On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls-classmates at a picturesque Blue Ridge women's college-launched their homemade raft (inspired by Huck Finn's) on a trip down the Mississippi. It's Girls A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi read the headline in the Paducah, Kentucky, paper.Thirty-five years later, four of those "girls" reunite to cruise the river again. This time it's on the luxury steamboat, The Belle of Natchez, and there's no publicity. This time, when they reach New Orleans, they'll give the river the ashes of a fifth rafter-beautiful Margaret ("Baby") Ballou. Revered for her...
On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls-classmates at a picturesque Blue Ridge women's college-launched their homemade raft (inspired by Huck F...
"That whole summer is as clear and as still in my head as the corsage under the glass bell in Mrs. Tate's parlor. Even now, summers and summers since, I can remember everything. I remember the day summer started."
So begins Lee Smith's disarming first novel, written while she was an undergraduate at Hollins College and a winner in 1968 of the Book-of-the-Month Club Writing Fellowship Contest. The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, set in a small southern town at midcentury, tells the story of nine-year-old Susan, for whom the first bright, carefree, promise-filled days of summer slowly...
"That whole summer is as clear and as still in my head as the corsage under the glass bell in Mrs. Tate's parlor. Even now, summers and summers sin...
Sheila Adams has been performing Appalachian ballads and telling stories for over twenty years. A native of Madison County, North Carolina, she was introduced to the tale-telling tradition by her great-aunt 'Granny, ' well-known balladeer Dellie Chandler Norton. This collection of Adams's stories provides a rare portrait of a distinctive mountain community and charts the development of an artist's unique voice. The tales range from stories of heroic, sometimes fierce, mountain settlers to the comic adventures of local drifters and tricksters, from magical childhood encounters to adult rites...
Sheila Adams has been performing Appalachian ballads and telling stories for over twenty years. A native of Madison County, North Carolina, she was in...
Cuomo's Commission on Competitiveness argues that America must reform its economic and social policies and institutions to reverse the weakening of its industrial leadership, the erosion of living standards and escalating social problems. Topics include public investment, urban poverty, health care, the environment, fiscal policy and international strategies.
Cuomo's Commission on Competitiveness argues that America must reform its economic and social policies and institutions to reverse the weakening of it...
In The Christmas Letters, three generations of women reveal their stories of love and marriage in the letters they write to family and friends during the holidays. It's a down-home Christmas story about tradition, family, and the shared experiences of women.
Here, in a letter of her own, Lee Smith explains how she was inspired to write this celebrated epistolary novel:
Dear Friends,
Like me, you probably get Christmas letters every year. I read every word and save every letter. Because every Christmas letter is the story of a life, and what story can be more...
In The Christmas Letters, three generations of women reveal their stories of love and marriage in the letters they write to family and friends ...
How does a girl from Grundy, Virginia, become a successful writer? The interviews and profiles in Conversations with Lee Smith tell the story of one woman's discovery of her coal-mining hometown as a potential -literary place.-
In this first book of interviews with Smith, she revels in character and sense of place as cornerstones to her art. -What interests me most in writing are the characters, - she says. -I have a lot of trouble thinking of plots, but I love to create the people. I think a person that you create is coming out of some aspect of yourself.-
Smith's career...
How does a girl from Grundy, Virginia, become a successful writer? The interviews and profiles in Conversations with Lee Smith tell the stor...
