It’s been nearly a century since the logging boom swept across Appalachia, but the story is timeless, forever engraved on the landscape and in the psyche of mountain people.

“It permanently and irrevocably changed the entire face of Western North Carolina,” said Jason Brady, a special collections librarian at Western Carolina University.

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The beauty of literature is its solely unique power of transportation.

That beauty lies in the meticulous arrangement of words, phrases and sentences on a simple black and white page, where upon decoding the message you conjure endless colors, scents and landscapes. You find yourself walking the streets of far away places in forgotten eras, faces and voices long since put six feet under, all covered up in dust under the bed of a modern world. 

The key to opening the portals to these places lies in the fingertips of the writer. Sitting down and letting the images in your mind pour out onto the blank page is a sacred act, one where you let the story unfold in front of you rather than racing to find a conclusion. Crafting a story is a delicate and often misunderstood process. To find the perfect word, one must travel to the deepest, darkest corners of their soul, in search of the ideal conflict that is located at the foundation of every great story.

Ron Rash’s latest collection of short stories echos a theme that runs through all of his works: an awareness that Appalachia is in transition, that it is becoming something else. Of course, this is a quality that is shared by all things — what the poets call “mutability” — but in this instance, the author is mindful of what our world is becoming in contrast to what it once was. Like the drowned girl in his short story by the same title, Appalachia may be undergoing a “sea change” and will emerge as “something rich and strange.” The substance may be alien, repugnant and/or fascinating.

Just when we all thought that Ron Rash had taken his Southern Appalachian noir novels to the limit with Serena, he comes back with not only a topper, but creates a new fiction genre in the process. Rash’s new novel, The Cove, like his previous fiction, is set in the mountains of Western North Carolina. In this case, he’s taking his readers over the mountain from Haywood County to Madison County in and around the town of Mars Hill. While this story is a “mountain mystery” and a page-turner in the vein of his latest novel and his recent short stories, it is written in a softer tone, a slower pace. In fact, it’s a love story that is all about timing and the intricate details from which a good yarn is spun.

In a book where the saying  “timing is everything,” proves to be providential,  Rash has written a lovely, sensitive tale. Who would have thought that on the tails of Serena, the Duke of Dark Tales would have, could have gone in this direction? In The Cove his “new” tone of language and the storyline are consistent throughout, including the symbolically imaginative Hawthorne-like naming of his characters: Laurel Shelton (a reversal of Shelton Laurel), Ledbetter, Weatherbee, Bettingfield, Lingefelt, Lusk. And first names: Doak, Slidell, Tillman, Boyce, Jubel. This is an Appalachian chorus line of characters who add their own patinas to this portrait/landscape painting of a World War I version of Romeo & Juliet.

A young woman (Laurel) isolated in a remote cove that is “nothing but shadow land” on the outskirts of Mars Hill who is considered by local townsfolk to be a witch — due largely to the cove’s history as being “cursed” and because of a peculiar birthmark on her skin — comes across a drifter camped out on the family land. With a haunting flute melody, like the birdsong of a Carolina parakeet, wafting through the woods from up along a rock outcropping above the family farm, she goes to search out the music’s source. (Rash later describes the stranger’s flute music: “It wasn’t so much a soaring sound but something on the song’s surface, like a water strider skimming over a creek pool.”)

While Rash drags out the meeting of the two main characters with a tantalizingly deft touch, when the two finally do meet it is love at first sight — at least for Laurel, whose prospects for marriage and a helpmate to keep up the old mountain farm are near to nonexistent. The drifter turns out to be an escapee from a World War I internment camp for German prisoners in Hot Springs, which is something that Laurel and her brother don’t find out until the end of the book when Rash shifts gears — after a long courtship between Laurel and the flute-playing stranger —and the book becomes “a mountain western” complete with a local saloon, posses and search parties, lawmen and lunkheads, and of course the corn liquor.

In the telling of The Cove’s story, Rash’s language is purer, more poetic. His “touch” is softer, more finely honed. Using local language and a lusciously restrained libido, Rash’s telling is reminiscently Shakespearean. “He’s already tallied my gone hand against me,” Laurel’s brother Hank says, explaining to himself his future father-in-law’s attitude concerning his upcoming marriage. “I’d as lief not have him beading its barrel on me,” says Hank later in the book, referring to the stranger who has been brought from the woods into their cabin after nearly being stung to death by yellow jackets with “the welts on his neck and chest arguing at least as much poison as a copperhead bite.” “I need to get the daubing off you. They’ve drawn what poison they will. Besides, like Hank said, you don’t want to be mistook for a bobcat,” Laurel says to the stranger when he finally comes to consciousness and finds himself inside the Shelton cabin.

When it is revealed that the stranger is mute, Laurel remarks: “Not being able to talk … I’d think it could make you feel a lavish of aloneness.” In this literary-littered telling of a familiar tale, there’s even a lovely nod to our local-boy-made-good Thomas Wolfe when Rash slips Wolfe’s father into the storyline. One of the book’s main characters, Chauncey Feith, wanders into Wolfe’s tombstone and monument business building and carries on a conversation where reality and fiction overlap like parallel universes.

… as he walked toward Grant’s Pharmacy, Chauncey noticed the two-story brick building with W.O. Wolfe Tombstones and Monuments painted on the storefront … Someone coughed inside the shop and a few moments later an old man, tall and gaunt, stooped through the open doorway, his hands and leather apron smudged with white dust. “W.O. Wolfe at your service, sir,” the stonecutter said, and made a slight bow. “How may I assist you?” “Do you make monuments of real people?” “I do,” the older man replied, “although, as you can see, more often creatures of the celestial realm.” “And why is that?” Chauncey asked. “Perhaps they wish an image of what they aspire to be instead of what they are,” the stonecutter replied. “The better angels of our nature, corporal as well as spiritual. I can assure you, young squire, from my own humbling experience, that as we grow infirm and life’s pleasures pale we long to free ourselves from these sad declining vessels. But enough of such dispiriting parlance. An old man’s morbid reckonings are not usually the concerns of youth, nor should they be.” The stonecutter paused, licked the tip of his thumb and rubbed it on his apron, allowed a wan smile. 

In the book’s suspenseful and nail-biting conclusion, the timing in actions and events in the last 20 pages give new meaning to the word “irony” with the Romeo and Juliet-like Shakespearean ending stretching minutes into what seem like hours and with mere seconds making all the difference in the world. Ron Rash, in this book and with this ending, has become a master clock-maker. With impeccable timing, meticulous craftsmanship, and flawless design, he has given us yet another mountain classic. One which, to the squeamish, will be much more palatable, perhaps, than previous books. One can only imagine what Ron Rash will come up with next as part of the traveling magic show that he conjures with each new book.  

Thomas Crowe is the author of Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, an award-winning non-fiction memoir published by the Univ. of Georgia Press. He can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Ron Rash’s novel, Serena, was birthed in an image: his mind’s eye pictured a woman on horseback. From the woman’s posture on that horse, her very way of being, Rash said he knew this would be a novel about a very singular human being indeed.

“I knew she was very strong,” said the writer, who teaches at Western Carolina University and lives near Sylva. “And that someone was looking at her with fear and love.”

This image of Serena, which Rash developed into the bestselling 2008-released novel, has now spurred a major motion picture. The film version of Serena is set for release in 2014.

Serena, the novel, is set in Haywood County.

Actor Bradley Cooper and actress Jennifer Lawrence, who recently played leading roles in the to-be-released David O. Russell movie, “The Silver Linings Playbook,” will team together again in the movie “Serena.” Lawrence was in North Carolina last year for filming of “The Hunger Games,” to be released next month.  

The location of filming for “Serena” has not been announced.

Rash’s Depression-era set novel relates the story of timber baron George Pemberton, who is married to Serena. The couple moves to Western North Carolina to create a business empire. When Serena discovers she cannot bear children, her anger becomes directed toward her husband’s illegitimate son. Cooper and Lawrence will portray George and Serena Pemberton.

Academy Award winner Susanne Bier will direct the movie for 2929 Productions. Bier recently finished work on an Italian drama with Pierce Brosnan titled “All You Need Is Love.” Her other films are “Things We Lost in the Fire” and “In a Better World.”

Rash said he will not be involved in the movie’s production, but that he’s “very pleased” that the novel will be produced in film form. Rash hasn’t seen the screenplay. He didn’t, however, seem particularly worried or concerned about how his novel might be tailored to fit the big screen. The movie and novel are two separate retellings, entirely different works of art, he indicated.

“It’s out of my hands,” Rash said.

These days, the novelist’s attention is much more focused on the upcoming release of his 10th work of fiction and his fifth novel, The Cove. It will be released April 10. The Cove is set in Western North Carolina during World War I.

Rash’s fiction include the short story collection “Burning Bright,” which garnered him the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, the world’s richest prize for the short story literary form.

“He is Appalachia’s most accessible writer who not only treats our history and culture with integrity, but has gained an amazing audience,” said Gary Carden of Sylva, a storyteller and writer with deep family roots to WNC and a frequent book reviewer for The Smoky Mountain News. “(Rash) is, in every sense of the word, an advocate for the spirit of Appalachia.”

How the sausage is made

Writing is hard for everyone, even an experienced writer who so adeptly brings stories to life as Rash. It generally takes him about three years to put a single novel together — “that’s typical,” he said.

Rash locks himself in a room, at home on Locust Creek Road in Sylva or at his office at WCU, and works. And really works, for up to six hours at a time: no music, no noise and no interruptions.

“I must be by myself,” Rash said in explanation. “I need solitude. You have to get really deep into it and enter that world as a writer.”

The image is always the beginning for this writer, as it was in Serena, he said. But there are hours and days and weeks and months of historical research, too. Readers of Serena are usually struck by the painstakingly accurate historical detail, portrayals that ring true to those familiar with these mountains. And the fact is, Rash tries to be representative of what he’s portraying.

“On Serena I did a huge amount of research,” said Rash, a descendant of Southern Appalachian families who was raised in Boiling Springs.

He studied and read about the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and about the conflicts that arose between those conservation efforts and the timber interests, through books, newspapers and whatever he could get his hands on.

Rash doesn’t simply regurgitate research and fob it off as fiction: always there are those guiding images, those flashes of meaning and insight that characterize this novelist’s work.

The research confirmed the power wielded historically by these timber barons. The image, however, for Rash was discovered when, on a trip to Lake Logan in Haywood County, he observed a table made from a single piece of yellow poplar, a table forged from a large tree. The table struck the novelist as being a trophy. A trophy, that is, for the timber barons.

From such images Rash wove his novel, Serena.  

The Cove, Rash’s forthcoming novel, hasn’t been birthed easily. This experienced writer hit writing roadblocks he’d not experienced before.

“This last novel has been so difficult,” Rash said. “It seemed more difficult than the ones before. I just seemed to take a lot of wrong turns. After two years, I was ready to give up on it, but I didn’t because I’d put so much time into it by then.”

Ultimately, Rash worked out the problems. He described himself as satisfied and happy with The Cove.

Despite ever-increasing recognition as an accomplished and important fiction writer, Rash said he plans on staying and teaching at WCU.

“I love teaching,” he said. “And I enjoy my students. I think their enthusiasm is good for me — it helps keep me alive to the wonder of writing.”

Ron Rash will visit City Lights Bookstore to read from his first poetry book in 10 years, Waking, at 1 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28.

Rooted in places such as Watauga County, Goshen Creek and Dismal Mountain, the poems in Rash’s fourth collection, Waking, electrify dry counties and tobacco fields until they sparkle with the rituals and traditions of Southerners in the stir of their lives.

Rash leads his readers on a Southern odyssey, full of a terse wit and a sense of the narrative so authentic it will dazzle you. As we wake inside these poems, we see rivers wild with trout, lightning storms, and homemade churches, nailed and leaning against the side of a Tennessee mountain.

A two-time PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist, Rash has been compared to writers like John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy. With his eye for the perfect detail and an ear for regional idiom, Rash furthers his claim as the new torchbearer for literature in the American South.

For information call City Lights at 828.586.9499.

When I was nine years old, I once caught a 12-inch brown trout at the point where two small Jackson County streams, Cope Creek and Scotts Creek, converge. I ran all the way home with the fish in a large, leaky can and dumped it in waist-high concrete trough on our back porch that my grandfather had built. It was fed by a spring a quarter of a mile away. Our milk and butter sat in jars and crocks in this cold, rushing water, and for a while, my trout lived there, lurking behind jars of buttermilk and cream. When I would plunge my hand into that cold water and touch the back of “my fish,” it would surge and race back and forth in the trough, stirring up the sediment on the bottom. I fed it cornbread and night crawlers and it grew a bit. Ah, but my fish died one night when it attempted to catch a firefly. I found it the next morning, stiff as a cold pork chop with the firefly still glimmering in its mouth. There might be a moral there, somewhere.

When I opened Ron Rash’s Waking, I was glad to find my trout suddenly restored to me:

Caught by my uncle

In the Watauga River,

brought back in a bucket

because some believed

its gills were like filters

that pureness poured into

springhouse’s trough pool,

and soon it was thriving

on sweet corn and biscuits,

guarding that spring-gush,

brushing my fingers

as I swirled the water

up in my palm cup

tasted its quickness

swimming inside me.

No doubt, untold numbers of mountain boys brought a trout home, and when they read this poem, I think that something in their hearts will hum like a resonating chord on a guitar.

To me, this resonance is the essence of Rash’s art: the ability to create an image so vivid, it unleashes the sleeping memories in the readers’ heart. For example, Nolan White, the Watauga clock-maker, who showed Rash how he “set each gear in place” and when the clock begins to run, the poet hears “that one pulse among many.”

However, some of the images are riveting and painful to contemplate: the “cold, beckoning eyes” in the face of a drowned girl trapped beneath a ledge in a river’s surging waters (like the girl in Rash’s novel Saints by the River); the grave of 13-year-old David Shelton (who may be found in Rash’s novel, The World Made Straight), who asked his executioners “a single mercy – to not be shot like his father, in the face.”

An especially memorable one is the luckless drunk, Charlie Starnes, whose alcohol-soaked clothing caught fire and suddenly, poor Charlie “wore a suit/ of flames” as he raced “through barb wire into/ a cornfield where they found him/ face down like a felled scarecrow.”

There are poems about pocket knives, an old woman’s treasured mirror, a pair of glasses removed from a grandmother’s dead face; an ancient shade tree, junk cars – family quilts, car tags on a barn wall, raspberries – all familiar details in the lives of the people whose descendants live in places called Dismal, Blowing Rock, Boone, Shelton Laurel, Spillcorn Cove and Goshen Creek. When defined by Rash, these objects come to resemble the unearthed shards or fragments of a vanquished culture. Wrapped in the language of a true poet, these “fragments” acquire a numinous or sacred quality.

There is also a marvelous cast of memorable characters. I especially liked the old veterinarian who specializes in womb-locked calves. He remembers a cold, winter night somewhere in Madison County “back in the 50’s,” when he confronted a panther “yellow eyes as bright as truck beams/black-tipped tail swishing before/ leaping away through the trees/ back into extinction.”

Then there is a marvelous monologue by an alcoholic “felled angel” who now sells serpents to snake-handling churches, noting that his “God now is a bottle of Jack Daniels.” However, the most poignant poem in this collection might be “Woman Among Lightning: Catawba County Fair, 1962.” This poem captures the anguish of a poor mountain woman who has fled a life “that leaks away like blood on land that is always wanting more.” She has come down to the fair grounds to ride the Ferris Wheel, which “dredges buckets of darkness out of sky.” While lightning flashes around her, she hangs suspended for a moment “above field and fence,” as far as “a fistful of hard-earned quarters can take her” from the bleakness of her life.

Finally, there is a recurring theme in Waking that might have special significance to readers who find a progression of ideas in Rash’s work. This collection is rooted in Rash’s growing interest in “racial memory,” or to be more specific, the Celtic tradition. Some of the poems in this collection stress Rash’s growing awareness of the bedrock of Appalachian culture.  Instead of turning to classical Greek or English mythologies, Rash has a preference for an ancient tradition that reflects his own experience – the ancient Celtic work, The Mabinogion. I believe that it is here, amid tales of magic and witchery – a world filled with the merging of incompatible things, where the dead return (“The Crossing”) and Time sometimes stand still – that Rash feels “at home.”

In the poem, “Resonance,” Rash describes “a trout alive in a burning tree,” an image that readily suggest the world of The Mabinogion, which, like Rash’s own work, teems with water in all of its aspects (floods, baptism, drowned towns, rebirth, etc.). It might be especially noteworthy that the poem, “Rhiannon” describes the plight of a character in The Mabinogion, who is falsely accused of murdering and consuming her own child. Her child has been stolen while Rhiannon sleeps (her enemies smear the sleeping woman’s face and hands with blood). In time, her child is returned to her and he becomes a famous Welsh hero, Peryderi.

If I have read this aspect of Waking correctly, I am delighted and frankly, I can’t wait to see what the world of The Mabinogion – a world filled with alternate universes, curses, a host of mythical beings, including the grandfather of Merlin, the magician in Arthurian legend – just how will this touch of the fey and strange affect Rash’s future work. I also feel that Rash’s use of the word “palimpsest,” which describes ancient manuscripts in which the original message has been erased but can still be discerned. A new message can be written on such a document, but the original message – like the faded traces of a milk trail through a pasture, remains. What is that dim message? Is it “a name carried far” from Wales to Shenandoah - a link to Appalachia’s “racial memory?”

Waking by Ron Rash. Hub City Press, 2011. 76 pages.

Chemistry and Other Stories by Ron Rash. Picador, 2007. 230 pages

This remarkable collection of short stories has already been named one of the 15 “notable books” of 2007 by the Story Prize Committee — an award that is presented annually in recognition of the nation’s best. The top award, $20,000, is the largest literary prize in America. In announcing their selection, the contest officials stated “The Appalachian Mountains are the setting of this beautifully crafted collection that begins and ends with a fish and spans several generations in an isolated region with characters as craggy as the landscape.”

There is a passage in the heart of Ron Rash’s novel, The World Made Straight, in which Leonard Shuler remembers a visit to Shelton Laurel with his grandfather shortly before Shuler leaves to attend the University of North Carolina.

By Sarah Kucharski • Staff Writer

History books and literature long have recounted and regaled the Civil War, examined its long-lasting effects in determining who “we” are as a great and unified South, and how “we” are not yet ready to lay down arms between victor and vanquished.