A Life Of Missteps Leads To First Book After Age 50

A pair of borrowed four-inch heels with black organza ruffles inspired me to write my book, Rules for the Southern Rulebreaker: Missteps and Lessons. Actually, falling off of those borrowed four-inch heels onto then President Barack Obama inspired me.

Mishaps like this happened throughout my life and when I recounted them to friends, co-workers and family, they often said I was a good storyteller.

The day after falling during a photo opp at a White House media Christmas party, I called the friend who loaned me the shoes to tell her that Barack Obama had said the heels were “great” and worth the fall.

“Katherine, you have got to write a book,” she said.

I’d heard that here and there before, and decided I’d give it a try even if all I ended up doing was making three copies of each chapter, stapling them together and giving the “book” to my three kids.

At the time I worked at the Tampa Bay Times in St. Petersburg, Fla., as the editor of the paper’s arts and culture magazine. In my 25 years there, I’d been a business reporter for about a decade and the parenting columnist for another decade.

I knew how to write. I knew how to interview people, organize thoughts, come up with a good hook for the lead and meet deadlines on time. But I’d never written about myself, so I took a memoir writing class at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg.

I loved the Thursday nights I left the newsroom at 5:30 sharp to get to class by 6 p.m. for three hours of writing, reading and critiquing.
As a reporter, I always had to make sure I engaged readers, but kept myself out of the story. Now I was still writing to engage readers, but I was in the story, relating to them. Unlike writing and reporting one or two stories a day for the newspaper, I wrote just one essay a week. And even then, I could think it over, get multiple critiques and tweak it or completely start over if I wanted.

I finished the class with five essays in various stages and the confidence to write more. I shared them with a friend and editor at work who came up with the gist of my book.

“You pretty much play by the rules, but then you go out on a limb, take a risk, wander down an unexpected path and chaos ensues,” she said. “Each chapter could be a rule you broke.”

So the chapter when I fell on Obama, is titled “Always Wear Sensible Shoes.” The chapter about spending the night with someone I met in the airport (and his parents) on the way to meet my boyfriend’s mother the first time is titled “Don’t Talk to Strangers.” I got divorced after 24 years and country song lyrics helped me understand how great relationships can come to an end, so I titled that chapter: “Miranda Lambert is Not A Licensed Therapist.”

After the memoir class, I was on my own to write 18 more essays over the next two years while working full time.

During this period, my first two children went to college, I got divorced, I left the paper where I’d worked so long for a new career in public relations, I moved out of the house where I’d raised my family and had surgery for colon cancer.

My book went from something on my bucket list that I wanted to give to my kids and close friends, to a goal that I was determined to complete during all of this change and something I was doing just for me. It was my hobby, my “me-time,” my passion project.

I made sure I wrote for one chunk of time each week outside of my house. A chunk was at least two hours and sometimes as many as four or five. Sometimes, after my kids headed to bed around 9 p.m., I went armed with my laptop to the front porch of a 1920s Mediterranean style hotel a few blocks from my house. Other times, I sat in a buggy field with a spiral notebook while chaperoning a Boy Scout campout. I wrote on planes, in line at the DMV, in carpool line, and while camping out at a music festival.

I made a point of carving out at least one hour or more to write anytime I was traveling. I was alone at a restaurant on Valentine’s night in Raleigh, while visiting my parents. I sat with my laptop while waiting in a two-hour line to see the premier of “Lady Bird” at the Telluride Film Festival. I wrote and at a bar and bookstore called Rough Draft near my oldest daughter’s university, Bard College, on the Hudson River in New York.

I always had one or two essays printed on paper stuck in my pocketbook, so I could line edit and make notes in longhand if there wasn’t enough time to pull out my laptop. And I always had a new essay in the works in a document on my computer, so I could write on a plane or in a field where there was no Internet connection.

Along the way I showed the essays to a good friend and short story writer working on her debut novel. She honestly told what worked and what didn’t. I hired that editor from the newspaper to officially edit the essays. Another friend brainstormed with me to come up with the title.

Through a friend of a friend I contacted Lee Smith, who is an award winning, best-selling author of about a dozen books. I emailed her two essays. She really liked them and asked me to send her all of the essays printed out in hard copies to her summer house in Maine.
After she finished them, she sent an amazing e-mail.

“Katherine Snow Smith’s sure voice, deft pen, hilarious sense of humor and always-original slant on things offer the reader much to enjoy… Her own lifetime of writing and observant living is distilled in this kind, original, and compulsively readable book.”

I was in an airport with my teenage children when I received her very generous words. We hugged and I teared up. It was so much better than handing them a few pages stapled together.

—

Katherine Snow Smith has lived throughout the South as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, public relations executive, daughter, sister, mother, wife, divorcee, and friend. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and started her journalism career covering three miniscule towns in South Carolina. After a stint covering business in Charlotte, NC, she got married, moved to Florida, and started a twenty-year career at the Tampa Bay Times―first covering business, and then, after having a baby, creating a parenting column, Rookie Mom, for the paper. Now―three kids, two careers, and one divorce later―she’s embracing the fact that life has many chapters.

Find out more about her here https://katherinesnowsmith.com/

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/snowsmith

RULES FOR THE SOUTHERN RULEBREAKER

Southern women are inundated with rules starting early―from always wearing sensible shoes to never talking about death to the dying, and certainly not relying on song lyrics for marriage therapy.

Nevertheless, Katherine Snow Smith keeps doing things like falling off her high heels onto President Barack Obama, gaining dubious status as the middle school “lice mom,” and finding confirmation in the lyrics of Miranda Lambert after her twenty-four-year marriage ends. Somehow, despite never meaning to defy Southern expectations for parenting, marriage, work, and friendship, Smith has found herself doing just that for over four decades. Luckily for everyone, the outcome of these “broken rules” is this collection of refreshing stories, filled with vulnerability, humor, and insight, sharing how she received lifelong advice from a sixth-grade correspondence with an Oscar-winning actress, convinced a terminally ill friend to write good-bye letters, and won the mother of all “don’t give up” lectures by finishing a road race last (as the pizza boxes were thrown away).

Rules for the Southern Rule Breaker will resonate with every woman, southern or not, who has a tendency to wander down the hazy side roads and realizes the rewards that come from listening to the pull in one’s heart over the voice in one’s head.

BUY HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing