In this 1990 interview with Don Swaim, Lee Smith discusses growing up in southwestern Virginia and North Carolina as an only child which she says is the reason for her love of reading and if given the opportunity, she would rather be the reader than the writer. She loves writing, but loves to read more and wrote her first novel, The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed, in her senior year of college.

Lee Smith talks with Don Swaim in this 1985 interview. In the interview, Smith explains that she didn't grow up in a literary family, but as a child she was always observing the way people interacted with each other. She loved to read even at a young age and wrote her first story at the age of ten. Her career took off after college writing a number of books including: Something in the Wind, Fancy Strut, Oral History, Family Linen and many others.

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