Episode 317 - Katherine Snow Smith - Watch Your Step, Life Has Many Chapters

Katherine Snow Smith has lived throughout the south as a newspaper reporter,
magazine editor, adjunct instructor, daughter, sister, mother, wife, divorcee and friend. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and started her journalism career covering three minuscule towns in South Carolina. After a stint covering business in Charlotte she got married, moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, and started a 20-year career at the Tampa Bay Times. Katherine raised three children with her husband, a fellow journalist. After their 24-year-marriage ended and last child went away to college, Katherine returned to her native North Carolina to be closer to her parents in Raleigh. Now, three kids, two careers and one divorce later, she’s back at her alma mater getting a master’s degree in Media and Communications so she can teach journalism on a college level. Most of her classmates are less than half her age. They help her with coding homework and she waxes on annoyingly about how life has many chapters they’ll never expect. Some are piercing. Some are priceless. Keep turning the page.

Book - Stepping on the Blender - Journalist Katherine Snow Smith returned to her native North Carolina after her last child left the nest and a 24-year marriage ended. With more baggage and less time on the clock, she thought of fellow Tar Heel Thomas Wolfe’s book You Can’t Go Home Again. She writes with vulnerability and humor about forging an unexpected path, parenting, dating, reporting, aging, loss and launching the next act in a full life.

Oh yeah, she stepped on a blender minutes before leaving Florida for this latest chapter. Sometimes you just have to prop your bloody foot on the dashboard and put it in drive.

Book: Rules for the Southern Rulebreaker - Southern women are inundated with rules starting early―from always wearing sensible shoes to never talking about death to the dying, and certainly not relying on song lyrics for marriage therapy.

Nevertheless, Katherine Snow Smith keeps doing things like falling off her high heels onto President Barack Obama, gaining dubious status as the middle school “lice mom,” and finding confirmation in the lyrics of Miranda Lambert after her twenty-four-year marriage ends. Somehow, despite never meaning to defy Southern expectations for parenting, marriage, work, and friendship, Smith has found herself doing just that for over four decades. 

Rules for the Southern Rule Breaker will resonate with every woman, southern or not, who has a tendency to wander down the hazy side roads and realizes the rewards that come from listening to the pull in one’s heart over the voice in one’s head.

https://katherinesnowsmith.com/
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