The latest Writing Your Life program, Writing People and Places has me focused on, well, people and places. I haven’t read Dimestore: A Writer’s Life by Lee Smith yet, but it looks like it might fit this month’s focus on writing vividly about the people and places that live in our memories.
Lee Smith is best known for her forty-five-year career writing fiction about the Appalachian south. This memoir, composed of fifteen essays, is set in the Virginia mountains of her youth and in her father’s dimestore where she listened to the customers and learned to become a storyteller.
Read a review of Dimestore here and find out if this book sounds like one you might like. This quote from the review by Alice Cary of BookPage sold me on it:
The dimestore is gone. Walmart looms over the river. I’m 70, an age that has brought no wisdom. When I was young, I always thought the geezers knew some things I didn’t; the sad little secret is, we don’t. I don’t understand anything anymore, though I’m still in there, still trying like crazy.
If you read it, let me know what you think!