Ron Rash

      This installment's featured author is Ron Rash, whose novel Saints at the River is the 2006 choice of Western North Carolina's region-wide reading and book discussion program.  Rash will be the festival's leading presenter on Saturday morning, September 16. 

      Winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Novel of the Year for 2005, Rash is also a long-time educator and now serves as the first John A. Parris, Jr. and Dorothy Luxton Parris Distinguished Professor of Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee.

      Rash grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina.  Both sides of his family have lived in the Southern Appalachians since the mid-1700’s and his works of fiction and poetry draw heavily on his highland heritage.  He attended Gardner-Webb College and Clemson University and became an educator, first teaching at Tamassee-Salem High School in upstate South Carolina for two years, near the location of the Jocassee Reservoir, the setting of one of his poetry collections and of his novel One Foot in Eden.  He then taught 17 years at Tri-County Technical College.

      He had been writing seriously for over a quarter of a century when wide recognition struck, but his work has long been highly regarded in literary circles. His poetry and fiction have appeared in over 100 journals, magazines and anthologies over the years.  He is now considered one of America’s foremost literary voices.

      Modest and retiring, Rash places his highest priorities on his writing and on giving time to his family.  Fame came to him in mid-life and he wears it with ease and grace.  “You've got to remember,” he says, “it’s all about the writing,” not about promotional demands, celebrity or honors.  He has been writing six days a week since he was in his twenties; he’s now in his fifties.  He insists success in writing comes only with perseverance and strict discipline.  “If the work’s not the priority,” he says, “then you’ve lost your way as a writer.” 

      Rash also points out that, especially in North Carolina, younger authors can be inspired by the high examples set by other long-established writers such as Lee Smith, Fred Chappell and Robert Morgan who, despite their celebrated achievements, have remained “well-grounded people” who “show us how to act”.  “We’re all competitive in some sense, and all anxious to get recognition, but in the end what’s important is be generous and decent” in success.

      He is the author of six books, two short-story collections entitled The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Casualties; three books of poetry, Eureka Mill, Among the Believers and Raising the Dead;  and two novels, Saints at the River and One Foot in Eden.  His third novel, The World Made Straight, is forthcoming from Henry Holt.  He is a past winner of the NEA Poetry Fellowship and the Sherwood Anderson Prize; in 2001 he won the Novella Festival Novel Award and in 2002 received Foreword Magazine’s Gold Medal in Literary Fiction for One Foot in Eden, which was also named Appalachian Book of the Year.  The novel was voted Best Fiction Book of the Year by the Southeast Booksellers Association and the Southern Book Critics Circle.  In 2005 Rash won the O. Henry Prize for his short story “Speckle Trout”, which appeared in the spring 2003 edition of The Kenyon Review.  In 2005 he was given the James Still Award by the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

       The Carolina Mountains Literary Festival is most fortunate that Ron Rash has agreed to participate in our inaugural event.  We are also privileged to be a part of the Together We Read program.  Rash says he is especially honored that Together we Read has chosen Saints at the River as its 2006 project because the organization, now in its fourth year, covers sixteen Western North Carolina counties and specifically celebrates the same Appalachian culture that inspires his work. The stated mission of Together We Read is to develop in Western North Carolina a love of reading through the shared experience of well-chosen books.