BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN

dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563

CHAPEL HILL -- Novelist Lee Smith has "Southern door disease."

She said it happens when you spend time at someone's else home, then announce your departure but instead stand at the front door talking for another half hour.

"See, I'm doing it now," Smith told a crowd that nearly filled the sanctuary at University United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill Saturday morning to hear Smith and fellow North Carolina novelist Ron Rash speak about "Southern Stories" as part of the N.C. Literary Festival.

Rash wrote the novel "Serena," which was released earlier this year, and Smith is the author of several acclaimed novels, the most recent "On Agate Hill." Both writers read from their recent work and from their new individual collections of short stories to be released this spring.

Smith said short stories are harder to write as she gets older, because they are about one clear moment of intensity and change or the possibility of change.

"Life's more complicated," she said. "The older you get, you're interested in the long haul. You're not interested in the epiphany."

Rash read from a new story set in a bar, setting the scene with a wasted band member curled up on the dirty floor among peanut shells and cigarette butts. Rash's stories are born from an image.

"Sometimes it takes a few months to figure out what [the story] is," he said. He wrote "Serena" after imagining a woman on horseback on a ridge. His short story collection is called "Burning Bright." Rash also teaches creative writing at Western Carolina University.

Smith said her upcoming short story collection will include nine new stories and six that were published several years ago. She read from a story called "House Tour," inspired by her own experience. Smith lives in an historic house in Hillsborough that has never nor will ever be on a historic home tour. Yet some Red Hat Society ladies came by one day anyway, thinking her home was on the tour. At the time, Smith had a broken ankle and had left a case of wine on the dishwasher, hardly in shape to give a tour. The character in her story finds herself in the same predicament.

Smith's house was also the spark for her novel "On Agate Hill," which is set in Orange County and the N.C. mountains during Reconstruction. Soon after moving into her house, an older man knocked on the door and told a dark story of unrequited love post-Civil War. Just what a writer would want, she said -- to hear a story.