Display Interview

Conducted by Dan Wickett on 3/29/2005
The following is an interview with Ron Rash, author of two short story collections, three poetry collections, a children’s book and two novels.  Ron is the current John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University.  His story “Speckled Trout,” which was published in Kenyon Review last year, won an O. Henry Award.


Dan:

Hello Ron.  Thanks for taking some time out of your schedule to do this interview.

Ron:

Happy to do it, and to be a part of your network.

Dan:

Before we get into the questions about your writing, I understand you were quite the long distance runner in your younger years.  I’ve been told you might even have held a pretty substantial record in the 800.

Ron:

I don’t know about substantial.  I did run the 800 in high school and college and did pretty well. My best time was a 1:53. Why I think the question is relevant though is that I think running was great preparation for being a writer: getting up early each morning, working out alone.  You have to have self-discipline to be a good runner and you need to have that same self-discipline towards writing and reading.

Dan:

What sort of studying did you do to prepare yourself to be a writer?  How important do you think being well-read, both in terms of classics and contemporary writing, is to being a good writer?

Ron:

I have a BA and an MA in English.  I’m one of the few writers of my generation without an MFA.  I believe, for me at least, the straight MA was more valuable.  That deep immersion into great literature was what I needed in my early twenties.  I feel especially fortunate to get an MA before the theorists took over - to have been able to read the actual literature and not read “theory.”

I believe deep, intense reading is crucial to being a good writer.  Every good writer I know is a voracious reader, both in the classics and in contemporary fiction.  I think you need to know where fiction has been and where it is going. I worry that MFA programs don’t always have enough emphasis on reading, particularly works that are not recent.

Dan:

You are currently the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at WCU.  What duties does that hold for you?

Ron:

I teach Appalachian Literature and Creative Writing.  Each month I co-sponsor a program that features some aspect of Appalachian Culture. The program is not only for faculty and students but also for the surrounding community.

Dan:

You are frequently described as an Appalachian writer.  What does that mean to you when you read it or hear it?

Ron:

I am very proud of my Appalachian heritage, which goes back over 250 years on both sides of my family.  I’m always wary, though, of adjectives before the word writer, as they can be seen as limiting, as in “just” an Appalachian writer.  All writing that matters must transcend its place of origin.  I love Eudora Welty’s quote, “One place understood helps us understand all other places better.”  My writing is intensely Appalachian, in landscape, the way people speak.  Ultimately, however, the writing must connect to readers outside the region as well as in.

Dan:

Something that is very apparent from reading your work, in all forms, is how important it is to you to remember prior generations.  Is that something you believe to be a personal belief for you, or does it come more from a regional belief?

Ron:

Probably both.  Appalachian people have a tendency to honor their ancestors, but I’m also specifically grateful for what my parents and grandparents gave me, particularly their sacrifices.

Dan:

Your first collection of poems, Eureka Mill, has a poem, Invocation, where you are basically asking your grandfather, a man who couldn’t read or write, to help you put the words on the paper.  How was your grandfather instrumental in your becoming a writer?

Ron:

Well, I’ve written an essay about this that is posted on my agent’s website.  When I was five years old, I gave my grandfather a copy of The Cat in the Hat.  He opened it up and made up a story for me.  Around a week later, I gave it to him again, and he made up
another story.  Words became magical to me at that moment - they had an ability to transmogrify on the page.  Later, knowing he couldn’t read or write made writing even more important. I developed a feeling of obligation to tell his story as well as my own as he couldn’t write it himself.

Dan:

Your poetry is often written in a very tight, seven syllable per line, format.  Is there a specific reason you’ve chosen to go this route so often?

Ron:

My Welsh ancestry.  Traditional Welsh poetry is syllabic and often uses seven syllable lines.  My poetry uses a lot of devices of traditional Welsh poetry, particularly assonance and consonance within the line. A big influence on my work is Hopkins. 

I’m primarily a narrative poet, leaving me the potential danger of having my poems be merely chopped up prose.  The short lines have been helpful in making my poems more intense; the short line makes me work harder to find the right words to avoid being prosy, particularly because I try to make something interesting in each line happen as far as sound..

Dan:

When you sit down to begin something new, do you know right away that what you are going to write is a poem, or story, or novel?  How often do you start something as a poem and shift it to a story, or vice versa?

Ron:

I don’t always know.  Very often I shift.  One Foot in Eden started off as a poem, then moved to a short story and eventually became a novel.  Saints in the River went through the same progression.  Sometimes I have a short story turn into a poem.  I usually start with images, and where the images will lead me I often don’t know.

Dan:

I know your last published book was the novel Saints in the River, and you’re currently working on another novel.  Are you still writing stories and poems on a regular basis?  Do you only write them in between writing novels, or if you get a great story or poem idea, can you take a break from your novel and work on that?

Ron:

I’ve been primarily writing novels for the past five years, and not many poems or stories.  Occasionally I do though.  I find that novels are so consuming that it’s hard to write about anything else.  Novels are always with you and they block out anything else.  Sometimes, between drafts, I might be able to write a few poems.
	
I find writing poems and fiction to be similar to listening to AM or FM.  They are nothing like each other to me – it’s like listening to a completely different frequency.

Dan:

Your first story collection, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth, sets the stories in town, away from the mountains that so much of your work is set.  Was this a conscious effort on your behalf to separate yourself from the mountains?  Or perhaps a need to get these stories out of the way so you could get back to the mountains?

Ron:

The latter.  I spent a lot of time up with my grandmother in the higher mountains, but I grew up in the foothills.  I had to write first about the foothills so that I could move my writing into the world that was ultimately my subject matter. 

Dan:

Your first novel, One Foot in Eden, won the Novello Festival Press’s Novello Literary Award, which is how it came to be published.  As accomplished as a novel as this is, I find it hard to believe it took winning an award to get it published.  Had you sent it out to many publishers before this?

Ron:

Yes.  It was out there a while and a number of rejections were because I used multiple narratives.  Ironically, many reviewers and readers have told me that’s exactly what they like about it.  One nationally known publisher told me they’d take the novel with a single narrator, but I just couldn’t make that change;  that would destroy what I was trying to do with the book.  Another irony, several of the publishing houses that turned down the hardcover were in on the bidding for the paperback.

Dan:

Water.  It is everywhere in your work, seemingly a symbol of both life and death.  Where did this fascination with water come from?

Ron:

Well, I’m a Southern Baptist so I believe in total immersion.  Seriously though, I think growing up in an agrarian culture, you’re aware of the  way a rain in August can save a crop or how a heavy storm in the spring can destroy one.
 
Water is such a potent symbol:  destruction/resurrection - life and death - and it plays a large part in my novels.  In Welsh folklore, water is a conduit between the living and the dead - to the other world. This Celtic belief plays a big role in Saints in the River.

Dan:

You have won your fair share of awards – the Academy of American Poets Prize in 1986, General Electric Foundation Younger Writers Award back in 1987, an NEA Poetry Fellowship in 1994, the Sherwood Anderson Prize in 1996, the Appalachian Book of the Year (One Foot in Eden) and last year, the story you had published in the Kenyon Review was named an O’Henry Award winner.  How important are such prizes to a writer as he/she is developing his/her career?

Ron:

They’re always welcome.  Pats on the back are good.  It’s nice to know that somebody’s out there reading the work and appreciating it.  However, you still have to get up the next morning and battle the blank page to try and get the words right.

Dan:

What led to your writing the children’s book, The Shark Tooth?  How much different was the process than in writing any of your other work?

Ron:

I have a neighbor who kept after me - she wanted to publish a children’s book.  She had an illustrator and continued to ask me to write it.  I finally relented, telling her I’d give it one day and whatever I came up with I’d give her.  I took a Saturday, 8 hours, and what got published is what I came up with.  It was a very different experience than my other writing.

Dan:

What was like having a Ron Rash Day at Emory & Henry College in 2004?  Having a day dedicated to your writing and an entire issue of their literary journal, The Iron Mountain Review, dedicated to you?

Ron:

A real honor.  Because so many of my friends were there to share the day.  It meant a lot to me.
	
It was also important as many previous winners were some of my favorite writers:  Lee Smith, Robert Morgan and James Still.

Dan:

Have you seen Ted Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets?  What do you think about his using your work, with your seven syllable lines, as a wonderful example of form, not to mention the near raving he did about your work?

Ron:

I was honored.  Kooser’s a writer I greatly admire and have for over a decade.  He’s a wonderful choice for Poet Laureate.  He writes with such clarity and precision, both that book, and in his poetry.  It’s nice to be reminded that significant and excellent poetry
can be accessible. 

Dan:

There seems to be a pretty stock Ron Rash photo.  It’s mostly a head shot, but drops down enough to allow the viewer to see a flannel shirt.  You aren’t exactly clean shaven and almost appear to be sitting on a porch bench or rocker.  It this the real Ron Rash, or is there a bit of making the writer fit his stories involved in this?

Ron:

I showed this question to my daughter and she wanted me to tell you it’s the real Ron Rash.

Dan:

I see that you’ve also done some reviewing, at least a couple of times for the South Carolina Review if nowhere else.  Is this something you enjoy doing?

Ron:

Usually I have to be coerced into doing reviews, but I do think it’s important to occasionally do reviews because it gives me a chance to praise a worthwhile book.

Dan:

Speaking of reviewing, just how good is Tommy Hays new novel?

Ron:

I think it’s exceptional.  What makes it exceptional is that Tommy takes the most depressing of topics - a man losing his wife to Alzheimer’s - and makes it a life affirming book.  That is quite an accomplishment.

Dan:

As one who began his publishing career with many poems and short stories, I’m sure literary journals were very important to your getting your work out there for people to read.  What journals are your favorites and why?

Ron:

The journals were very important in getting me a readership, not just the attention of readers and other writers.  Shenandoah is really good, as are Kenyon Review and Southern Review, and Chattahoochie Review, and Poetry.    The reason I like the journals is that there is always have something excellent in them, which means they have exceptional editors.   I’m rarely disappointed by what’s in these journals.  I don’t often ask myself, as I often do when I read The American Poetry Review or The New Yorker, why on earth would someone publish this crap. 

Dan:

Lastly Ron, if you were a character in “Fahrenheit 451,” what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Ron:

I’d say Hamlet by Shakespeare.  I have no doubt he’s our language’s greatest writer.  If I were choosing a work by a living American, it would have to be Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

Dan:

I thank you again sir for taking so much time away from you daily schedule.  I appreciate it greatly and cannot wait for that novel coming in 2006.

Ron:

Thank you Dan, I appreciate your taking an interest in my work.