An Appalachian Review Conversation

This autumn, in between virtual readings, interviews, and Zoom conferences with book clubs across the country, bestselling novelist Wiley Cash was completing final edits on his much-anticipated fourth novel. Set in 1983 in eastern North Carolina—a departure from his previous books, which are all rooted in the state’s western mountains—When Ghosts Come Home centers on a sheriff facing a series of crises and mysteries amidst a challenging campaign for reelection. Winston Barnes, the fictional sheriff, is a haunted man, an adjective that might also be used to describe Cash himself.

The South—its landscape, its characters, the beauties and failings of its culture—continues to hold Cash captive. In a recent interview conducted over email, he characterized his writing as an attempt to “reclaim and investigate” his experiences in the region; he spoke about the influence of Southern writers including Ernest J. Gaines, Lee Smith, and Thomas Wolfe; and how he is seeking to give encourage other writers.

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JASON KYLE HOWARD:

From the outset, with A Land More Kind than Home, you established yourself as a true writer of place. Is that something that works more organically for you, or is sense of place something you consciously set out to do?

WILEY CASH:

It was very conscious at first. I was living outside of North Carolina for the first time in my life, and I was deeply homesick. The early drafts of the novel were written in Lafayette, Louisiana, and the later drafts were written and revised while I lived in the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia. The familiar felt very far away, and in writing about western North Carolina, I was able to write about a place that I missed, a place where I longed to be. I was also plumbing the depths of my own experience as a kid —evangelical religion, rural life, family dynamics—so all of it was an attempt to reclaim and investigate.

Later, perhaps deeper in the writing of that first novel and certainly in the writing of my others, I saw my writing about

Wiley Cash

place as being both conscious and unconscious. So much of what writers do is unconscious, and reflecting a place that you know well certainly falls under that description. But I’ve always written about places that I love and places that I still hold dear, so during the writing I always consciously investigate and interrogate those places, both physically— meaning I return there to immerse myself—and spiritually and intellectually—meaning I do my best to ask hard questions about how to accurately recall, conjure, and portray these places on the page.

JKH:

You are obviously very proud to be a Southerner, yet you never hesitate to critique the region for its failings. How do you strike that balance?

WC:

When you love a person or a place, you want that person to be healthy. I want the South to be healthy. My criticisms are not mean-spirited. I want the South to survive and thrive, and it won’t happen if we’re always humping our toxic past around with us. I’d rather we unpack it, call it what it is, address it and repair it, and move on with a lighter load.

JKH:

Why is writing about rural, working-class people so important to you?

WC:

I come from rural, working-class people, and the older I get the more I understand how that has come to bear on my own life. My mother and father’s people were all farmers turned mill workers from western North Carolina and the upstate of South Carolina. These people struggled from the farms to the mills to the suburbs. I was born in the suburbs, but I always felt anchored in the past. I especially feel that way now because I fully understand that it was the grit and determination of the old people that delivered me into the quality of life that I now have. I didn’t come from money, and I don...