Conversations with Ron Rash

Interview with Ron Rash

Jeff Daniel Marion / 1999

From Mossy Creek Reader 9 (2000): 18–40. Reprinted by permission.

Jeff Daniel Marion: I am interviewing Ron Rash. It is September 29, 1999. We are on campus at Carson-Newman College in the Appalachian Center. Ron read from his poems last night and also an excerpt from the novel he is working on. Ron, I want to talk to you about the background of where you have come from and also how that background, how that place, people, culture have shaped you as a writer. So tell us a little bit about your background.

Ron Rash: I was born in Chester, South Carolina. My mother and father were Appalachian, but they had to come down to work in the textile mills. But even as a child, I can remember sensing Chester never being really home. Home was always the mountains of North Carolina. My father’s family was from Buncombe County, the same section Jim Wayne Miller came from. My mother’s family was from Watauga County. When I was still a small child, we moved back into Western North Carolina. I spent most of my childhood in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, which is in the foothills. What I find interesting is almost all of my poetry is about the Appalachian region—either about the people that moved out of the region, as in Eureka Mill, or as in the poems I’ve done in the last few years, set in Buncombe County or Watauga County. And I think one reason is because I spent so much time up there and also just a sense this was my families’ territory. I don’t do this even consciously, but it seems like for some reason my imagination always leads me back to the mountains.

JDM: Did you grow up in a situation of a family that told stories, were good talkers, so to speak, or who were not?

RR: Well, it was interesting because some of my relatives, particularly the men, were very quiet but some of the women weren’t. And it was from the women that I got most of my stories. My grandmother was a very good storyteller. And one thing that I had, I think very valuable, and I think I’m in the last generation, because this was the last generation maybe before air-conditioning, was that we really did sit on the front porch on summer evenings. I mean you had to. It was too hot inside. People talked. That was what they did. That was entertainment. I can remember sitting on the steps listening to the adults and how much fun that was and hoping if I was quiet enough, they wouldn’t notice me and make me go to bed.

JDM: So this was an environment in which as a child you listened?

RR: Right.

JDM: And the adults did the talking?

RR: Yes. And one other thing that happened to me as a child, I had a speech impediment. And so I was very reluctant to talk because I was afraid people would either notice me or tease me. So I grew up listening. I think that was valuable as a writer.

JDM: Was there a particular kind of language that sort of got in your head as a child that you were listening to? I’m thinking particularly of how you draw on, in so many poems, words that we no longer hear in most parts of the Southern Appalachian region, unless you’re probably in some remote, rural areas. I’m thinking particularly of words like poke for paper bag. I grew up hearing those words, and I realize that’s a language that is fading, that is tied to the past. To what extent has that influenced you? I mean that sense of their language as opposed to the language you’ve learned in school.

RR: Yeah, well I think I did notice that even as a child, I would notice the differences. And I would notice there would be different words and different ways of even saying those words sometimes.

And it was kind of interesting because I would then notice that I wouldn’t hear these words, even in Boiling Springs, which was in the foothills. I caught up on that, and one thing that was real interesting was that when I was in graduate school, there were several times when I was reading Shakespeare, and I would read words that I had assumed were Appalachian slang. There have been a lot of people, such as Cratis Williams, who have done so much on this subject.

JDM: I remember hearing, when I was a young adult measuring tobacco in my home county, one farmer say to me Well I holp my friend over across the road there build his barn and he holp me build mine. Now, I have not heard that holp, which is straight out of the middle English (if you read Chaucer, holp, holpen, hath holpen—help). I have not heard that since, but that was a common expression in my grandmother’s time. I think maybe there’s something unique in the fact that both of us here are from a generation that was at a crossroads in language and being on the edge of modern or contemporary culture and having a sense of the older culture and its traditions and yet seeing that it is going to disappear very quickly. How did that affect you?

RR: Well, I think it’s probably the impetus for me for writing. I think, for instance, Eureka Mill. Why did I write about this mill village at this time? Well, I think because I suddenly recognized it was interesting. I actually went through a mill village one time, before I started working on the book, and I realized nobody was in these houses anymore, or at least no mill workers. The mills are shut down and suddenly this world is disappearing. I think one impetus for some types of writers, I think of people like Robert Morgan and Wendell Berry, is to preserve. There is a sense that you don’t want this to be forgotten, that it had some importance. And I think that’s certainly true of Appalachian culture. I think certainly some of the best poetry in the U.S. is coming out of the Appalachian mountains right now. I think there’s a sense of urgency that we preserve something that we recognize as vanishing.

JDM: It seems so much of our contemporary culture is more interested in figuring out the quickest, most efficient, and cost-effective way to accomplish something and we don’t think about Well why is it important to remember these things from the past? Why is it so important to remember the sweat, tears, and blood of our parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts and all those people? Somebody said one time that poets are usually one to two steps removed from the farm or from some sense of a connectedness to a traditional culture. And I’m wondering if many of us in Southern Appalachia sense this moving into something we’re not completely convinced is better than the past. Nobody’s saying here that we want to go back to kerosene lamps instead of electricity. But we should raise the question of what we’re trading off. It seems to me that your poems suggest that there is an enormous loss when you move from the individually owned farms and self-sufficient life of the farms. Nobody’s saying it was easy, but something significant is lost when you move into the village and become a worker at the mill. And you make the point in one poem that your mother looked forward to an eight-hour shift. Everybody knows farmwork is never finished. You can’t tend it in eight hours and then move away from that. So, I’m wondering how you feel about how we honor the past.

RR: Well, I think that’s true, and I think I’m close enough to know. My uncle was a tobacco farmer, and I’ve still got relatives who farm in the mountains. I don’t sentimentalize that world. I know how hard a life that is. We talked about, yesterday, how hard it is to make it as a farmer. I find that something is really askew in our culture, in our society, when you can have people working so hard and giving us the most vital thing we can have—food, and yet they make the least money. I don’t have an answer for that. I wish I did. I find such a situation tragic for the sensibility of a society. Didn’t Jefferson say he felt like the backbone of the country was the small farmer? And also that sense of having people in a society who are independent or at least more independent, who are not completely dependent on everything vital in their lives being provided by someone else.

JDM: Much of the really strong poetry coming out of Southern Appalachia right now is awakening readers. I think it’s a sensibility that says, let’s question. So while there may not be an overt political motive in the poetry, it is by its very nature political. In a sense it’s saying, look at what is being lost. I find your poems, particularly in Eureka Mill, to be very hard-edged in the sense of let’s look at what’s happening here, and let’s look at these lives that have been in some ways forced out of what had been a fulfilling kind of life. But let’s move on to another period to talk about. You went to Gardner-Webb as an undergraduate. Can you pinpoint a time when you began to feel writing was a passion driving you? Did this happen as a college student, earlier, or—

RR: I think it probably started earlier. I think there was always a sense that I liked to imagine. I was a daydreamer, not a very good student in high school, but I was a reader. I was reading a lot, and I continued to read. When I got into college, I had made a couple attempts at short stories. It started there. I pretty much spent my twenties trying not to write. I wasn’t getting any encouragement. What I was writing was terrible. It was really when I turned about thirty that I started writing some things that I thought maybe captured something in words the way I wanted. I felt like I was kind of starting to break through, but it was a slow process. But I think it began very early. I think it began with my listening as a child to people and then just taking that and using that as imagination. You know a story I often tell is about my grandfather, who could not read or write, reading The Cat in the Hat to me. What he was doing was he was making up a story because he couldn’t read the words. And the next time he read it to me, it was a different story. And that was wonderful because it suddenly made words magical to me. It was like they could move on the page and rearrange themselves. So I was really disappointed when I started reading in the first grade. My words wouldn’t do that, but he taught me something about imagination.

JDM: Were you read to by other people as a child? Where does this passion to read come from? You said partly listening, but were there voices that cultivated your wish to read?

RR: Yeah. I think my parents. Both of my parents were very intelligent people. My father was always a big reader, and there were always books around the house. And I think that was important. I talk to some of my students who sometimes say, We have a Bible and that’s the only book in our house. And I think that is so sad. There were always books around, and there was always a sense that they had some value, and I was encouraged to read as a child. My mother would take me to the library and say, Well why don’t you pick out some books. And she read to me as a child.

JDM: Do you remember particular books that were in your house? Were there certain books that appealed to you that you remember?

RR: One of the most memorable books was the Jesse Stuart Reader. I read that book so many times that I think it finally fell apart.

JDM: So you cut your teeth on that book.

RR: Yeah.

JDM: Let’s talk about why that was your favorite book. What do you think it was in that book that really drew you in?

RR: I think one thing was the instant recognition of the voices with the voices of my own family.

JDM: This was home.

RR: Yeah, yeah. Those people spoke exactly the way my relatives did. I think I sensed a world that my relatives had told me about. You know, some of the stories of the mountains, some tall tales, historical tales sometimes—

JDM: So let’s see how this related to your writing. You said that in your twenties that you were writing terrible stuff. Was that because you had not found the kinds of things you wanted to write about or did you begin by knowing about your subject?

RR: I had to discover it. One reason I wrote so poorly in my twenties was I was my age. I think some writers mature quicker than others such as Kurt Vonnegut. Also I had been in graduate school. I wrote a story that I still feel good about (in college), but when I went to graduate school, the writing just went all to hell because I started thinking like a theorist, and I started analyzing literature instead of responding to it with my brain but with my heart as well. I think graduate school was very valuable for me because what it allowed me to do was read a lot. But I had to almost get out of the sensibility of being a critic and go back to reading like a writer and also writing as a writer. And, you know, one thing I learned immediately (once I felt like I found my voice and started writing some things) was that everything I learned about influence in classes was not true. No writer consciously says, Well, I’m going to write this line like William Faulkner because I read William Faulkner twenty-eight years ago. Now influences are there, but they are internalized. They’re almost organic and they come out. And so that just struck me—you know, the idea that the writer will put in certain kinds of symbolism, which is a word that I don’t even want to use because it seems so untrue to what writers do. I mean none of that—I think—it’s almost like I think Faulkner once said he was afraid he had read too much. I don’t think that’s true, but I think I know what he means by that.

JDM: Well, I think you’re probably mirroring the effects of graduate school and there are a lot of writers who feel like it’s oppressive to them because it is a sensibility that is so foreign to a writer who wants to synthesize so much of his past and the things that are important to him and speak to him. And graduate school teaches dissection and analysis . . .

RR: Right, that’s it exactly.

JDM: . . . which we both would agree are important means of understanding literature. But when it comes to the process of writing, that’s another matter. While we’re staying on the idea of education and formal education, was there a particular teacher or teachers who saw possibilities in you as a writer and who in some way wanted to nurture your talent?

RR: Yeah, and one is very active in Appalachian Studies, Joyce Brown, Dr. Joyce Brown at Gardner-Webb. I don’t know if you’ve met her, but she’s a really good person. She comes from an Appalachian background. She’s very interested in the region and she really encouraged me—she was the first person to encourage me to write. Now as a teacher, I understand what a saint she was with me coming up to the door saying, You want to read my new story? And now I get that from the other end. But, you know, it makes me take them because I remember she did this for me.

JDM: I was there not long ago thinking—yeah—

RR: And as you know, she did that for me and encouraged me as a writer and it helped me to feel like I might eventually write something worth reading, though I certainly wasn’t writing it then. And at Clemson, I had a professor named Bill Koon, and he was very encouraging. Yeah, those people were important. But one thing I think I‘ve learned was, and one thing I think was you’ve just got to do it yourself. You can’t and shouldn’t expect people to encourage your writing.

JDM: It is a matter of the self. The drive has to be in you. It can’t be put there by someone else. But would you talk about what really does drive you to write? You’ve said it’s something that’s inside you, and it’s not something that somebody necessarily encourages you toward, but what is its fulfillment?

RR: Well I think a lot of it’s in a way what we touched on earlier, a sense of obligation to people who came before me to allow me to have a life where I was expected to go to college. I was the first generation where it was expected that you should go to college. And the only reason that happened was because, for two generations, my family had kind of fought to get into a situation where somebody could, and so I think that’s a strong obligation. And also I think another thing, if I’m honest, is that I know the material I can write about my relatives is much more interesting than my life. I find their world more interesting to my imagination. I mean I could write poems about a middle-aged professor suffering over having to read yet another group of 101 freshman compositions, but that to me is not a very interesting subject matter. For some reason, I can’t seem to get to what I feel like are important matters through my own life or through my . . .

JDM: Their lives and their stories free your imagination to enter into other selves, and it seems to me an absolutely fundamental aspect of the writer is this ability to enter into the life of the other person. Ultimately it is that leap of the imagination that takes us into the life of the other person. And in that sense, I think maybe writing is a fundamentally moral act. It’s a way of caring for and responding to the other person. That is something I think we are sorely in need of these days. I know you don’t think of a particular reader when you’re writing, but how do you perceive your readers? Do you have a certain perception of the kinds of people who would be reading your work, responding to it, or not?

RR: There are certain people, certain friends, and maybe in a way, that’s my ideal audience and very often other writers. I think, Is this the kind of thing that would ring true for them? But at the same time, I do not desire to be a writer who writes for a small audience. Now that may end up being the case as a poet, but one thing I try to do is be an accessible poet. I want people who don’t necessarily even read a lot of poetry to be able to read my work and say, I understand what’s going on. For me, a writer who has had a great influence is Robert Frost because he can be accessible, but that doesn’t mean he’s simplistic. He’s a master of that. His poetry works on a number of levels. And the writers I admire are those who are willing to risk letting us know what they’re saying. There’s more of a risk in that than hiding behind a kind of obscurity that I sometimes think is an attempt to be profound when you’re not saying much. I’m not a big fan of writers such as John Ashbery. That writing doesn’t interest me.

JDM: Let’s relate this to our region. Do you feel that we have an audience for poetry in Southern Appalachia now?

RR: Well you may know more about that than I do, but I sense that there is. It may be a small audience, but I just sense there’s an audience out there. I think, for instance, people such as James Still and Fred Chappell and Robert Morgan have a following in the region. I think there are people who are excited when they know a new book by these writers will be coming out. Now I’m not sure how big that audience is, but I see some good signs. For instance, the Appalachian Studies Conference. I think the one thing that we’re having to deal with now is that with the death of Jim Wayne Miller there is such as huge void. There’s nobody to be the central focus for this. I think he was such a great ambassador for Appalachian writers. Not only was he such an excellent poet himself, but he did a lot to promote other writers. And I’m not sure that we’ve got anybody who’s willing, who has the kind of energy that he had to do that. What do you think?

JDM: Right. I have similar feelings that we have some absolutely first-rate writers no matter what part of the country you want to put them in. I think we spend a lot of time talking about the importance of the region to our work and shaping our lives, but in the long run, these writers can speak to anybody in any culture because what we are writing about are basic truths, universal concerns. But it does seem to me that we are lacking the unifying person or voice who will step in and fill the role, as you said, of being ambassador for poetry in Southern Appalachia right now. And maybe that’s just something that was unique to Jim Wayne because, let’s face it, most writers need the time and the solitude to get the writing done. And if they’re being ambassadors all of the time, how much work are they going to be able to accomplish? So, we’re talking about a conflict here in the nature of the role of the poet in society. It cuts both ways it seems to me and makes a basic problem for the individual writers. And think about your own case. You teach five classes and the demands of that on your time and on your energy and then as you were talking to me earlier how much work you were able to accomplish in the summer maybe because, This is the time I’ve got and I’ve got to make the best use of it. And so ten hours a day, you would write. So it seems to me the dilemma that we’re facing is of a need for a figure who can be an ambassador. But at the same time this writer will need solitude to be able to do the work that is going to nurture us in the long run. And I don’t know what the solution to that is.

RR: Well, one thing that I do see that’s been heartening to me is people at the Appalachian Studies Conference are getting a chance to read their work to other people. And those are the kind of settings where I would like to see more poets involved. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like there’s more good poetry coming out of the Appalachians now than any other time. I just think there’s so much good work, and I think some people know that.

JDM: I think a lot of people do know that because there are a number of anthologies published and in the making. And there’s a beginning of a body of critical writing about the literature that’s been published. So all of this is necessary in building that audience for the poets who are going to come along after us. All of this is in service of creating a community of readers.

RR: And also just the recognition that I just wish some of these writers should receive. Jim Wayne Miller is a writer who is incredibly underrated nationally. He’s well known in the region, but when you talk about who are important writers in the second part of this century, I would say Jim Wayne Miller’s got to be in there. We’ve got