Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today

Ron Rash: One Foot in Eden

Ron Rash One Foot in Eden Thomas Ærvold Bjerre A Biographical Sketch South Carolina poet, short-story writer, and novelist Ron Rash (born 1953) is one of the new southern writers whose work is firmly situated in the southern tradition. Rash’s rural Appalachia characters represent a marginal South in the twenty-first century, and their deep attachment to the land suggests a feeling of belonging that is lost in the New South. Rash hails from the southern Appalachian Mountains, where his family settled in the mid-1700s. Born in Chester, South Carolina, and raised in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, Rash published his first book in 1994. It is a collection of linked short stories titled The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth in which he established his own voice while tapping into the solid tradition of southern literature. Eureka Mill, his 1998 poetry collection, gives a poignant and unflinching portrait of North Carolina’s cotton mill workers in the early 1900s. Two publications appeared in the year 2000: the short-story collection Casualties and Among the Believers, a book of poems. In 2002 Rash published his third poetry collection, Raising the Dead, which deals with loss and displacement as a result of the flooding of Jocassee Valley, South Carolina. That same year Rash made his debut as a novelist with One Foot in Eden, a novel that fleshes out the characters and themes of the poems in Raising the Dead. Disguised as a murder mystery and imbued with Rash’s poetic language, the novel is a powerful tale of a community displaced. One Foot in Eden was awarded ForeWord magazine’s Gold Medal in Literary Fiction and named Appalachian Book of the Year. In 2004 Rash published his second novel, Saints at the River, about a South Carolina community torn over the issue of environmentalism. The novel was named Fiction Book of the Year by both the Southern Book Critics Circle and the Southeastern Booksellers Association, and it was awarded the Weatherford Award for Best Novel of 2004. In 2005 Rash’s short story “Speckled Trout” received the O. Henry Award, and that story formed the first chapter of his third novel, The World Made Straight, published in 2006. It is both a coming-of-age story set in the 1970s Appalachia and a meditation on the role of the past in the present in the shape of a Civil War 234 Thomas Ærvold Bjerre massacre that has divided Madison County, North Carolina, ever since. In 2007 Rash published the collection Chemistry and Other Stories, with thirteen stories, eight previously published in Casualties. The new collection was a finalist for the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Rash’s latest novel, Serena (2008), takes place in the North Carolina mountains in the 1930s and is an Appala chian retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As a sociopolitical backdrop the novel has the ruthless lumber industry that destroyed a large part of the wilderness. Serena was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. One Foot in Eden Most of Ron Rash’s characters display a deep attachment to the land that suggests a feeling of belonging that is lost in the New South. In both poetry, short fiction, and in his novels, Rash has been determined to tell their story. One Foot in Eden began as a poem about a “farmer standing in a field of dying crops,” but Rash realized, as he has said, that “what I wanted to write, what that farmer wanted me to write, could not be contained in a poem . . . I knew that if I were to give him and his story their due I would have to write a novel. . . . All I knew was that I had to try, because for some inexplicable reason I owed it to that man in the field” (Rash, “The Story behind the Book,” n.d. [2002]). Thus Rash presents himself as the voice of the forgotten farmer, whose culture has all but vanished in today’s technological society. One Foot in Eden is a powerful story with Old Testament allusions, echoes of Shakespearean tragedy, and crime novel aspirations, all written in a wonderful language that is both poetic and dead-on colloquial and that manages to make the uniquely southern landscape come alive in front of the reader’s eyes. The story is set in the small Appalachian community of Seneca, South Carolina, from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Through five narrators we follow the community...