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Mattie Smith

 

Mattie Quesenberry Smith is an instructor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, and Dabney S. Lancaster Community College in Clifton Forge, Virginia. Recently, Finishing Line Press nominated her poetry chapbook, Mother Chaos: Under Electric Light, for a Library of Virginia Literary Award, and Ruminate editors nominated “To a Fishing Father” for a Pushcart Poetry Prize. Her work appears in Dappled Things, Dark Matter, Floyd County Moonshine, and Red Earth Review. She lives at the foot of Little House Mountain in Lexington, Virginia, where she raises her ten children with her helpful husband.

What’s your creative process?

While I am a lone wolf with respect to my writing, I do coordinate Sub Terra, a creative writing workshop for Rockbridge County community members in which writers develop poems, short stories, novellas, novels, and much more! These writers are developing writing in their older years, and several of them are just now getting works published after several years of development. Sub Terra is named such because we are cultivating the roots of writing and anticipating lively shoots to come.

With respect to my own writing process, I am old fashioned: I still believe in inspiration, and I rely on epiphanic moments in which I gain the ability to correlate and connect experiences, firing what is experiential into new meaning and cooling it for the reader.

What are you reading now?

I am currently reading an anthology of short stories collected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates and 1984 by George Orwell.