For Ron Rash, the Southern Appalachians hold a sense of eternity. Here, the promise of the future and the beauty—and harshness—of the present are just a few thin layers in a much longer legacy. These mountains are where his parents are buried, and their parents before them, and their parents before them. They’re the place that made his life, the place he’s lived his life, and the place that has inspired the poems, short stories, and novels he’s spent his career creating.
“Eudora Welty said, ‘One place comprehended helps us understand all other places better,’ and that’s why when people call writers ‘regional’ I don’t see it as an insult,” Rash said. “Because a really good regional writer is also a universal writer. You’re ultimately getting to
the core of what it means to be human.”
If there’s one overarching theme to his work, Rash muses, it’s an attempt to answer the question, “How does it feel to be alive in the world?” That goal is the engine animating everything he writes, and it’s driven him to considerable acclaim. A triathlete of a writer, Rash is an accomplished poet, short story writer, and novelist, the author of 20 books. His 2008 novel Serena became a New York Times bestseller and a PEN/Faulkner finalist, and he is also a three-time recipient of the O. Henry Prize and winner of the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, among numerous other honors. His most recent novel, The Caretaker (Doubleday, 2023), was named one of The New Yorker’sBest Books of the Year, and in 2024 he was inducted to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
“I view my work as similar to a patchwork quilt,” he said of his considerable body of work. “I’m creating a quilt with different size patches and colors, but it’s all one thing.”
Training ground
At 72, Rash has earned his place as a leading voice in Southern Appalachian literature, a success he owes in part to lessons learned from earlier moments of failure. Calling himself “the least well-rounded person I know,” Rash never cared much about succeeding at things that didn’t interest him—including school, where he was a poor student and failed the sixth grade.
“What I find amazing looking back is that my parents didn’t wring my neck,” he said.
James and Sue Rash came from humble beginnings, but they knew the value of education. Both natives of the North Carolina mountains, they met while working at a cotton mill in South Carolina but eventually embarked on professional careers. James, a high school dropout, took night classes to earn his GED, becoming a high school art teacher and later a professor at Gardner–Webb College (now Gardner–Webb University). Sue became an elementary school teacher. Rash, the oldest of their three children, grew up “much more comfortably” than his parents had. “But I was always aware of what they had sacrificed.”
Nevertheless, he couldn’t help “goofing off academically,” spending most of his childhood with his nose in a book (though never one assigned for class) or his feet roaming the woods around his grandparents’ farm in tiny Aho, North Carolina, just south of Boone. That farm was “the most important place in my life,” Rash said, and he went every chance he got.
“I just loved being able to wander the woods and the streams,” he said. “I fished a lot, but sometimes I just liked going out and daydreaming. I guess that’s what writers do.”
Rash also cherished the time with his grandparents, honing his ear for the Appalachian dialect so often celebrated in his work. And he absorbed a sense of the mystical: stories about ghosts, otherworldly messages written in spider silk, or salamanders serving as drinking water guardians.
“Maybe one of the best gifts I got was it enabled me to get a sense of a place where there was always more to the world than what you saw,” he said. “I mean by that folklore. Some people call it superstition—all these stories of these things that made the world really mysterious.”
A turn in the tide
But if the teenage Rash was training to be a writer, he didn’t know it. For a long time, athletics loomed larger than literature. Rash was a star track athlete through high school and into college at Gardner–Webb, where his time for the open one-mile run still stands as fourth-fastest in school history. He hoped to become a physical education teacher.
Then, he pulled a hamstring.
“It was in a way the best thing that could have happened,” Rash said. “I was 23, and all that focus I put into track I shifted into writing.”
Success didn’t come overnight. Rash describes his early work as “very mediocre” and was once told he would “never” be a writer—by a fellow writer. But instead of quitting, Rash drew on his already-developed comfort with failure and a tenacious desire to prove the naysayers wrong.
“I said, ‘Do I really want to try to do this well? Would I rather fail at it than not know if I could do it?’ To me, that was the choice,” he said. “I was willing to fail at it, and for a long time it really looked like I had. But I didn’t give up.”
It took years for the tide to turn. Rash was in his late 20s when an editor who “didn’t know me” and therefore was not doing it “to be nice” accepted one of his short stories into a magazine. A “really big moment” came in 1983 when The Southern Review published his poetry, but Rash was 40 years old before the publication of his first book, the short story collection The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Other Stories from Cliffside, North Carolina. He was pushing 50 before he placed a title with a larger New York City publishing house.
Rash believes the journey ultimately served to make him a better writer. By the time he found success, he had a full quiver of life experience to draw from and a helpful habit of constantly second-guessing his works-in-progress.
“You don’t want to be too confident about your writing, ever,” he said, “because once you get that way, you’ll get comfortable.” Then, “you’re kind of dooming yourself, because you’re going to be too easily satisfied.”
Keeping the momentum
As he gained his footing as a writer, Rash followed in his parents’ footsteps as an educator. After earning a master’s of arts, he spent a couple years as a high school English teacher and then taught writing at Tri-County Technical College near Greenville, South Carolina.
When his first novel, One Foot in Eden, published in 2002 to critical acclaim, new opportunities opened up—including an invitation to join the faculty at Western Carolina University, whose rural campus is nestled in the mountain valley of Cullowhee, North Carolina. Rash has served as the school’s Parris Distinguished Professor of Appalachian Cultural Studies since 2003, teaching advanced fiction writing to new generations of writers.
In defining his approach, he drew on that moment in his early 20s when the words “you’ll never be a writer” were directed his way.
“That really taught me something about teaching,” he said. “I would never do that to a student.”
His strategy hangs instead on encouragement—to keep reading, to keep writing, and to revise relentlessly.
“I think part of my role is to let them know that it’s okay for it to be a process,” he said.
Through his work at WCU, Rash helps to fuel the literary momentum in Western North Carolina that began with writers like Robert Morgan, Lee Smith, and the late Fred Chappell, the success of Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel Cold Mountain once and for all proving that a book set in the Southern Appalachians can become a sensation.
These authors were all “really kind and supportive” to Rash earlier in his career. Now, he works to pay the favor forward—to new writers and the people who will read them.
“A really good literary novel is more important than it’s ever been,” he said. “It’s one of the last places you can go where you have to have sustained attention. I think it's kind of the ‘anti’ everything else that's happening in the culture, and I think that's needed.”
“An Evening with Ron Rash and Friends,” a public event featuring Rash and acclaimed writers Crystal Wilkinson, Kelli Jo Ford, and Linda Parsons, will be held at the Blount County Public Library in Maryville, Tennessee, at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, October 24. The event is offered in conjunction with the annual Tremont Writers Conference co-organized by Smokies Life and Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont.
Holly Kays is the lead writer for the 29,000-member Smokies Life, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the scientific, historical, and interpretive activities of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by providing educational products and services such as this column. Learn more at SmokiesLife.org, or reach the author at hollyk@smokieslife.org.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Word from the Smokies: Ron Rash’s unlikely journey to literary acclaim
