Doris Buchanan Smith, author of books for children

I hope to teach a writing course on Zoom in January - February 2024. 

I will contact my former students when I have a date and time set. 

Meantime, I am interviewing interesting people for publication. I have a deep curiosity about the lives of others and enjoy writing their stories. I began doing that back in the 90s when The Clay County Progress Newspaper paid for my stories. I had just moved to Clay County in 1995 and had begun to meet artists in the area. One of my first articles was about a woodcarver who lived on my street. 

One of my best articles was the result of an interview with Doris Buchanan Smith, a children's author, who had published a large number of books many of them in languages of other countries. Doris came to the mountains in the summer from her home on the coast of Georgia. It was not popular at the time for children's books to include the death of a character for ages 8 - 12. That was a big step back then and not acceptable to most publishers. But Doris was published by HarperCollins Publishers.

A Taste of Blackberries
Doris Buchanan Smith. HarperCollins Publishers, $4.99 (85pp) ISBN 978-0-06-440238-5

In the book, two boys are pulling a prank and one of the boys dies. "In Smith's moving story, a prank ends in tragedy, and a boy must learn to live not only with the loss of a friend but with the feeling that he could have prevented it." Ages 8-12.

Doris Buchanan Smith

DORIS BUCHANAN SMITH won the Josette Frank Award for "outstanding literary merit in which children or young people deal in a positive and realistic way with difficulties in their world and grow emotionally and morally"; the Georgia Children's Book Award; the Children's Best Book Prize Netherlands (Zilveren Griffel); and Georgia Author of the Year, all for A TASTE OF BLACKBERRIES. 

I remember the day I walked into Doris's house in the mountains of western North Carolina. I had met Doris through Nancy Simpson who had met Doris one day when she was out walking on Cherry Mountain. 

I had been told that I would not see where Doris worked. Her office was very private and she didn't want to have to tidy up or make it ready for strangers to come in. I understand that because where I work is always messy, cluttered, and not for strangers to visit.

Doris taught a writing class at John C. Campbell Folk School one summer and I was overjoyed to be in her class. She was the first real professional writer, a well-published author, I studied with. 

I was nervous about my interview with her, but when it was published in The Progress, Doris told Nancy it was the best article anyone had ever written about her. I still have that newspaper clipping in my files. 

Doris Buchanan Smith wrote another book for children that broke new ground when she wrote about a grandparent who was developing Alzheimer's disease. The book title is Remember the Red-Shouldered Hawk.   The book is out of print now but might be found as a used book.

If you have children who read, I suggest you give them Doris Buchanan Smith's A Taste of Blackberries this Christmas. Written in the 1970s, the setting and many things will be different from the modern books of today. But this book is about grief and the guilt one child feels. In our country, we avoid speaking about death as if when the words are not spoken, death doesn't exist. Parents often have difficulty talking to children about the death of a family member or someone close. Children need to learn about the reality of life and this exceptional book won many awards because Doris wrote so well about this taboo subject.