Photo: Gary Carden ’58 MA ’64 shows off the barn at his Sylva home.
Western presented an honorary doctorate to Sylva native Gary N. Carden ’58 MA ’64 in August in recognition of his four decades of written works and storytelling performances that showcase Southern Appalachian culture, but this son of the mountains hasn’t always wanted to call the mountains “home.”
Carden was raised by grandparents during the 1940s in the isolated Rhodes Cove community, with formative years that included hoeing corn, listening to his great-grandmother tell stories, and, as Carden says, “acquiring the dialect and traditions of a Southern highlander.”
Carden enrolled at Western Carolina College, now WCU, in 1953 as an English major with a minor in drama and speech. As a student, he acted in theatrical productions and started WCU’s first literary magazine, Catastrophe. When Carden graduated with a bachelor’s degree, an elderly aunt admonished him, “Don’t you forget where you came from,” but the man novelist Lee Smith now calls “a national treasure, an Appalachian Garrison Keillor” tried anyway.
“I couldn’t get out of the mountains quick enough,” Carden told the Ramsey Center audience as he accepted his honorary doctorate of humane letters. “For 15 years, I taught, always near a city – Atlanta or Charlotte or Raleigh. I wanted to be near theaters, bookstores and nice restaurants. I wanted to get a little culture – all that culture I had been missing all those years.”
Carden taught high school English and drama outside the mountains for five years, returned to WCU to earn his master’s degree in English in 1964, and left the region again to resume his teaching career in colleges. “Eventually, I discovered I wasn’t all that thrilled,” he said. “I could never find the place I wanted to live, and I was homesick.”
On a summer day in 1972, Carden came back to Sylva for a visit and stopped by WCU’s Mountain Heritage Center to hear a presentation by mountain poet Jim Wayne Miller. “He didn’t read poetry like any poet I had ever heard,” Carden said. “He exhorted the audience, and talked to them like an old-timey preacher.” Miller kept repeating particular phrases, and one of those phrases was“come home.”
Carden took Miller’s words literally and metaphorically, coming back to Sylva to live in his grandparent’s house, and also embracing his native culture as a teacher, storyteller, novelist, historian, playwright and screenwriter. The extensive body of work he has produced since then includes the book “Mason Jars in the Flood and Other Stories,” the Appalachian Writers Association 2001 “Book of the Year”; his storytelling video “Blow the Tannery Whistle,” which has been shown numerous times on public television across North Carolina; and a play, “The Raindrop Waltz,” which has been staged more than 300 times.
In addition to the honorary doctorate from Western, Carden has received the North Carolina Folklore Society’s Brown-Hudson Award, and a children’s film for which he wrote the screenplay won the American Library Association’s 1998 Carnegie Medal for excellence in children’s video.