Staff Spotlight: Lea Smith

What do you write?

If I don’t reg­u­lar­ly put pen to paper−or fingers to keys−all the frag­ments of stories and ideas would come spilling out on unsus­pect­ing passersby. 

In all seri­ous­ness, I have written in some way, shape, or form since I was very young. I was gifted a journal in fourth grade, and I have kept a regular prac­tice of cleans­ing through writing ever since. Cur­rent­ly, I write fiction, but poetry and memoir some­times cycle through as well. I some­times think of cre­ative writing as another exten­sion of my jour­nal­ing− another way to self-sooth while craft­ing some­thing for others to inter­act with. 

Is there an author or artist who has most pro­found­ly influ­enced your work?

A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a writing prompt.

If you could host dinner with four people, dead or alive, who would you host and what would you talk about?  

Mar­garet Atwood would be on my right, Daniel Quinn on her right, then Robert M. Pirsig. So…what do Atwood, Quinn, and Pirsig bring to the table? Fiction soaked in philosophy. 

I value these three writers because their art created motion within me. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Quinn’s Ishmael, and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motor­cy­cle Main­te­nance were mobi­liz­ing without preach­ing. These three writers created works that are not only enter­tain­ing, but also made me rumi­nate on the words long after the books were closed. Some­times I’d return later with more life expe­ri­ence for dif­fer­ent interpretations 

Atwood’s skills as a poet are evident in her writing, as it con­tains a musi­cal­i­ty and cadence that flows easily even when the content of The Handmaid’s Tale is hard to swallow. Quinn takes history and funnels it through the words of an all-knowing gorilla who made me cling to his every word because I was tired of hearing advice from ill-willed humans on tele­vi­sion. Pirsig made me want to look deeper at myself in case I too held a Phae­drus that had some­thing to say. 

Atwood brought atten­tion to the fem­i­nist move­ment, Quinn to the envi­ron­ment, Pirsig to per­son­al inquiry. But they did not sac­ri­fice cre­ativ­i­ty or forsake the lit­er­ary craft in the process. They are novels, after all, but they do more than tell a story. They mobi­lize. My writing seeks to do the same.

Why did you choose Stonecoast for your MFA?

I attend­ed The Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Maine for my under­grad­u­ate degree in English with a minor in cre­ative writing. I had the plea­sure of taking writing and work­shop classes with Stonecoast’s direc­tor, Justin Tussing. He also brought the Stonecoast Writers Con­fer­ence to my atten­tion. After attend­ing the con­fer­ence during the summer of 2022, I felt that I had to come back for more. 

Not only is the faculty varied, they are also all com­plete experts in their craft and quite wel­com­ing. The Stonecoast envi­ron­ment is all about com­mu­ni­ty build­ing. I have not expe­ri­enced any com­pet­i­tive­ness in the program so far. Every­one wants to support each other.

What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?

Acci­den­tal­ly fol­low­ing Leah Scott-Kirby around like a lost puppy. Then being (gently) scolded like a lost puppy, only to con­tin­ue doing it anyway, like a lost puppy. 

What do you hope to accom­plish in the future?

I came into pos­ses­sion of my pater­nal grandmother’s writ­ings on growing up in England during the Blitz, moving to America during the civil rights move­ment, and nav­i­gat­ing life in a new country. There’s a story there, and I am cur­rent­ly in the process of coaxing one out for a novel, which I hope to publish in the future. 

I also love to teach. I taught yoga in my early twen­ties and the process of watch­ing a light­bulb flick on in someone when they mas­tered some­thing they had unsuc­cess­ful­ly attempt­ed before was extreme­ly grat­i­fy­ing. I have helped friends and loved ones with writing and editing before, and I’d love to take the leap to teach­ing cre­ative writing at some point. 

If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a mas­ter­class in imag­i­na­tion and of course, patience − a quality I search for every day. 

***

Excerpt of a short story called “Thoughts While Turning Soil”

I believe worms are the orig­i­nal hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ists. They seem to achieve the quest that most every gar­den­er tries and still fails to do− leave the soil better than we found it. And yet, even with our oppos­able thumbs and the con­tem­pla­tive mass between our ears, we still find ways to make it worse. Like the elec­tric blue fer­til­iz­er we sprin­kle around new plant­i­ngs to bolster the growing process, the repeat­ed sev­er­ing of the myceli­um layer that con­nects trees togeth­er in a sophis­ti­cat­ed game of string phone, the mono­cul­ture rows of the same plant with the same wants year after year. 

Worms might not under­stand the concept of left and right, but they seem to rec­og­nize and strive to do one thing: eat and make the soil better because of what comes out the other end. 

When I was ten, my father peered at me over Botany for Biol­o­gists, the book he assigned his BIO l01 stu­dents. It’s almost charity at this point, that he still teaches that class. We were outside in our small back­yard, he in a lawn chair with a glass of unsweet­ened iced tea, no lemon. Me, with my kid-sized shovel, digging at nothing, mar­veling at the small, roundish hole I’d uncov­ered as traffic inched by outside our fence. I squat­ted down and slid my hand under­neath the roundish shapes in the dirt. My father watched me ponder the Earth, and asked, “did you find some worm poop, Kev?” 

I looked from my hand to my father, and back again. Surely, the lumpy trail of soil couldn’t be the excre­ment of the worm now poking its pointed head from the hole I’d just unearthed. 

When I con­tin­ued to stare at my hand, my father spoke again. “The tech­ni­cal term is worm cast­ings, but I say call it like it is.”

Not being the squea­mish type− it was nearly impos­si­ble with a father who insist­ed on recre­at­ing the classic middle school frog dis­sec­tion at home− I let some of the dirt fall out of my hand and pinched the com­pact­ed mate­r­i­al between my thumb and pointer finger. 

“Worm poop is nature’s fer­til­iz­er. Worms move around under­neath the soil, eating the dirt and enrich­ing it with min­er­als, enzymes, and good bac­te­ria. Then, they poop it out. Voila,” he said, putting his book down, “the world made better by shi−”

My mother had emerged through the back door with a white head­band wran­gling her hair and motioned with her hands that dinner was ready. Even after she had gone com­plete­ly deaf from a viral infec­tion when I was six, my father still cen­sored himself when she was around− a hopeful preser­va­tion of nor­mal­cy, I thought.

Twenty-four years later I’m still think­ing about worms. It’s Tuesday morning, and while digging a hole for a new rhodo­den­dron plant­i­ng, I’ve managed to cut one in half with my shovel. I exam­ined the two halves, check­ing to see if I’d cut closer to the tail end or the head. After my father and I had gone inside for dinner all those years ago, my father con­tin­ued at the table, placing his fork on the table so his hands were free, telling us more about worms. 

“If cut in half closer to the tail end, an earth­worm can regen­er­ate and con­tin­ue its life. If cut near the head, where the essen­tial organs are, they die,” he’d told us. I’ve done the latter, this time. It isn’t my first kill, and it won’t be the last, but it never fails to upset me− knowing I’ve elim­i­nat­ed another colleague.

I have often won­dered if worms might acci­den­tal­ly aid in the process of decom­pos­ing an old work­mate. They seem to have no trouble in the service of dis­in­te­grat­ing animals, even humans. Though the latter would depend on whether a coffin was used. I have often won­dered how long they would take to dis­in­te­grate my father.

I buried the two halves in an inch of soil, gently patted it down, and stood up. I did it too fast, my vision staying some­where near my knees. In that short stretch of time, where my eyes took their own excur­sion and my ears rumbled, and I let every­thing find equi­lib­ri­um again, I caught of glimpse of some­thing I’d been putting my back to all season− a tri­an­gle of blue, speck­led with white float­ing across my field of vision. Two forms hunched in on each other, steady­ing; a third, stand­ing at a podium with a com­put­er, relay­ing. The form wearing the blue bandana leaned away from the younger person− prob­a­bly a son or daugh­ter, there for support− and turned her gray eyes at me, as I stood next to a tiny grave, with my shovel in my hand, on the clock to build the Oncol­o­gy Garden portion of the local hospital’s new gar­den­ing install­ment, wishing destruc­tion, decay, and death were not all around me when I could not see it clearly. 

It’s strange. The irony of the whole thing. A year prior, this hos­pi­tal charged me almost two week’s pay to tell me I had suf­fi­cient amounts of vitamin D, and an insuf­fi­cient amount of every­thing else, and that, accord­ing to the doctor whose finger went into my anus, my prostate was normal. He said it was a good thing I was start­ing the check­ups early, given my family history. 

Now the hos­pi­tal would pay me to over­haul their entire front garden, which lined the two sides of the oncol­o­gy wing. Peren­ni­als had been scat­tered years before by the local garden club, then left to flour­ish into a tangled mess of plants that were sup­posed to be there, and plants that had hitched a ride in the loam and mulch−weeds. The abnor­mal plants which mul­ti­ply uncon­trol­lably and infil­trate healthy gardens until they are unrec­og­niz­able. And yet, weeds are my job secu­ri­ty, and because of them, and the time and care it takes to remove them, I hope to break even with the hos­pi­tal, at least.

If you think too hard about any­thing, it starts to unravel. It is funny, though, what happens after almost a decade and a half of being a gar­den­er. Someone might say, it’s like herding kittens. I’m saying it’s like raking leaves in the wind. I have per­ma­nent dirty spots on the out­sides of my pointer fingers, where my thumb rubs when I grab plant mate­r­i­al. I’ve gone out with a few women who seemed to visu­al­ly lock onto my hands during the date and then don’t call me back when it’s over. I try not to think too hard about whether there’s any sort of correlation. 

My job requires that I pull unde­sir­able things from the Earth to make room to plant desir­able ones (desir­abil­i­ty may vary from client to client). I rake leaves from yards and put them in the woods at the base of the very things that made the leaves and say here, have these back, here’s some natural mulch for you to make new leaves and drop more of them on my client’s yard. We’re in this together. 

If you don’t think too hard about some­thing, it stays unopened, taught, tied up. So it’s as if the person in the window, who looked upon me with a famil­iar fierce and trying gaze, had reached out to tug ever so gently on the string holding it all together.