Award for Literature (1989), the Appalachian Writers Award (1989), a Lyndhurst Fellowship (1990), the Robert Penn Warren Prize (1991), the Lila Wallace-
Reader's Digest
Writers Award (1995), and a special award in fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999).

Lee Smith is the author of ten novels. She and her husband, writer Hal Crowther, live in Chapel Hill and often teach at the Hindman Settlement School Writers Workshop in eastern Kentucky, one county away from her Virginia birthplace.

The excerpt below is from the opening chapter of her novel
Saving Grace
, in which a minister's daughter introduces herself and her family as she narrates the story of her young life.

Novels:
The Last Girls
(2002),
Saving Grace
(1995),
The Devil's Dream
(1992),
Fair and Tender Ladies
(1988),
Family Linen
(1985),
Oral History
(1983),
Black Mountain Breakdown
(1980),
Fancy Strut
(1973),
Something in the Wind
(1971),
The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed
(1968).
Novella:
The Christmas Letters
(1996).
Short stories:
News of the Spirit
(1997),
Me and My Baby View the Eclipse
(1990),
Cakewalk
(1981).

Harriette C. Buchanan, “Lee Smith: The Storyteller's Voice,” in
Southern Women Writers: The New Generation
(1990), ed. Tonette Bond Inge, 324–45. Dorothy Combs Hill,
Lee Smith
(1991). Chris Holbrook, review of
Saving Grace, Appalachian Heritage
23:4 (fall 1995), 67–70. Anne Goodwyn Jones, “The World of Lee Smith,”
Southern Quarterly
22:1 (fall 1983), 115–39. “Lee Smith” in
Interviewing Appalachia: The Appalachian Journal Interviews, 1978–1992
(1994), ed. J.W. Williamson and Edwin T. Arnold, 341–62. “Lee Smith Issue,”
Iron Mountain Review
3:1 (winter 1986). Lucinda H. MacKethan, “Artists and Beauticians: Balance in Lee Smith's Fiction,”
Southern literary Journal
15:1 (fall 1982), 3–14. Nancy C. Parrish,
Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers
(1998). Virginia A. Smith, “On Regionalism, Women's Writing, and Writing as a Woman: A Conversation with Lee Smith,”
The Southern Review
26:4 (October 1990), 784–95. Bonnie Winsbro, “A Witch and Her Curse: External Definition and Uncrossable Boundaries in Lee Smiths
Oral History,” Supernatural Forces: Belief, Difference, and Power in Contemporary Works by Ethnic Women
(1993), 26–51.