Ron Rash has written about “one of the most remarkable moments of my life” that occurred when he was 5 years old, before he learned to read.
It was a warm summer evening and my grandfather, still dressed in his work clothes, was smoking a Camel cigarette as he lingered at the kitchen table after a hard day’s work. When I handed my grandfather the red and blue book (“The Cat and the Hat”) and asked him to read to me, he did not offer any excuse, not even the most obvious one. Instead, he laid the open book on the table before us, peering over my shoulder as he turned the pages with his work-and-nicotine-stained fingers, and I heard the story of a talking cat and his high, blue-striped hat.
What he had done was make up a story to fit the pictures that lay on the pages before us. Not surprisingly, I quickly realized that the story he was reading was very different from the one my mother had read from the same book.
The effectiveness of my grandfather’s performance was verified by my begging him to read “The Cat and the Hat” again the following Sunday. His story was different this time. The cat got into more trouble, and out of it less easily. At every opportunity in the following weeks, I ambushed my grandfather so I might hear what new events might occur in this cat’s ever-changing life. How could I not grow up believing words were magical? How could I not want to be a writer?
As he sits in his Coulter Building office, surrounded by books, it is obvious that Ron Rash is a writer who doesn’t enjoy talking about himself, but loves to speak of family roots that go deep into the mountains. A son of Buncombe and Watauga County natives, Rash was raised in Boiling Springs and the South Carolina town of Chester, where his family lived from time to time to take advantage of the work available in the textile mill. His grandparents never had the opportunity to go to college, but Rash’s parents went back to school as working adults and earned degrees. Rash says it was a family expectation that he would attend college after his high school graduation.
“They tried to do better for the next generation,” Rash said. “I think one of the reasons I write is that it’s an act of gratitude that the people who came before me sacrificed so much.”
Rash made his first serious attempt at creative writing when he was a student at Gardner-Webb University. His mind and energies previously had been focused on running track in high school and college, but he had been a voracious reader all along. “One day I sat down and thought, why don’t I try this and see what happens,” Rash said. The result wasn’t anything to get excited about, but he kept at it and discovered that his athletic background helped him when he faced the dreaded blank page. “Having been an athlete was a great advantage because it taught me discipline,” he said. “You need day-in and day-out discipline to do both.”
And so, Rash combined the tough-mindedness acquired in his athletic pursuits with his love and appreciation for the natural and human history of the Southern Appalachians to launch a literary career while he taught in high schools and colleges across the region. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, and wrote three collections of poetry and two collections of short stories, before transitioning to writing a series of critically acclaimed and award-winning novels. He joined Western’s faculty in 2003, coming back to his family’s homeland in the mountains, “my true home.”
This past November, Rash learned that “Serena,” his fourth novel, had been named to the Publishers Weekly “Best Books of the Year” list, and that the novel had come in at No. 7 on the online retailer Amazon’s list of the 100 best books of 2008. Those accolades have been accompanied by a burst of complimentary reviews in newspapers and magazines across the nation, including The New York Times, in which reviewer Janet Maslin listed “Serena” as one of her 10 favorite books of 2008 and praised Rash’s “elegantly fine-tuned voice.” The book also has made the “best-of-2008” lists of The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle.
Novelist Pat Conroy has stated that “Serena” “catapults (Rash) to the front ranks of the best American novelists.” Rash says the praise for the novel is encouraging. “It’s the book I worked on the hardest. It’s nice to get a good response,” he said.
As the literary accolades come his way, Rash stays busy as he teaches Appalachian literature and creative writing at WCU, and continues to prepare his next published work, a collection of short stories. With the October release of “Serena,” he is being called upon more often to present readings across the country, and in recent months has been to Boston, Portland, Ore., and Cincinnati. “The best part of that is getting to meet writers I admire,” Rash said.
“Serena” tells the story of a timber baron, George Pemberton, and his ruthless wife, Serena, who come to the North Carolina mountains to create a timber empire. Rash says each of his three previous novels were inspired by a single image that came to his mind, but “Serena” started with two images: a huge table that he saw at a resort in Waynesville that had been hewn from a single piece of yellow poplar, and an image of a woman riding a ridge crest on a “magnificent white stallion” that popped into his head while he was driving through the mountains. That woman is his fictional Serena.