Erica Lee Smith
2023 Right to Write Award Recipent
I was adopted and raised in a white family in a predominantly white area. You speak English so well! is something I’ve heard my whole life. Even as a kid, I used to think, I write even better! Writing came easily and naturally to me and by the age of five, I was writing my own stories. It wasn’t something I ever consciously chose to do, it was never foisted upon me by well-meaning parents—I first recall losing myself in reading and then realizing that I could lose myself in writing my own stories as well. I have always had an interest in energy, specifically, what people are energetically drawn to, whether that’s a person, an activity, a place, or a particular experience.
Having returned to Cape Cod now as an adult, a place I had only longed to get away from when I was younger, I have enjoyed a different relationship both with this place and my writing. This probably has less to do with the place changing (though it has), than my acceptance of myself, which in turn allowed for a release from the expectation of how I should be, which, for a non-white person in a white space, can be a very long laundry list. More recently, I have been involved in several groups (including Board of Directors for my mixed income neighborhood’s HOA, which was a mistake I will NEVER make again) where I was able to utilize my writing not just to get my own point across but to give the opportunity for others who had, up until then, felt their voices were ignored, the chance to be heard. I love that writing can serve so many different purposes, both individual and communal, and that it can speak to everyone, acting as a bridge to connect different people, different experiences.
About Erica
Erica Lee Smith was born on one peninsula (Korea) and raised on another (Cape Cod). For a decade in her twenties, she lived on a third (San Francisco), before returning to the Cape after her two older children were born. She works as a freelance writer and has had work published in several literary journals and anthologies.
A Mid-Year Update from Erica
The opportunity to participate in Monthly Mentorship was life-changing from the start—even before the program started, actually, because I had the opportunity to give a reading at the Right to Write Awards, and that is something I’ve never done before. In fact, I’ve had a great fear of sharing my own work, which I allowed to hold me back and view my writing as private, something I did for myself.
Though I was beyond nervous, I could not have had a kinder, more supportive audience as I did something I never thought I would be able to do—and I really enjoyed it, too!
The program has been a permission of sorts: a permission for me to take my writing seriously, to talk about it with others, to work on cultivating relationships with my fellow writers. I have been writing for most of my life but there is always more to learn and in the first half of this program I have learned so much. And it’s been deep, foundational shifts in my perspective: there are many ways/methods/approaches to getting a story down; not everything you research will necessarily make it into the final version; and revision is not something to be avoided, rather, it’s where both the real work and the real play come in.