From print issue v. 30: “Ron Rash and His Journey as a Writer”
by Sue Lile Inman
On a mild November afternoon, Ron Rash and I sit beside the fire in his den. A large red quilt handmade by his mother hangs on the wall opposite the hearth. Ron has been writing most of the day on a new short story marked up for revision, a tall plastic cup beside his laptop. “I drink a lot of iced tea when I’m writing hard like I did today,” he says.
He’s at home at the moment in Clemson, SC, although many days he’s more likely to be in Cullowhee, NC, where he teaches Appalachian cultural studies and fiction writing at Western Carolina University as the Parris Distinguished Professor. Or with all the places in the world where his novels are published and where he’s gone on book tours, you might find him in New Zealand or Britain. The day of this interview, he received a call from his French publisher inviting him to Brussels to publicize his newest novel, The Cove, a bittersweet story of a young Appalachian woman and her mute wandering lover during World War I.* His best-selling novel Serena has been translated into French, Chinese, Dutch, and Czech.
Ron would be the first to tell you that his writing life has not always been thus. For 17 years he taught five or six classes a semester at Tri-County Technical College in Pendleton, SC, and yet managed to write a stream of poems and stories. It took two decades of steady work before the publication of his first novel.
Born in Chester, SC, Ron grew up in Boiling Springs, NC. His journey as a writer goes back to his preschool days when he asked his grandfather to read The Cat in the Hat, a book he’d heard many times from his mother. His grandfather read quite a different story, so Ron kept after him to read it again and again. Every time the story turned out to be new. Ron learned from him the magic of words, the power of imagination, ignorant at the time that his grandfather could neither read nor write. Both sides of the family are rooted in the western Carolina mountains, so it’s no surprise to find in all his work a strong sense of place. Appalachia figures as strongly as his unforgettable characters.
“I feel lucky,” Ron says. “My father dropped out of school to work in a mill and earned his GED later. My mother came from a farm near Boone to the mill after high school. There was something in both of them. They wanted something more.” His father attended night classes, earned a college degree, and taught art in high school. H is mother, at 40, worked for a degree so she could teach elementary school. “What they did was hard won. We always had books, art, magazines at the house. It was a good place. At the same time, my other relatives were blue collar. That was a nice balance. They showed me more of the world.” Ron is the oldest of three: Tom, three years younger, works as an administrator at ABTech; his sister Kathy as a ceramic engineer. Ron passes his manuscripts to his brother: “Tom is essentially my only reader. He knows not only what’s on the page, but what I’m trying to do, what I’m after. He’s tough. And nobody’s better at line editing.”
Ron started writing his sophomore year in college under the influence of his English teacher at Gardner-Webb, Joyce Brown. In graduate school at Clemson University, he met Dr. G. William Koon, who not only encouraged Ron’s writing, but influenced the way he would conduct his own classes. Ron took literature classes and a satire seminar from him. He says, “Bill Koon taught me how to read — how to read attentively. The writers he loved, I loved. He was a great teacher. Everything I’ve done as a teacher, I’ve used Bill’s methods, how he ran a class. I studied hard because [I] didn’t want to disappoint him.”
A key moment in Ron’s journey occurred in grad school. When a famous writer visited Clemson, Ron submitted a story for critique. The writer proceeded to shred it ruthlessly in front of the class. Afterwards, Ron closed himself off in his office, humiliated. The longer he pondered what had happened, the more he realized the famous writer was correct. H is story was no good. Should he chunk the whole idea of writing? A distinct possibility. Something stubborn moved within him. No. He determined then and there to show the man that Ron Rash could write a better story.
As Ron continued teaching, he kept on writing, sending off manuscripts, receiving rejection slips, and then a few acceptances from literary journals. His first published story was “My Father’s Cadillacs” in a small Indiana magazine when Ron was 27. He and his wife, Ann Todd Rash, who teaches English at Daniel High School in Clemson, have raised a son and daughter. And Ron kept writing, usually in the early morning. He’s practiced the 24-hour rule: When a manuscript returned with a rejection slip, he sent it out again to another publication within 24 hours.
Now, after spending so long on the novel The Cove, he likes writing short stories, “the form I enjoy more.” He wants the story under development to surprise him, as he hopes it will do for the reader. Ron relishes working with the language after “the most confounding part” — roughing out a complete first draft. He says, “What I enjoy the most is the way vowels and consonants play off each other.” He likes “trying to be as concise as possible. When a short story works, there’s a feeling of the concision of poetry.” His fifth collection of short stories (14 in all) appeared from Ecco/Harper Collins in February 2013: Nothing Gold Can Stay. The stories span from the Civil War to 1900 to the early twenties and the Great Depression to the sixties and include “Trusty,” a story first published in The New Yorker.
Of Serena, Ron says, “That’s the best book I’ll ever write. The most ambitious. The one I was the most driven to write, going eight to ten hours a day.” The story of lumber tycoons in the 1930s who clear cut timber in North Carolina, using men desperate for work, dangerous and often lethal work, came as Ron researched the beginnings of Smoky Mountain National Park. The image appeared to him of a blond woman on a white horse atop a hill. The woman became Serena Pemberton, who compares to Lady Macbeth in her ruthless ambition and cruelty. In his final rewrite, Ron made Serena’s voice distinctive by writing her lines in iambic rhythm. The loggers make a convincing Shakespearean chorus with dark comic effect. His beloved character Rachel appeared late in his composition; he knew he’d found the missing counterpoint to Serena: “She gave a marvelous balance.” The movie Serena starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper is scheduled for wide release in fall 2013.
Although some might see Romeo and Juliet in The Cove, Ron sees also the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. “The artist,” Ron says, “goes into the underworld. The artist has to go into the depths, very often into darkness, and is often the survivor.” About the writing of a novel, Ron says that “each time, it’s just as frightening and hopeless. The energy and time required are just as daunting.”
After finishing an exhausting book tour for The Cove, Ron experienced a low, dark time himself: “I had the longest period in 25 years with nothing clicking. No good feeling. No energy. No curiosity.” He started five stories and “they wilted.” During this time, he says he was frustrated, restless, “like if you exercise every day, and then suddenly stop. Part of who I am was missing.”
When asked what to do in such a blocked, fallow period, he advises: “Go to the desk, and try and try and try. Take any idea and run with it. Even on days when you hate to write. You have to have a mule-like stubbornness.”
Then, three weeks before this interview, a fertile idea hit and now he’s written two new stories that feel right. “I had a line — ‘When I was sixteen, my summer job was robbing trains.’” Of course, for a line to appear, he had to be there to receive it.
His life as a writer is a journey to which Ron gives a poet’s love of language, a mountain man’s knowledge of Appalachia and its people, a storyteller’s imagination, and “a mule-like stubbornness.” Composing a book for him involves a process, he says, “that may not be the healthiest, but here it is: Write four hours a day, six days a week for three years.”
Writing requires a certain kind of listening to know what to write. Ron says that you must allow yourself attentiveness: “Isolate yourself and just reflect on and be attentive to the natural world, to a memory, to something you imagine, a time or place in the past. It’s the hardest thing to do in our society today.”
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*This article has been corrected since its original publication. Originally, The Cove is described as being set during World War II.
