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FEATURED AUTHOR—RON RASH Making Himself Heard_______________ Silas House As a child, Ron Rash had a speech impediment that caused him to listen to the people around him with a keen interest. "I'd listen in hopes that if I listened hard enough I might be able to learn how to make my words as clear as theirs," he says. When he wasn't listening to his relatives talk, he was tramping around the woods or hiding away by himself so he could read a book. "I was a dreamy kid," he says. Rash spent the better part of his twenties trying to convince himself that he wasn't a writer, feeling as if he ought to get on with a "normal" life. "I found that I had to write," he says, when he discovered there was no escape. "I'm a lifer." Since that discovery, Rash has been prolific, publishing more than 100 poems in such magazines as Yale Review, Oxford American, Southern Review, and Shenandoah, just to name a few. The poems have been collected in the books Eureka Mill (1994), Among the Believers (2000), and Raising the Dead (2002). His poetry has been praised by everyone from Anthony Hecht to Billy Collins, who used Rash's poetry in his national poetry project. Rash has also written two short story collections, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth (1994) and Casualties (2000), as well as a children's book, The Shark's Tooth. Never one to tarry, Rash has now completed a novel, One Foot in Eden, published in October 2002, after winning the prestigious Novello Literary Award. The novel actually started when Rash became attached to characters he was writing about in his latest book of poetry, Raising the Dead. "I realized that they would not leave me alone until I completely fleshed them out," he says in his soothing North Carolina drawl. "They deserved a novel, and I feel so fortunate to see them come to life in this book." He says the novel started with a single image of a young farmer standing in a field of dying crops. "I didn't want to write a novel; I didn't even believe I could write a novel," Rash says, citing that the longest thing he had ever written was an 18 page short story. "AU I knew was that I had to try, because for some inexplicable reason I owed it to that man in the field." His determination was pressed forward by the demand of his characters and he worked on One Foot in Eden for four years. The 11 novel has a little bit of everything: romance, sex, folklore, history, and murder. But most of all it has the power of lyrical, poetic prose that Rash has become known for. Lee Smith, author of Fair and Tender Ladies, has already called the book "a classic tale of passion and tragedy." In fact, Rash's fiction has received raves from the likes of not only Smith, but also Robert Morgan, Dale Ray Phillips, Tim McLaurin, and Fred Chappell. The novel is also an ode to the land that Rash has loved all of his life. Rash grew up in western North Carolina near Boiling Springs and always had an appreciation for the nature around him, a trait that is obvious when reading his work. The driving force in the novel is the reader's knowledge that the land is growing closer and closer to disappearing beneath what will become an all-encompassing, manmade lake. The power company eventually forces everyone out, floods the valley and the family farms where this close-knit community has lived and worked for generations. Rash says he has always been haunted by man-made lakes. "The disappearance is so total, no trace of the culture or the individuals who lived their lives there," he says. In this way, the novel seems to be a way of preserving the history lost beneath the many man-made lakes that dot the Appalachian landscape. This desire for preservation probably comes from Rash's deep respect for those who have passed away before him. Much of Rash's writing concerns the dead...

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