Understanding Ron Rash

Chapter 1 Understanding Ron Rash

Chapter 1 Understanding Ron Rash In a brief essay, “The Importance of Place,” Ron Rash states, “one of the most interesting aspects of literature is how the most intensely regional literature is often the most universal,” and he goes on to cite the examples of William Faulkner’s Mississippi, Alice Munro’s Ontario, Gabriel García Márquez’s Colombia, and James Joyce’s Dublin.1 Elsewhere Rash has noted the difference between “regional” and “local color” writing: “Local color is writing that is only about difference—what makes this particular place exotic. Regional writing is writing that shows what is distinct about a place—its language, culture, and all of that—yet at the same time says something universal .”2 Having chosen to ground his work firmly in the history and culture of the American South’s Appalachian region, where his ancestors have lived since the mid-1700s, Rash has seen his fiction celebrated not only regionally but also nationally and internationally. Chemistry and Other Stories (2007) was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2008, as was his novel Serena (2008) in 2009. His fourth collection of short stories, Burning Bright (2010), won the prestigious Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including French, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, and Chinese, evidence that his writing does, indeed, address features of human experience that transcend the local and regional. Responding in the negative when an interviewer asked if he ever consciously thought about being a southern writer, Rash added, “The best of Southern writing has always been universal—the region merely a starting point, not an ending point.”3 Like many other writers from Appalachia and the broader South, Rash is “always wary . . . of adjectives before the word writer” because they can easily become terms of disparagement or diminishment, limiting and reductive.4 Yet the subject matter of his fiction 2 Understanding ron rash and poetry testifies to his fierce allegiance to Appalachia—its people, its landscape , its vernacular language, its history, its folklore. Thus Rash’s writing has contributed substantially to what Robert Bain and Joseph Flora termed in 1994, the year Rash’s first book was published, an Appalachian Renaissance within the larger Southern Renaissance.5 It was Rash’s parents and grandparents who instilled in young Ron his sense of identification with the mountain South, specifically Buncombe, Watauga, and Madison Counties in western North Carolina. Although born on September 25, 1953, in Chester, South Carolina, a mill town, and raised in the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina, Rash recalls being aware that “home was always the mountains of North Carolina.”6 His paternal grandparents had moved to Chester from their farm in Buncombe County to work at Eureka Mill. There his mother, Sue, an out-migrant from Watauga County, eventually met his father, James, while both were employed at the mill. James, having dropped out of high school at sixteen, later earned a GED as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees, the last from Clemson University. He became professor of art at Gardner-Webb College in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, raising his family there. Yet from age twelve Ron spent summers and many holidays with his maternal grandmother on her farm near Boone in Watauga County, immersing himself in the natural world and in his relatives’ storytelling, for “there was no car, . . . no TV,” and no airconditioning .7 Rash has called the area around his grandmother’s farm his “spirit country” and has commented that “that time in the mountains . . . gave me my primary landscape.”8 A slight speech impediment inclined him to listen rather than to talk, so he absorbed family lore as well as Appalachian folklore and regional dialect, material he regularly draws on in his fiction and poetry. In fact he has attributed his becoming a writer to this speech defect.9 Among the other influential childhood figures who helped shape Rash’s interest in storytelling and writing were his paternal grandfather and his parents . In “The Importance of Place” and in several interviews, he has described how his illiterate grandfather led him to believe “words were magical” by recounting different versions of The Cat in the Hat each time he “read” that Dr. Seuss book to Ron. Says Rash, “My grandfather could not teach me how to read, but he had taught me how to use my imagination.”10 He also credits his parents with making words magical...