Writer Lee Smith On Her New Memoir, "Dimestore"

Lee Smith is a Southern author who began writing as a kid. She was disappointed when her favorite books had to end. Twelve novels and four short story collections later, she's loved for her storytelling ability, sweet humor, and vivid characters. 

Smith has now written her first memoir, Dimestore: A Writer's Life. It's the latest WFDD Book Club selection, and Lee will be at both book club meetings at Scuppernong Books this Saturday.

Lee spoke with WFDD's Bethany Chafin about her memoir from her home in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

The reason I was suddenly seized with the need to be writing a non-fiction book was that my father's dimestore, which he owned and ran for 55 years, and the whole main street of the town where the dimestore was, Grundy, Virginia, the little mountain town where I grew up, everything was suddenly demolished as part of a huge flood-control project. And so I witnessed the dimestore being blown up before my very eyes, and then my own family home (the only house my parents had ever lived in), and I was seized with this notion to write non-fiction, to write about all these places that were gone, all these people who had lived there, had their whole lives and being there in that little town. I just started to write verbal sketches of all the people and all the places that had been there. And the dimestore for me was the focal point, because I spent so much time working in the dimestore with my dad.

On the way writing engages her senses...most prominently, the sense of hearing:

I think in a certain way, although I've been doing it all my life, I'm not much of a writer. I'm really more of a storyteller. The kind of writer we are always has to do with where we're from and how we first learn language, and for me it was all oral. It was falling asleep in somebody's lap, on somebody's porch every night trying to stay awake long enough to listen to the end of the story being told. Even today, when I'm writing fiction or a story, it's like I can hear the story in my mind, and I just sit down and write it down. But the voice of the main character is speaking in my ear, or the voice of somebody else in the story, or sometimes it's just the voice of the story itself. I think I'm really a storyteller rather than a more abstract thinker or a real writer.

On the voices found in her fiction and non-fiction:

I don't even think of it [Dimestore] so much as a memoir. It's just people that I've loved and the people that have influenced me all these years are just talking in here. They're telling their own story. Whether it's that wonderfully eccentric old lady, Lou Crabtree, who signed up for one of my continuing education courses and gave me more of a continuing education than I gave her. But it's her voice talking to me. Another person who was an influence is Miss Eudora Welty, and it's her voice talking to us when she came to visit us at college. Or it's Mr. James Still up in his cabin in the mountains. My momma, my daddy, they're all in here and they're all just talking rather than me telling about them.