Talking Place with Ron Rash

Stephen Hundley
I'm hoping we can get a little closer to talking about putting a place into writing and what that looks like. I read an interview you did with Deep South magazine. I think this was in 2015. You said “landscape can become destiny,” and I heard you say elsewhere something to the effect of “geography operating as identity.” I know you’ve spoken to the role of mountains, how they can provide a sense of protection or limitation or permanence and human insignificance, but how do you feel when you or your characters are displaced from Appalachia, and how does this separation effect character destiny?

Ron Rash
That’s a good question. So much of my writing is in the region, but you know I do have characters such as Rachel in Serena who leave that landscape and have to adjust to another one. So often I don’t write about the people who go outside of the region. I have a couple of short stories, one that’s not published.  I think people who grow up in mountains or even foothills can feel exposed in flat landscapes. I know this is true in my case. The first time I went into the Midwest I just felt utterly naked. I really did. It was disconcerting. It was almost like God was looking at me and everything I did. I’ve just been reading Karl Ove Knausgård’s books. Do you know his work?

Hundley
I don’t.

Rash
My Struggle. He’s a Norwegian writer. The novel is 3,600 pages, very autobiographical.. A book about his life. When he  moved from Norway to Sweden—he felt Norway was too provincial—and there was a moment when he realized he could  go anywhere, but  a part of him could never leave that place, and realizing that was not such a bad thing.

I’ve actually written a new story—it came out a few months ago in Ploughshares—about a soldier during World War II, and he actually is in France during the war and goes to one of the caves where the cave art is. Lascaux. And he feels something in that cave that he has to bring back into the Appalachian Mountains, and he actually recreates the cave in his own house. The artwork. Which was an interesting turn for me.

Hundley
Have you worked with bringing something back to Appalachia before?

Rash
Not like that. It’s a story I feel good about, but it’s a new thing, and I think that’s a nice touch there—a character who grows up in Appalachia and realizes what he, in this case, needs is something elsewhere that allows him to survive.

Hundley
That “something” is tricky. I’ve been reading a lot of your poetry recently. I picked up New and Selected, out in 2016. It’s a great collection. One of the poems I always come back to is “Corpse Bird,” and that was one of the pieces I was directed to quickly when I started reading your poetry. People like that you did it one way—as a poem—and then you turned it into a story as well. How did place factor or render differently in the two forms? In other words, does place play a different role when you write a poem, as opposed to something in prose?

Rash
That’s interesting. As soon as you brought it up, I realized that is a story where somebody is outside of the region. That guy has moved into the piedmont, and he’s trying to bring his culture with him--orr that he can’t evade his culture.

As a poet is I’m very aware that I just don’t want to tell a story with some broken lines. I really attempt put an intense pressure on the line. A lot of my poems after my first book are seven syllables per line. I’m using a traditional Welch technique, cynghanedd, very often.Hopkins was very influenced by traditional Welsh poetry, the chiming of words through a poem. And Hopkins really does it intensely.

I caught this morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphine, dapple-dawn-drawn…

Dylan Thomas does it too. I tend to use cynghanedd more subtly, but I think if you look at my lines, you’ll see some interesting things as far as vowels and consonants, vowel sounds within a line. I like lines that are very often rhymed within the line. I’ll go one line then rhyme halfway through the next line. So the difference for me is that the poem is more about sound. The short story is more about content 

Hundley
What are you more excited about right now? You sound really excited about the poetry.

Rash
Well, you know, it’s funny, because I just had to go back and read some of my poems because somebody’s wanting to do an essay about them, and we’re going to do another interview about my poetry, which is nice because people kind of forget about my poems.  I feel the poems hold up pretty well.

I think it is different to get place into a poem, but at the same time, obviously, I’m still working within that landscape, and I think in a way the sounds and the landscape merge. I’m finding the sounds that fit whatever I want to say about that landscape.

Hundley
Makes me want to reread.

Rash
That’s a good thing.

Hundley
This is a little vague, but I think you’re up to it. How do you make a sense of place felt in a piece in a meaningful way? I’m thinking here of your writing, but also writers like Breece Pancake and Richard Ford, who also seem to be leveraging landscape not just for setting, but also for theme and character.

Rash
That’s an interesting question. I think certainly a part of it is a attentiveness to landscape. And I’m very interested in landscape as destiny-- the idea that the feel of the place, and the feel of the place on people. In my novel The Cove I think Laurel feels this very intensely. It’s as if the place is affects every thought she has. So attentiveness to detail is crucial. The Irish have a term about the magic of naming though it escapes me. The enchantment of place names, or the specificities of a particular place. I love that in a poet, such as Seamus Heaney. Also the patoi, trying to get a feel of the people and the place through the way the people use language.

Hundley
That’s a difficult thing to do. You have to know so much about a place to have it so timidly and subtly infiltrate character thought.

Rash
Yeah, and I think a really good writer can do it and not necessarily be from the place. Annie Proulx, I think, is magnificent at this, particularly her Wyoming stories. She grew up in New England. Ford grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and he writes about New Jersey. I mean, when I read him I have a vivid sense of that place.

Hundley
You’ve traveled a good deal, most recently to France. Is there a place you’ve visited that’s changed your writing or fascinated you in a persistent way, such that you keep revisiting that place in your mind?

Rash
Wow. Being in France has been refreshing good. Just the way they live their lives and the importance of literature. It really heartened me. I think in the United States right now literature’s value is too often placed only on the ideological. I don’t think that ought to be the only way that we approach literature, that through this idea that we’re going to make a better world. I have my doubts about whether literature can do that. I’m conflicted. But also, just the idea that maybe just giving a reader pleasure is justification enough. And I mean by that a difficult pleasure. A pleasure that can include and should include complexity. It should include a sense of the sublime.  I love Simone Weil’s statement that contradiction is the lever of transcendence. And I love that quote, because I think what literature can do sometimes is to contradict what we want to think, to believe

I just think literature can do many things.  Martin Amis says literature is a war against cliché. That’s clichéd writing, but it’s also clichéd thought.

Hundley
Talking about places and different places, how have the places you write about changed since you’ve been writing about them, and how has this changed your writing? I’m thinking here not only of the opioid epidemic and its effect on Appalachia, but also of technology and people of all regions getting more disconnected from the land. A lot has changed since you wrote The Night New Jesus Fell to Earth.

Rash
Oh yeah. The technology has changed a lot. One of the more difficult things, the more troubling things for me personally, is the landscape, particularly my grandparents’ farm near Boone, North Carolina. The place is hardly recognizable now. People have moved in. They’re mostly second homes. There was a two mile road where many of the people were kin to me. I knew them all, kin or not. That sense of community is gone. I think that’s an impetus for my writing. I think it’s the impetus for a lot of writing. I want to keep that place from being completely lost, at least through writing about it, memory. I think that’s a pretty worthy thing for literature to do too. And also, what did it feel like? I was thinking about this the other day. What I’m writing about, or what I’ve been writing about, is what it feels like to be human. Now we’re becoming machines, so perhaps that too is preserving something lost.

 I worry about how technology has changed the world. Well, it hasn’t changed the world, but it’s given the appearance of change.

Hundley
How so?

Rash
Well, in a sense so much of what is real or seems to be real is seen through a computer screen. And I’m not saying that’s good or bad, but for me what it allows is a certain idea that, from an ecological point of view, that we’re not connecting to the natural world, or the real world. And if you have that illusion, it’s the death of us, because we’re creatures, and when the world dies, we’re not going to be able to jump into our computer screens. Damn, I’m getting preachy.

Hundley
*laughs*

Rash
But we’re not. I could be completely wrong, but I do worry about attention spans. And I’ll say something here about novels, I think novels are more important now than they’ve ever been because they’re one of the few places where someone can really, really go into silence and into, with the best novels, complexity and issues that cannot be resolved in a thirty second sound bite. And to me that’s a wonderful thing. People keep asking, “What’s the relevance of literature?” Well, that’s it.

Hundley
What do you do that makes you feel most connected to your place? How do you interact with it?

Rash
Just being out in it. I’ve been trout fishing twice this week. That certainly helps. I actually just went and visited my father’s grave in Boone. My grandparents’ graves. I walked that land. I revisited the place that to me is the most important place of my childhood, which was grandparents’ farm near Boone. There was a sadness in going into my grandmother’s house. My aunt lives there now. But there was still a connection. I was still in that landscape, even though a lot of it had changed. The act of writing about place certainly keeps me connected as well as physically being there.

I’m living on land that my family owned 200 years ago. It had been out of the family for a century. I didn’t know the connection when I bought the place. I was doing research for my novel Serena, and I realized that one of my relatives had owned it.  So knowing that someone in my family looked out at the same landscape 200 years ago certainly helps.

Hundley
Talking about special people and places, who or what have been your teachers in addressing place and in the fragility of place? I have a good friend, Dan Leach, who requested I ask about Bill Koon, who taught Southern Literature at Clemson--where you went to graduate school. Was Bill instrumental in shaping your voice or love for place? I know Dan was pretty torn up to see him pass.

Rash
Oh yeah. I was too. I mean, he probably, outside of my immediate family, had more impact on my life than anyone. I came to Clemson from Gardner-Webb, a little school up in North Carolina. I wasn’t sure I should even be in graduate school. And Bill affirmed that I should. And he was such a great teacher. He got me interested in literature I would never have read on my own. A lot of that was 18th century, you know, Samuel Johnson and Swift. And that was good. I needed to get outside of what I was reading at the time. And what I loved about him as a teacher was that he felt like literature was important. I sense many teachers today almost apologizing for having students read. Bill, he viewed you with contempt if you weren’t smart enough to understand why lit was important. And he made me want to be a better reader. I think what really connected us was—you were talking earlier about having to read some things “under the radar” during your time at Clemson—I’d been reading Walker Percy, and I did my master’s thesis on Percy, and I thought, you know, this is a great writer, and hardly anybody knows about him. Bill knew about him. We bonded over Percy.

Bill introduced me to writers, and as far as sense of place, I think he showed me that I could do it. That I had some insight into literature. He said, “You should pursue this.” He was the best teacher I’ve ever had, and the way I teach is the way he did. He taught me how to teach.

Hundley
That’s a big legacy.

Rash
Yeah, and he did it for many people.

Hundley
I want to talk a little bit about history. There is a lot of history in One Foot in Eden and in Serena, and a lot of your work in any form dips back into the past. How much historical research goes into your writing when you’re working with that place?

Rash
Oh, a lot. Many writers research before they start writing, but I do it in medias res. as the story develops, that’s when I start to research. I’ll set up a scene, and later I’ll go and do research. for example: when I was writing Serena there was a moment when I realized I needed something for Serena to do that was going to impress these loggers—these men who live the roughest, most dangerous of lives. I said, “What are they afraid of?” One thing would be rattlesnakes. Well, maybe I can have Serena go out and shoot one, but that’s not going to elevate her the way I want. Maybe she can even train a dog. But then I remembered I had seen a hawk grab a snake off the ground before. First hawk, then I thought, what if she could train an eagle? And I didn’t even know if that was possible. So that’s when I did the research.

And I actually found somebody in Wyoming. At that time one of twelve people who legally hunted with a golden eagle in the United States. And he became a friend, but what he confirmed was that it would be possible for her to train it. It would be unusual, but possible. So I imagined something, and then I went towards the research to see if it could be done. And that’s usually the way I work.

But what I like about writing about the past is that it can be very subversive to the reader. Particularly in Serena I’m really writing more about what was happening in the United States in the present more than the past. That was when they really started trying to allow logging and mining in national parks. Right now that’s really being pushed.

Hundley
Do you do any research on the natural history of a place?

Rash
Oh yeah. I’m fascinated with the New River which goes up near Boone. There’s a pretty interesting discussion about whether it’s the oldest river in the world. It may be the Nile, but it’s one of the oldest. And I’m fascinated with the idea that the Appalachians are the oldest mountains in the world, and that’s important to me, that idea. Occasionally I’ve mentioned it in a story or a novel. That I’m working in the oldest kind of landscape, in the sense of mountains. That affects me. It affects my writing, even if it’s not overt.

Hundley
At this point, you’ve written best-selling novels, award winning collections, and you’re still contributing to small magazines. I was on staff at The South Carolina Review when your story, “The Eagle” ran. What role have small literary magazines like SCR and The Swamp played in your career, and what keeps you coming back to contribute to that community?

Rash
Well, that’s where I was first able to publish. And it was so important. I remember the first thing I ever published outside of a college magazine was in the Southern Humanities Review. I remember I had sent some work out and gotten rejections, and then just that first confirmation that there was something I’d written that someone might find good. And I wasn’t telling anyone. Even my family. It was secret. I would lie. People would ask, “Ron, are you thinking about writing?” And I would say, “No.” And I was sending these things out. But that confirmation was so wonderful. I’ll never forget that letter coming back. “We really like this poem.” I was ecstatic.