“Blazing Star,” a short story by Lee Smith

a Friday from the Archives post by the editor, Margaret D. Bauer

Early in my first year as editor, I wrote to Lee Smith to ask her about the Red Emmy chapter she cut from her novel Oral History. She’d mentioned it in an interview or at a reading, saying she cut it because it read like “bad Benji,” referring to Faulkner’s Benji Compson chapter in The Sound and the Fury. I was working on my first issue of NCLR, which featured Oral History, a novel I’d written about in graduate school. A chapter on Lee Smith’s Oral History, incidentally, would find its way into my William Faulkner’s Legacy book. I actually submitted it to founding editor Alex Albright’s first issue of NCLR! (He rejected it.)

Oral History influenced my first feature topic, and what a coup it would be to get a piece of it into that issue. However, Lee Smith turned me down saying she had lost that cut chapter. In hindsight, I do wonder whether, even if she hadn’t, she would have wanted us to read what didn’t make the novel’s final cut. As I often tell my students, you can’t unread anything. After reading Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s prequel to Jane Eyre, I can never read Jane Eyre the same way. I’m fine with that. I didn’t like Rochester much before I read Rhys’s backstory for him. All this is to say that reading Red Emmy’s voice likely would have taken some of the mystique away from this vibrant, unforgettable woman.

And to get to the point of these Friday posts – Lee did send me a short story appropriate to my oral history theme. What a coup that was! A Lee Smith short story AND a Fred Chappell story in my first issue. But Ole Fred is a story for another day.