LEE SMITH GIVES KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Me with Jill McCorkle and Lee Smith

You may already know that Lee Smith was my seventh-grade English teacher. That’s right. She taught me how to diagram a sentence — a skill, a gift, a much-missed middle school requirement. OK, I love to diagram. It makes the sentence construction so wonderfully visual. So maybe it’s no big surprise that as a storyteller, someone who is always painting a picture with words, I would be drawn to this grammatical art form.

But that’s not really the point of this blog, is it? Last week, I attended the 2009 Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga. The speakers were, as they always are at this conference, amazing. I was particularly taken with Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet and Emory University professor who spoke about writing to and from another race without stereotyping or creating a sense of “otherness.”

Of course, the highlight for me was Lee Smith’s keynote address. She spoke so eloquently, so passionately about her young life in Grundy, Virginia, a coal-mining town in the southwestern part of the state. Her father owned a dime store there, and Lee spent so much of her childhood in her father’s store. She said she was responsible for tending to the dolls, but I think she was busy collecting stories that she has generously spooned out to us over a lifetime.

As I sat there in the front row, listening to her talk about her father who died the very day he closed the store he had loved for 47 years, I began to cry. I cried in part because of the love she had for her father and this small town. And I cried in part because of the realization, yet again, that having sat in her classroom and watched her with chalk in her hand pull apart a sentence and put it back together on the blackboard, had been an incredible gift.

Posted April 10, 2009 at 1:54 pm · 2 comments · Leave a Comment