By Parvi Anand
This past Thursday, Lovett welcomed novelist Michael Farris Smith to campus as part of the school’s Writer in Residence program. Mr. May-Beaver, who runs that program and also the American Studies department, brought him to the Riverbank.
Smith, known for works such as Desperation Road, Rumble Through the Dark, and the newly released Lay Your Armor Down, visited classes and spoke to all juniors and seniors during assembly. He spoke about his writing process, his Mississippian background, and the value of creativity.
Mr. May-Beaver described the Writer in Residence program as one of the highlights of his job, explaining that he loves inviting writers whose work he admires and sharing that passion with students. He said it is especially meaningful for the handful of students who truly see themselves as writers, because meeting someone living the life they hope for can be a powerful moment. He joked that Smith was the perfect choice not only because he is an excellent writer but also because “he’s cool, he’s got long hair, and he has a great Southern accent.”
Smith first caught Mr. May-Beaver’s attention when he and Mrs. Waterman, along with their fellow spouses, went to his recent book tour. After hearing him read and discuss his novel, Mr. May-Beaver felt certain that students would connect with him. He explained that he chooses writers whose work he respects and who he believes will speak well to a high school audience. Over the years, the program has brought poets, novelists, and slam poets to Lovett. This year’s choice was a novelist rooted in the tradition of Southern storytelling!
From the moment I sat down with Michael Farris Smith to discuss his journey to becoming a writer, the influence of Mississippi on his stories, and what he hopes young writers take away from his work, I could tell it was going to be a great conversation. He was straightforward and funny.
Smith first realized he wanted to write while living abroad in his mid-twenties. He told me that it was the first time he ever read simply for enjoyment, and discovering certain authors changed everything for him. He said he felt fortunate to have found writers whose work captured “isolation, loneliness, and being away from home.”
He recalled reading Hemingway and recognizing real places in Spain and Paris, and even though he “didn’t understand” Faulkner at the time, he kept reading him anyway. As he put it, he became “drawn to this notion I wanted to create for myself and see if I could do it.” When his time abroad ended and he returned to Mississippi, he began writing seriously at 29 and admitted there “didn’t feel like there wasn’t a plan B.”
Mississippi is at the heart of Smith’s work. Growing up as a preacher’s kid in small Southern towns, Smith explained that the Bible stories he heard as a child had a major influence on his imagination. He noted that “those are dark stories” and that Mississippi itself is full of contradictions he began to notice as a teenager. He described the state’s landscape as “really beautiful with the rolling hills, the Delta and the west, the coastline,” and said that the mix of beauty and complexity gave him “a lot to put to work and put to use.” The stories he knew, his relationship to place, and the “mixed emotions” he felt about home all shaped the characters and worlds he would later create.
Much of Michael’s writing is a blend of Southern realism and darker, sometimes apocalyptic tones. He told me he is drawn to the tension between beauty and chaos, explaining that “there can be grace and beauty in decay,” just as “there can be horror in the very clean and well organized.” He said he likes reaching as far as he can as a writer to create extreme conditions, both natural and emotional, and that he often writes on the line where “things fall apart.”
Many readers describe his work as Southern Gothic, and Smith agrees that the label is fitting. He told me you “don’t have to look too far driving in the South” to find forgotten towns covered in kudzu, the vine he called “the vine that ate the South” (which I embarrassingly had to look up during our conversation). He said the genre’s focus on erosion and a kind of spiritual heaviness is “very meaningful to the South” because the region is “haunted in ways that blur the edge of reality.” “I don’t know if there’s anything out there or not,” he said, “but I like imagining it and searching when I’m working.”
Smith has also adapted many of his novels into films, a process he described as challenging but rewarding. He explained that screenwriting forces him to make hard decisions because “everything that’s in the novel can’t make it on the screen.” Sometimes beloved characters or moments have to be cut.
Seeing his imagination come to life, however, was unforgettable. He described the surreal moment when “this character that has only been in your head comes out of the wardrobe trailer” or when he stepped onto a film set and stood inside the bar he had once written. He said the world of the novel exists only in the imagination, but on a set, a director can “walk over and change the lighting or even adjust the way a character holds a cigarette, making everything suddenly physical and real.”
Michael also spoke about his short story “I Am Not a Rock Star,” explaining that short fiction lets a writer capture a single moment that reveals something larger about a character’s life. In contrast, a novel allows a writer to “soak into their entire world.” The story begins with the image of “a woman looking in a mirror,” and he follows her to the end to discover that her husband’s passing from sickness was the cause of this transformation.
As that story’s title might indicate, music plays an important role in Smith’s creative life. He grew up surrounded by it, with a mother who played piano and his own years singing in the church choir. He said, “The lyricism of music influenced the rhythm of my writing. I love the immediate emotional return that music offers.”
His current band, The Smokes, was formed only two years ago, and he laughed as he explained how he “met some guys a couple years ago and next thing you know we made a record.” Their music blends rock and roll, Americana, and even some country.
This was Smith’s first time visiting a high school as a writer. I asked him what he hoped young writers would learn from his visit. “One lesson to give is just do it,” he said. “Nobody can stop you.” He encouraged students to chase whatever sparks their interest and not to worry about an audience in the early stages of writing, because “the moment you start worrying about audience and people outside of it, you’re dead.”
Although he believes workshops and feedback are important later on, the creation itself should belong solely to the writer. He compared it to playing around. “This is just imagination,” he said. “Just make something up and write a sentence and another.”
