Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 5.09 Literature and Poetry
Presentation #1 Title
Transience and Change in Appalachia: Ron Rash’s "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
In his new collection of short stories, Nothing Gold Can Stay (2013), Ron Rash presents characters confronted with the changes in Appalachia through stories set both in the past and in the present. This new collection shows characters struggling against dire circumstances and for a brief moment believing in the possibility of escape, often to succumb to stronger forces or the mystery of the unexpected. As in his previous and award-winning collection Burning Bright (2010), many of Rash’s new stories reflect the new and the old Appalachia surviving side by side in a changing landscape. The protagonists of his new collection—populated by convicts, meth addicts, unlucky young couples, fugitive slaves, troubled or self-destructive school teachers, and war vets, among others—experience transient moments of happiness often followed by sorrow. This paper discusses Ron Rash’s view of changes in the new Appalachia through his new collection of short stories, aptly named after Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” The vibrant imagery condensed in the eight lines of Frost’s poem breathes life into Ron Rash’s stories through the multiple meanings of the gold metaphor in the Appalachian Eden. The sense of fatalism present in so many of his stories, perhaps the only thing that has not changed in the new Appalachia, hints at the same lyrical conclusion of Frost’s poem: Eden is grief.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Carmen Rueda is Associate Professor of English at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain). She is the author of Voicing the Self: Female Identity and Language in Lee Smith’s Fiction (2009). In 2010, she was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she conducted research on contemporary Appalachian fiction.
Transience and Change in Appalachia: Ron Rash’s "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
Harris Hall 446
In his new collection of short stories, Nothing Gold Can Stay (2013), Ron Rash presents characters confronted with the changes in Appalachia through stories set both in the past and in the present. This new collection shows characters struggling against dire circumstances and for a brief moment believing in the possibility of escape, often to succumb to stronger forces or the mystery of the unexpected. As in his previous and award-winning collection Burning Bright (2010), many of Rash’s new stories reflect the new and the old Appalachia surviving side by side in a changing landscape. The protagonists of his new collection—populated by convicts, meth addicts, unlucky young couples, fugitive slaves, troubled or self-destructive school teachers, and war vets, among others—experience transient moments of happiness often followed by sorrow. This paper discusses Ron Rash’s view of changes in the new Appalachia through his new collection of short stories, aptly named after Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” The vibrant imagery condensed in the eight lines of Frost’s poem breathes life into Ron Rash’s stories through the multiple meanings of the gold metaphor in the Appalachian Eden. The sense of fatalism present in so many of his stories, perhaps the only thing that has not changed in the new Appalachia, hints at the same lyrical conclusion of Frost’s poem: Eden is grief.
