Katherine Snow Smith Leads Us to Laughter And Tears in Her Memoir-in-Essays, “Rules For The Southern Rulebreaker”
Podcast: Download (Duration: 36:12 — 33.3MB)
In this episode 145, we visit with Katherine Snow Smith, author of the book “Rules for the Southern Rulebreaker: Missteps and Lessons Learned.”
Award winning North Carolina author Lee Smith, says of the book, “Katherine Snow Smith’s sure voice, deft pen, hilarious sense of humor and always original slant on things offer the reader much to enjoy in these delightful essays.”
The book has 22 chapters, or rules, such as “Always Wear Sensible Shoes,” “Never Arrive at the Funeral Home Late,” and “Always Know Your Date’s Pedigree,” and as Katherine says in the Forward to the book, she broke them all. She finds humor and tenderness in these many moments known as life.
Connect With the Author
About the Author:
Katherine Snow Smith has lived throughout the south as a newspaper reporter, editor, public relations executive, daughter, sister, mother, wife, divorcee and friend.
She grew up in Raleigh, N.C. with her older sister Melinda. Her father, A.C. Snow, was a newspaper reporter, editor and columnist. After writing a column for the Raleigh Times and then the Raleigh News & Observer for 67 years, he retired earlier this year at age 95. Her mother taught English and public speaking at North Carolina State University. Her father is one of 15 children from Surry County and her mother is one of three from Randolph County, so she grew up with a large family that spreads from North Carolina’s mountains to the piedmont.
Katherine attended Needham Broughton High School in Raleigh and then went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After graduating with a degree in journalism in 1990, she worked for the Greenville News in South Carolina covering the three metropolises of Duncan, Lyman and Wellford.
A year later she managed to land a job at The Charlotte Business Journal covering retail, textiles and some other manufacturing. Her coworkers called it the lint beat. She was in Charlotte when NCNB became NationsBank and downtown was transitioning to Uptown. Her first on fortunately only form of “sexual harassment” took place during a tour of Carolina Place mall when it was under construction with developers and architects.
Along the way she met a reporter at the Spartanburg Herald who had worked in Salisbury. When she realized on their first date he meant Salisbury, Conn. not Salisbury, N.C. she was shocked to find out she was out to dinner with a real life Yankee born in New York City. His dad was from Mobile, so that helped matters, they dated for two years then got married and moved to Florida where they both worked for the Tampa Bay Times.
She covered business and he became the paper’s political editor. After their first daughter, Olivia, was born, Katherine started a parenting column titled “Rookie Mom.” Six years later Katherine was writing about the trials and tribulations of raising three kids in her weekly “Rookie Mom” column and Olivia thought her mom was actually Pokemon.
Katherine stopped the column after a decade when her three kids were old enough to be embarrassed about the material she shared with strangers. This was about ten years before thousands of “influencers” were sharing hourly videos of their kids.
Katherine returned to covering business for the Tampa Bay Times for several years and then became editor of Bay, the newspaper’s arts, culture, travel and style magazine. During this stint she and her husband of 24 years got divorced, though they continued to work about ten feet apart in the newsroom and remain friends.
A public relations agency came calling at the right time and Katherine made the jump to the “dark side” as it’s known in journalism circles. She worked as an account executive and senior content strategist for a year then went out on her own to start SnowWrites, a small public relations and writing firm.
Katherine still lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., and visits her parents in Raleigh regularly, now just on the back porch. Olivia works for a non-profit organization in Washington D.C., Charlotte attends the University of Vermont and Wade is a senior in high school in St. Petersburg.
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