Her still-growing oeuvre of fiction evidences her absorption of the idioms and cadences she overheard during those early years. When she is asked about the influences on her writing, Smith often recalls, as she does in her recent memoir Dimestore, that as a child she would listen from a corner of her father’s “Five and Ten Cent Variety Store” in Grundy, Virginia, to the stories and conversations that filled the air of the place. This is the taste of spring.” Through these lines, Smith’s language both offers a glimpse into Ivy’s nontraditional spirituality, springing from her perceptive relationships with nature and people, and transports the reader through its very sound and texture. But perhaps beyond the appeal of these richly rendered people and places, Smith’s language itself leads readers into moments of the sublime, her prose an artful combination of Appalachian and Southern dialects with poetically crafted diction and syntax which, as Longinus explains of sublimity, “tears everything up like a whirlwind.” In a missive to her deceased father, Ivy reminisces about how he would take her and her siblings up the mountain to collect birch sap, how he once cut bark from a tree for them to taste and warned Ivy, “Slow down, slow down now, Ivy. Like other fans of Smith’s writing, I have been continuously drawn to her Southern (often Appalachian) characters and settings, periodically rereading Fair and Tender Ladies, for example, to revisit the mesmerizing Ivy Rowe at her farm in Sugar Fork on Blue Star Mountain.

The voices she has generated have become background music to my own life, as they have for so many readers. Since then, I have with great pleasure read everything Smith has written.

Struck by the power of that book, I bought and devoured Fair and Tender Ladies, which would become and remain one of my top five novels ever. But even after 25 years of scholarly work on Lee Smith’s stories, I still find her fiction as fascinating as I did when, in the spring of 1991, I read my first of her novels, Oral History. If that subject isn’t awfully rich and hearty, the hours (let alone days, weeks, years, and even decades) of analysis can render the subject into a flat, distorted, unrecognizable thing. Most academics will admit, if pressed, that long-term research on a particular subject can sometimes spoil it for you.

Oral history by lee smith