This will be the first of several blog articles as we imagine the characters in A Land Remembered. When we read a book, we become the casting director, costume designer, sound engineer and director. And it is different in the minds of every single reader of that book. The beauty of reading lies in its […]

Continuing our exploration of characters in A Land Remembered, we’re going to look at Tobias MacIvey. “Tobias MacIvey was thirty years old and had been in the Florida scrub for five years. He had come south out of Georgia in 1858. In his horse-drawn wagon, there was a sack of corn and a sack of […]

This is a continuing thread describing the characters in A Land Remembered. Emma MacIvey, a central figure in A Land Remembered, is depicted as a woman of profound strength, resilience, and unwavering resolve. As the matriarch of the MacIvey family, she plays a pivotal role in shaping the legacy of her clan amidst the untamed […]

People often ask what it was like growing up with a famous author. The fact is, I didn’t. Dad wrote his best-sellers after I left home. The only one I vaguely remember him writing is The Beginning. I was about 13 years old when he wrote The Beginning and it wasn’t a big hit at the […]

If you enjoy Patrick Smith’s novels, you will love the film, Patrick Smith’s Florida: A Sense of Place. My father used to be really big on the lecture circuit. He was a natural storyteller and was invited all over Florida – and in the Soviet Union too, for that matter. From very wealthy country clubs […]

My father, Patrick Smith, wrote several short stories throughout his writing career, going back as far as the 1960s. I was thrilled to find several of these stories safely tucked away in file folders. I was honored when he said I could publish them. Reading them, you can see him developing the literary style for […]

When my dad was researching what would turn into his international bestseller, Forever Island, he had to get to know the Seminole way of life. That knowledge also gave him other ideas for novels, the most popular one being A Land Remembered. But there was another story he had to tell, this time from a […]

I’ve been asked what motivated my father to write such a different novel from his previous work. He told me he was deeply moved after reading a newspaper article in the mid-1970s detailing the mistreatment of migrant workers in South Florida. The article recounted the horrifying story of a crew chief who held his workers […]

Patrick Smith took a detour when he wrote In Search of the Russian Bear in 1984. This is not a novel; it is a true chronicle of a trip he and my mom, Iris, took through the Soviet Union, back when it was the Soviet Union. (Son Rick Smith writing this.) When I first read […]