The Story of Land and Sea

Vogue recently called The Story of Land and Sea by Katy Simpson Smith MFA ’13 “luminous…set to be the debut of the year,” and they’re not the only ones buzzing about it. Since her novel’s publication in August, Smith has been interviewed by NPR and reviewed in the The New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, and The Huffington Post. Smith had never considered herself a fiction writer; she received a history PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and then enrolled in the Bennington MFA in Writing program where she began The Story of Land and Sea. “It was such a revolutionary point in my life, when I had to face up to this long dream I had to be a writer,” Smith said. “I wouldn’t have had the courage to do that if it hadn’t been for Bennington.” The Story of Land and Sea is set in a small North Carolina town during the years following the American Revolution. John, an ex-pirate, struggles to raise his daughter in the wake of his wife’s death. Smith navigates into their past, illuminating the intertwining lives of John’s wife, Helen, and her girlhood companion, a slave named Moll. Falling somewhere between a lyric fairytale and historical fiction, The Story of Land and Sea is a tale as incandescent as the inside of an oyster shell. We caught up with Smith over the phone.

How long had you wanted to tell this story?

The idea for the novel came while I was in the PhD program at UNC Chapel Hill when I went to the town of Beaufort, North Carolina, on a random road trip and found this incredible graveyard that had a gravestone that said “Little Girl Buried in Rum Keg.” So I thought, “Oh my gosh, that is a story someone has to write.” But at the time I wasn’t really considering myself a writer so I filed it away in the back of my head. Then when I started at Bennington, I started out writing contemporary short stories and they were all pretty bad. I was kind of avoiding the topic of history altogether. But my second year, that story started to present itself again and I thought, “Okay, I have to give this the time that it deserves.”

In an interview with NPR, you said that you believe women in all time periods have found ways to control their own lives. Although The Story of Land and Sea is structured around John, it is the women in his life who captivate us— both Moll and Helen can accomplish things their male counterparts would be unable to do. How do you write historically accurate yet empowering female characters?

For me, what was important was writing women whom modern readers could identify with but who still retained their truthfulness to the time period. But I think it is important to view history not just as a lens to see our own lives but as a time when people had completely different ideas about relationships and the world and religion. Women had very different ideas about their own roles in society and it’s important to honor that while still showing that, even in this time period, there was so much room for their own sense of empowerment.

In many ways, The Story of Land and Sea is, curiously enough, a meditation on what it means to be a father. Did you set out to explore that intentionally?

It was definitely not intentional. It started out with particular characters and I followed them down the various paths they led me. Once they became more fully fleshed out I thought, okay, the fathers in this book are really taking over, which was wonderful and surprising to me because it’s not a relationship I know a lot about. I’m not a man and I’ve never been a father. So getting into the heads of people who are engaged in that relationship was like exploring a completely different world. I know there are some writers who write about different countries or eras and I think a similar thrill can be had from writing about people who are very different from ourselves.

Do you identify as being a Southern writer? What does that mean for you?

It’s a tricky question. I’m definitely from the South, and I identify a lot with Southern writers that I love. Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor. I feel like I’m a part of a legacy that’s come before me. But I’m also very careful about what being from the South means, in terms of the responsibility that you have to write about it. To me, being a Southern writer means you have the responsibility to write about race, to write about the past in a very truthful way. And I think sometimes that can feel like a burden but still feel very empowering, to be able to share these stories that are often very misrepresented or misunderstood, and to share them in the form of literature.

Bennington’s MFA program has the motto “Read. Write. Be Read.” What books did you read while working on The Story of Land and Sea ?

That’s my favorite part of Bennington, the emphasis on reading. I almost consider myself more of a reader than a writer. I just love reading so much, I do it all the time—I think I definitely read more than a hundred books while I was at Bennington, but mostly that was just procrastination. While I was there, I was introduced to Michael Ondaatje. I read one book and thought, “Oh my gosh.” That one semester I read them all. I also read a lot of short stories. Getting access to different forms was inspiring to me; I read a lot of poetry as well. I’m very grateful to the professors that pushed me in that direction, because I wouldn’t have considered it ordinarily. But poems have such perfect form in terms of vibrant language that I think it was inspiring to me as I was trying to write the book.

What is your next project?

I just finished a first draft of my second novel. It is also historical fiction, set in the same time period in the late 18th century, but it is set in south Alabama. It follows the lives of three very different men who become bandits.