Going to post a thing I said about Rivers, a novel by my favorite teacher Dr. Michael Farris Smith. He, along with one other teacher (Mrs. Moffett), taught me a lot about short story writing.
I've been reading Rivers by Michael Farris Smith.
Haunting. Perhaps more so than The Road by McCarthy, which I had to
put down because it was too depressing. But I'm not having this problem
with Rivers: possibly because it has very close ties to my homeland,
and he is a mentor of mine. Cormac McCarthy - although brilliant - can
be depressing. But Dr. Smith does the craft of literature a favor by
writing this novel. It's not a Katrina novel, but it's also not a
complete end of the world, apocalypse story; except for the region of
the world that probably deserves it the most.
Now, I support my teachers, buying their works, reading them and then trying to find a non-bias way to read it, without not loving it because someone I know who wrote it.
(Had the same problem with Smith's novella "The Hands of Strangers." I got it when it first came out a few years ago, and acted astonished when other people didn't have copies, if they lived in the South. I don't just mean in Columbus, MS. After I read it, I figured a whole bunch of other people had, because the South is such a tight-knit place, but no one had read Smith's novella, other than a select few who don't count because we all went to the school he taught at and that gives us all an immediate bias against all of his other short stories, for the most part.)
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