About

Gerald Lafayette Smith is a Professor Emeritus of Religion at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He spends the majority of his waking hours either reading, writing, working in his garden, observing the birds, bees, and butterflies that frequent his flowers, or falling asleep three sips into his cup of coffee.

Smith’s passion for words started when he was a child, barred from the local library due to his house being outside the town’s boundaries. After finding a local pastor to sponsor his library card, Smith’s voracious appetite for written words did the rest. Outside of his academic pursuits, he has published several historical works about Sewanee and the University of the South, and has several poems featured in literary journals. Now Smith is working on publishing poetry, selected essays, a memoir, and his famed fly fishing journals.

Stay tuned for good things to come!

Smith on writing:

Scribe
When I was twelve the old women sent for me
Great aunts, grandmother
Sisterhood of long dresses, dark sweaters
Aprons, bonnets, living picture of early times,
To a chair and small table, pen and paper.
My summons, to write a letter for them
Brought me to the parlor
Because I was “good with words,”
To frame their care by sentence
Telling a brother far distant of
Family news, word of death, plans.
Baruch to a jeremiad of women,
My first scribal appointment,
Already set aside in their eyes
By gift or curse the same
Apart from their world and skills,
Placed like a sick Indian child
Under a tree in the forest
Severed from family,
Given over to another tribe,
The elders of word and script
My Druid masters here among the oaks,
Trees now pulp in this shadowed forest
That lines my walls where I write.