Lee Smith recently left her North Carolina home, where she teaches creative writing at North Carolina State University, to visit Oxford and read at Square Books from her newest short story collection, News of the Spirit. Smith has written two other volumes of short fiction and nine novels, among them Oral History, Fair and Tender Ladies, The Devil's Dream, and Saving Grace.

I watched you talk about the centennial of William Faulkner's birth on TV with Jim Lehrer, and I thought we might start by going back to some of your remarks on that program. You said: "I read Absalom, Absalom! like some people read the Bible." Can you talk about that?

When I first read Faulkner I was in college, and I was already trying to write things. At that point I was blown away by the language. I was just drunk on the language. I really don't think I understood a whole lot of what was going on. I think I was drawn to it because like anybody who is from the South and who would write about it, I also was alienated from it. I think I really identified with "I hate it! I hate it!" in a way that I never understood at that point. Later, I was interested in the sense of place because I come from another place that's made an indelible imprint on me and that fascinated me. Later, I think, as I was trying to write, I was interested in the writing itself and in the technique. One thing I didn't get to say on that show was that Faulkner wrote each one of his novels with a different narrative strategy. He was above all a great innovator, a totally experimental writer, the first great experimental writer, I think, in this country. Those novels are all like doors that any would-be writer can walk through, and so it's exciting to read Faulkner when you're trying to learn to write. Later, after a certain age, you discover mortality and then Faulkner makes a whole different kind of sense and you discover all kinds of things like loss and unredeemable sadness of one kind or another. Then you get to a whole bunch of other things--ideas and attitudes--that I never suspected before. Faulkner is rewarding to read at whatever point you are in life.

You also said during that interview: "All great literature is regional." You praised the "exquisitely specific" nature of regional writing. Can you expand on that idea of a connection between place and writing?

Well, the great thing about the novel is that it confirms the everyday, and it tracks people through time in a way no previous form of narrative ever did. The paradox, of course, is that any writer who would be universal has got to first of all be absolutely specific to her own or his own time and place. Faulkner, of course, is so wonderful an example of that in this country. The more specific you can be to time and place and circumstance, then the more universal the work will be because people reading fiction don't want to be in their own heads; they want to be in the world of the fiction, and you have to give them a sufficient world.

How do you connect that sort of specificity to the notion that great writing is universal?

Well, to be abstract does not mean to be universal. This is the paradox. Young writers are always turning in these stories where nobody has a name and I say "why don't you give them a name?" It's "he and she"; the characters are abstractions. So I say: give them a name, put a shirt on them, give them a kind of earring, are they wearing sandals or are they wearing wingtips? The more specific you can be, the more universal, and this can be hard at first to get across to students.

Is region ever a barrier to understanding? For instance, do you think your work means something less or something different to people outside the South?

I do think there still exists a certain prejudice against regional writing. Certainly an anti-Southern prejudice still exists unless a writer somehow manages to break through that or overcome it in one way or another. It's sort of an anti-cornpone thing. It particularly has to do with dialect. You write in dialect at your peril, whether it is African American or rural South or Appalachian or just whatever it might be. There's a certain set of associations that people (not people in the South, but elsewhere) have that must be overcome, and that's done in various ways. I think a good example is Cold Mountain, which is written in this beautiful, sort of 19th-century prose and, although it's taking place in the South and it's about the Civil War, yet it doesn't have the cornpone thing that turns people away. It is not a first-person narrative, and of course the dialect, when it's used in conversation, doesn't turn people off. I think another thing that turns people off is the notion of the South as violent. For instance, I think one of the great, great writers of all time is Larry Brown. I think Father and Son should have the readership that Cold Mountain is getting. I think they both should have it. But Larry's people are violent, and, like dialect, that scares people. Inman [a character in Cold Mountain], on the other hand, has simply fallen into a violent world. He has to deal with it, but he didn't create it; it's not coming out of his own personality. I think there are things that are part and parcel of the Southern experience, and if you write about them in a certain way, you are going to mystify or throw off readers in other parts of the country.

You praised Faulkner for his ability to combine comedy and tragedy. It seems to me that you have that same ability--to make something funny and at the same time profoundly serious.

Well, I don't know. I think that maybe I am one of those people who take an essentially tragic view, a very serious view, and the thing is if you do that then you've got two choices: you can just go in the closet and close the door after you or you can make a joke and figure out ways to make it through the world. I think that humor is often very, very helpful. I came from a funny family that just loved making jokes and telling stories. For me, one of the functions of story and of writing is that it provides a way to make it through the night anyhow.

Is reading out loud part of your writing process? Do you stop and think: "how does this sound?"

No. But I do think that part of the process for me is certainly oral. I mean, I do hear a voice in my head literally when I'm writing and oftentimes it is the first person voice of the speaker or the narrator. That was particularly true for News of the Spirit because this collection is specific people's stories. The book has only gotten one bad review, and it was in Boston. Somebody sent it to me. It's hysterical--it's written by this woman who hates it. She says the book is just like those people who come up to you on the street and pull at your sleeve and start telling you a long story that you didn't have time to hear. And they don't know when they should leave you alone. "Who are these insistent women in this book?" she asks. But of course, it's true in a way. She's right.

When we were having our earlier conversation, you said: "Women have always used humor to help them say what they mean." Can you say more about that?

I think it's only recently that women feel perfectly comfortable in saying what they mean. And a number of them still don't. Women of my generation were brought up to make other people feel good, you know. My mother's great quote was "a lady never lets a silence fall." That is terrifying! You were supposed to smooth the way, make other people very comfortable. Part of making other people feel comfortable can be to not state a preference, or to not state an opinion too strongly. But with humor I think you can say something and make a little joke of it. You can say what you want to say without it being threatening to someone else. You can get what you want to say across without offending. Humor is a corrective. I mean, there may be something that we're trying to get across, and we just don't want to hurt someone's feelings or rock the boat. Women have become very adept at this, particularly, I think, women earlier who were not in positions where they could exercise power directly. They had to find all sorts of ways to get things done the way they should be done and the way they wanted them done without angering people.

Particularly Southern women I imagine.

Absolutely. That's where, of course, the whole stereotype of the steel magnolia comes from, the one who's smiling and cracking the whip. Women had to become adept at both if they wanted to take care of children and get things done.

What has the humor in your work allowed you to say or to do that you might not have been able to otherwise?

I think now I feel very comfortable in writing about anything in any way I want to. But earlier on, humor allowed me to write about things that were scary to me. In an earlier novel, Black Mountain Breakdown, for instance, I was writing about passivity among women. There I was writing about something that I was feeling very strongly and that I think my generation felt--again that thing of being raised to please other people, your mother or your husband or whoever--but not being raised to wake up one day and wonder who you are, which, of course, is a logical consequence of living that way. That topic was scary to me. I didn't know I was writing about that specifically. I was just writing the story of Crystal, but I think making it funny at certain points enabled me to write it. The same is true for "The Happy Memories Club" in News of the Spirit. I think we're all scared of aging and of dying and of having our loved ones change beyond recognition and losing the things we've given our life for. Alice Scully's language and her teaching are all so important to her in that story, and so those losses are terrifying. The best way I can touch it is through humor. It makes me able to deal with those issues. And I hope it would make someone else able to read about them.

Let's talk some more about News of the Spirit. You seem to be equally good at writing short stories and novels, but is your writing process different? Do you start on something and say--this has got to be a story?

Actually, I do. I kind of know what it's going to be. But it takes me a long time to do stories and I don't think they're really very good. Theyre not what I think stories should be; mine are more like little collapsed novels. They have too much in them. I have trouble paring them down and making them be what a story should be. The stories are not formally formed enough. But I love the shorter form. I particularly like the 100-page story. It's an unsalable length, but its my favorite length. I love that completely unpublishable forsaken length.

"The Bubba Stories" in News of the Spirit--is that you?

Yeah, oh yeah, it really is. That very painful period of the writing class scenes is me. Although I did not have an affair with my teacher, nor did I make up a brother. But those were some of my ideas about wanting to write.

What holds this collection of stories together?

These stories were all about women telling stories. Two of them messed me up and turned into novels. Saving Grace was going to be one of these and she would not quit. She just would not quit. But I had her in there initially as a story. And then also I had a story that became The Christmas Letters. It was just 120 pages, but it was published separately. And so I feel like I've been working on this book for a long time. I do have trouble controlling my characters.

How did "News of the Spirit" get to be the title story?

Actually I had wanted to name something "News of the Spirit" for a long time. But originally the title I had on that particular story was "We Don't Love with Our Teeth," and I really wanted that. That's what the characters in the story say to the dog . . . I really wanted that title and everybody at the publisher thought it was sort of kinky and kept imagining some kind of weird sexual thing! So then I thought of "News of the Spirit." But I liked "We Don't Love with Our Teeth" as a title.

Conducting the interview was Kathryn McKee, one of two James M. and Madeleine McMullan Professors at the University of Mississippi. McKee has a joint appointment in Southern Studies and English.