Ron Rash

• Born: September 25, 1953
• Place of Birth: Chester, South Carolina

Southern American writer Ron Rash writes poetry, novels, and short stories, exploring similar themes in his poetry and his fiction. His writing often begins with an image, and as he develops the image, it leads him to the appropriate form, whether poetry or fiction, or both. Sometimes, one of his poems leads to a short story, or a short story leads to a novel. The story “Speckled Trout” was the genesis of The World Made Straight (2006), and “Pemberton’s Bride” was part of Serena (2008).

Achievements

Ron Rash has accumulated honors for his work in poetry and fiction. Several awards have acknowledged his ability to evoke the Mountain South of North Carolina and South Carolina. Rash was recognized with the General Electric Younger Writers Award in 1987. In 1996, he received the Sherwood Anderson Award for fiction. His story “Speckled Trout” was a PEN/O. Henry Award winner in 2005. “Into the Gorge” was a PEN/O. Henry Award winner in 2010. His collection Chemistry, and Other Stories was one of five fiction finalists in the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Awards for 2008, and the following year, his volume Serena was included as a finalist for the same award. It was also named one of the Notable Books of 2007 by the Story Prize Committee and was given the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award by the Western North Carolina Historical Association in 2008. Short stories by Rash have appeared in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best and The Best American Short Stories. A film adaptation of Serena, starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, was released in 2014, and a film based on The World Made Straight hit theaters in 2015. His short story "The Baptism" appeared in the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

In 2005, Rash received the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers for writing of the Appalachian South. He was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Gardner-Webb University, his alma mater, in 2009.

Biography

Rash was born in Chester, South Carolina, where his parents worked in the textile mills. Both later completed college and became educators. Rash was mostly raised in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, where his family moved when his father became an art professor at Gardner-Webb College (now University). Both his father’s and mother’s families had lived in western North Carolina for more than two centuries.

Growing up, Rash spent summers on his grandmother’s farm near Boone, North Carolina. He credits his time living there and roaming in the woods as developing his powers of observation for the natural details he includes in his writing. An early influence on his storytelling was his grandfather, who, although he could not read or write, would make up intriguing stories based on the pictures in the books his grandson asked him to read. Rash’s awareness of language was heightened by his childhood difficulty in pronouncing certain sounds and the subsequent speech therapy to correct the problem. Those sessions made him a careful listener, a useful skill for a writer.

Rash earned a BA in English from Gardner-Webb College and an MA in English from Clemson University. He briefly taught English in high school and then taught for several years at TriCounty Technical College in Pendleton, South Carolina. He developed a disciplined approach to writing despite the demands of teaching and began to publish his poetry and fiction in literary magazines. Part of his self-discipline Rash credits to his having to develop a daily practice schedule as a runner on high school and college track teams.

The publication of his novel One Foot in Eden in 2002 brought his work to the attention of a wider audience. He was appointed as Parris Distinguished Professor of Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, in 2003. He continued to publish in a variety of formats, including the book of poetry Waking (2011) and short-story collections, like Nothing Gold Can Stay (2013), Something Rich and Strange (2014), and In the Valley (2020). He also wrote several novels, including The Cove (2012), Above the Waterfall (2015), The Risen (2016), and The Caretaker (2023). He is married and has two children.

Analysis

Ron Rash vividly portrays the Appalachian South. It is a region that has been in transition over the past 150 years from the rural past to the early industries of lumbering and textiles and finally to the modern world of interstates, tourism, and chain stores. Although Rash’s characters are set in a specific culture and landscape, they grapple with universal human concerns. Some characters try to hold to what matters from the past while confronting change. Others lose their connections to their family and the land.

As John Lang notes in Appalachia and Beyond (2006), “Whether in fiction or poetry, Rash’s work is marked by striking imagery, lively storytelling, apt figurative language, and vividly realized characters.” Rash’s short stories are realistic in style and subject matter, but he occasionally includes supernatural beliefs from folk culture, as in “The Corpse Bird.” His style includes precise details from the natural world.

Particular threads that run through his stories include themes of displacement and of the disappearance of culture. The setting of the stories is a place where land has been taken for a national park and where dams built for electrical power have flooded home sites. Farming has become less profitable, and inhabitants have turned to factory work or have migrated away. Thus, the younger generation has begun to lose connections with family and cultural traditions.

Rash’s characters are working-class men and women who struggle to get ahead. The stories often discuss the need for money, work issues, and the effects of social class. He favors a first-person or third-person-limited point of view so that the reader is taken into the mind of the characters. Rash’s sharp sense of character avoids stereotyping. He says in an interview published in Appalachia and Beyond, “Part of my responsibility is to be true to lives that were often tragic and complex, to avoid sentimentalizing those lives. We live in a culture that doesn’t value an understanding of the past.”

“Back of Beyond”

“Back of Beyond,” chosen for New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008, embodies the theme of loss of connections found in several of Rash’s stories. In this story from Burning Bright, methamphetamines are the scourge that causes a break between generations, within a family, and from the past. The main character, Parson, is a pawnbroker in a small town. He feels contempt for his methamphetamine-addicted customers who pawn anything to support their habits. At the beginning of the story, a young woman pawns her great-grandmother’s churn and her high school ring, symbolically disposing of both her past and her future to pay for her addiction. With a high school diploma, she could have gone on to college or found a job, but, as an addict, she can concentrate only on her next fix.

Parson has developed a cold shell to focus only on the business aspects of these transactions. He says nothing to his brother when Danny, his brother’s son, brings items from the old family farm to sell to support his methamphetamine habit. However, after the sheriff comes looking for a stolen shotgun that Danny had pawned, Parson decides to act.

When Parson drives up into the mountains to the site of the old home place, he is shocked to find that Danny’s parents have surrendered the house to him, and they live in a trailer on the property. The electricity has been shut off, the trailer is a mess, and the house is mostly empty because Danny has sold everything. Danny, like the young woman at the beginning of the story, had other possibilities. He had done well enough in high school. His parents had been supportive, but once he was involved with methamphetamines, nothing else mattered.

Parson tries to help. He arranges to send Danny and his girlfriend to Atlanta. However, his brother and sister-in-law, despite their fear of what Danny is involved in, are not entirely happy. They rationalize their son’s behavior.

The title “Back of Beyond” is a phrase that refers to a remote or inaccessible place. While it literally describes the old farm, it also represents Danny, who has separated himself from normal life by his addiction. Parson, too, feels isolated from his family and is repulsed by the intrusion of meth into the lives he sees.

“Into the Gorge”

Themes of displacement, the contrast between the present and the past, and a dilemma over money run through this story, a 2010 PEN/O. Henry Award winner and a selection for The Best American Short Stories, 2009. It appears in Chemistry, and Other Stories.

Jesse, the sixty-eight-year-old protagonist of the story, gets into trouble when he goes to harvest some ginseng his father had planted on the old family land in a gorge that belongs at present to the national park. Jesse needs the money to supplement his income from a decreasing tobacco allotment. However, an alert young park ranger finds him and arrests him. Offended by the young ranger’s attitude that Jesse is an old fool and by the ranger’s refusal to listen to his explanation, Jesse reacts impulsively and manages to escape by maneuvering the ranger to fall down an old well he remembers. A manhunt ensues.

As Jesse attempts to elude the pursuers by heading up the gorge, he contrasts his situation with a search for his missing great-aunt many years ago. On a cold night, she, suffering from dementia, had wandered up the gorge toward the original homestead where she had been born. The neighbors turned out to hunt for her but found her dead, evidently from hypothermia. Jesse recalls the respect that the neighbors showed when they brought the body home and how they spoke of his great-aunt’s many skills and good character. Jesse contrasts this with the lack of respect shown to him by the ranger, who is not from the area. At the end of his strength, Jesse waits out the cold night.

Like his aunt, Jesse has lost the world that he has known. The conflict reflects the different views of Jesse and the ranger toward the land. For Jesse, the ginseng patch is still his family’s land, but for the ranger, Jesse’s actions are criminal.

Chemistry, and Other Stories

The thirteen stories in Chemistry, and Other Stories show Rash’s range from the serious to the humorous. While the stories are rooted in the particularities of Appalachian culture and history, the subjects and themes are universal: relationships between parents and children, the theme of displacement from one’s personal and historical past, the perniciousness of drug culture, the tension between outsiders and natives, the persistence of the past, and respect for nature.

The theme of displacement is seen in “Not Waving But Drowning” as a young couple travels across Lake Jocassee, formed by a power company’s damming of a river. Houses, barns, and mailboxes are left and can be seen through the water by the boaters. The young husband worries about his wife’s succession of miscarriages and the strain those have placed on both of them. He feels that, in a sense, he is drowning. The title alludes to Stevie Smith’s poem by the same name, where a drowning person’s waving for help is misinterpreted as a greeting.

A lighter tone is present in “Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes.” Sightings of a monster fish are reported in the Tuckaseegee River. The county’s game warden, who hails from Wisconsin, dismisses the reports as tall tales. Three older men decide to prove him wrong. After much effort, they manage to hook the fish. It is a very old sturgeon, a fish once common in rivers all over the country but seldom seen lately. Out of respect, they release it. The parallels between the ancient sturgeon and the men, old in experience and knowledge, are emphasized by the title of the story, a quote from William Butler Yeats’s poem “Lapis Lazuli.” That poem suggests that one should face death with heroic joy. The men in the story, like the sturgeon, refuse to surrender to old age and death. Precise imagery about the fishing expedition adds realism to the story and also suggests an environmental message about respect for an endangered species.

Several stories center on strong emotions. In “Cold Harbor,” the trauma of war affects a Korean War nurse as well as a soldier whose life she saves. The title refers to a Civil War battle. “The Projectionist’s Wife” is a coming-of-age story. In “Chemistry,” a father seeks solace in a more emotional religion after being hospitalized for depression. The main character of “Dangerous Love” runs away to the carnival with a knife thrower and becomes part of his act, willing to risk her life for an intense relationship.

Burning Bright

This volume continues to feature the history, characters, and landscape of the Mountain South. The title alludes to William Blake’s “The Tyger,” a poem in which the speaker questions why or how God could create a fearsome, destructive beast such as the tiger. The stories in Burning Bright similarly explore violent or destructive tendencies of humans, yet, compassion also exists in the human heart.

In the title story, “Burning Bright,” a woman comes to realize that her second husband, a seemingly kind man who has brought romance back into her life, is probably the arsonist who has been setting fires in the drought-stricken county. However, she decides to keep this knowledge to herself and, instead, prays for rain.

The evils of the Great Depression, the Civil War, and methamphetamine addiction cause people to make desperate choices in, respectively, “Hard Times,” “Lincolnites,” and “The Ascent” (the last a selection for New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2010 and The Best American Short Stories, 2010).

In a story with humorously macabre overtones, “Dead Confederates,” money troubles cause a young man to get involved in a scheme to dig up some graves in search of Confederate relics to sell. His hospitalized mother has no health insurance, and his job on the road crew cannot pay her bills and keep up his truck payments. The initial plan goes awry, but he does find some relics to sell for the much-needed cash. He eases his conscience with the thought that the Confederates whose graves he robbed had nice tombstones and were probably rich, and since they are dead, it is fair that his mother should benefit from what they left behind. This story, like “Lincolnites,” concerns the Civil War history of western North Carolina, the home of many Union supporters, and is an amusing comment on the theme of the persistence and influence of the past.

Bibliography

Antopol, Molly. Review of Chemistry, and Other Stories, by Ron Rash. The Southern Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 2008, p. 202.

Baldwin, Kara. “‘Incredible Eloquence’: How Ron Rash’s Novels Keep the Celtic Literary Tradition Alive.” The South Carolina Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 2006, p. 37–56.

Brown, Joyce Compton. “Ron Rash: The Power of Blood-Memory.” Appalachia and Beyond: Conversations with Writers from the Mountain South, edited by John Lang, U of Tennessee P, 2006.

Crisp, Kelly. "Not Just a Southern Writer: Ron Rash." Publishers Weekly, 24 Aug. 2016, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/71271-not-just-a-southern-writer-ron-rash.html. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.

Gay, Roxane. "The Baptism." Best American Short Stories, The Southern Review, 2018. p. 242.

Maslin, Janet. “Rural Pride and Poverty and a Hen’s Empty Nest.” The New York Times, 8 Mar. 2010, p. C4.

"Ron Rash Books." Ron Rash, www.ronrashwriter.com/books. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Webb, Gina. “Tales of Bleak Hopeful Lives.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 21 Mar. 2010, p. 4E.

Wilhelm, Randall. "Review of Chemistry, and Other Stories, by Ron Rash." Appalachian Heritage, vol. 35, no. 4, 2007, pp. 110–12.