“It was like falling into a womb.”

In an interview with Nancy Parrish, this was how writer Lee Smith described her literary genesis, tracing it to Hollins College, a small, women’s liberal arts school near Roanoke, Virginia. Parrish uses this maternal metaphor to examine the formative influences of the Hollins environment on the work of the “Hollins Group”: writers Lee Smith, Annie Doak Dillard, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, Jo Berson Buckley, Anne Bradford Warner, and Nancy Beckham Ferris, well-known contemporary authors and scholars, each an alumna of the Hollins class of 1967.