Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger by Lee Smith

Everybody in town comes to the games-old people, teenagers, little kids, women holding tiny wrapped-up babies in their arms.” They know whom to call when a parent is sick because, as Dee Ann Sims explains in “Big Girl, “there is somebody like me in every town, that is good at staying with old people.” Where Dee Ann lives, the high-school football game is the “main thing going on. These people have been there for generations. There is no influx of “transplants” moving to the towns where Smith’s characters live. Her stories don’t so much highlight the differences between North and South as they focus on the range of experiences available in small towns and close-knit communities, places often far removed from urban centers. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger first saw publication in magazines and journals such as The Atlantic, the Oxford American, and The Southern Review.

As the narrator of “Folk Art” says, “Once you get something going, it takes on a life of its own.” Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger: New and Selected Stories, Smith only adds to her successes. A playwright as well, Smith’s Good Ol’ Girls-written with fellow author Jill McCorkle and featuring music courtesy of Nashville’s own Matraca Berg and Marshall Chapman-made its off-Broadway debut last winter.

Since then she’s written eleven more, plus three collections of short stories. Former Nashvillian Lee Smith wrote her first novel in 1968, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, while still an undergraduate at Hollins College.

Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger by Lee Smith