Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Raising the Dead: Trauma and Healing in the Fallen World of Ron Rash
Session Abstract or Summary
Three contributors to the forthcoming collection Summoning the Dead: Critical Essays on Ron Rash (eds. Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon), John Lang, Martha G. Eads, and Jimmy Dean Smith discuss Ron Rash in this charged critical moment. With the publications of Summoning the Dead, The Ron Rash Reader (2014), Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories, and John Lang’s own Understanding Ron Rash, the time is more propitious than ever for re-visiting the ghosts—of people, wildlife, places, and history itself—that haunt Rash’s fiction and poetry. By summoning, and confronting, the dead, Rash suggests, we find a way to fight our way out of our own graves, in which the trauma of memory, both personal and regional, has buried us.
Presentation #1 Title
“Morning’s Fawnlight Yokes Inside Dew Beads, Each Hued Like a Rainbow’s Hatchling”: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Imprism-ment in Ron Rash
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
With Above the Waterfall, Ron Rash clarifies how significantly the incarnational art of Gerard Manley Hopkins influences his fiction and poetry. For the novel’s Becky Shytle, a park ranger and poet, Hopkins is both inspiration and scripture. Traumatized by a school shooting years before, imprisoned by that dark memory, Becky yearns to be “inside the earth’s pulsing heart,” to “slow … [her] bloodbeat to that rhythm.” Under the influence of such Hopkinsisms as inscape and invision, Becky spontaneously coins the term imprismed to describe the process of willful immersion in the world’s sacred body, an integration through which attentiveness to the evanescent leads to an epiphany of deeper permanence (cf. Hopkins’s unleaving, “Spring and Fall”). Besides elevating the mundane moment when Becky wakes in a campground, the striking neologism imprism encapsulates Rash’s Hopkins-inspired aesthetic, both in this novel and throughout his oeuvre. This paper briefly surveys imprism-ment in Rash’s poems, then tends to evanescence in The World Made Straight and The Cove, before focusing at length on the last transcendent passage of the drowning scene (“she is now inside the prism”) that begins Saints at the River and its re-vision for the essential short story “Something Rich and Strange.” Throughout his fiction and poetry, Martha Eads and John Lang will argue in this session, Rash depicts a traumatized “fallen world.” But “Hopkins has provided a model for reconciling the fact of a fallen world with the immensity of God’s love” (Sarah Gordon).
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Jimmy Dean Smith is Professor of English at Union College in Kentucky, where he also directed the Honors Program. The author of articles on George Orwell, T.S. Eliot, John Fox, Jr., and other literary figures, he has upcoming articles about Flannery O’Connor, Ron Rash, the environmentalism of Justified, and reality television in Appalachia.
Presentation #2 Title
Not Just Whistling “Dixie”: The Civil War’s Legacy in Ron Rash’s World Made Straight
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
Ron Rash’s The World Made Straight challenges readers to reflect on how cultural and personal histories control and challenge us. A tutorial on Appalachia’s complex Civil War legacy, the novel focuses its instruction for both its protagonist, seventeen-year-old Travis Shelton, and its readers on the Shelton Laurel Massacre, an event about which most Americans, even in Madison County, NC, where the novel is set, are misinformed if not unaware. Though a drunkard and drug dealer, the former schoolteacher Leonard Shuler knows both the history of the atrocity and Simone Weil’s radical pacifism. He is thus well suited to be Travis’s tutor and to resume the vocation, delving into his own family’s history of complicity in the massacre to develop Rash’s themes of guilt and reconciliation. Survivors of both personal and historical trauma, Travis and Leonard, and their ancestors, have lived in the passive voice, embodying an existentially bleak pattern scholars of trauma studies have identified among survivors on the “losing” side of history. In the novel, they undergo a restorative process remarkably similar to the Transforming Historical Harms (THH) framework Hooker and Czajkowski set forth: face history, make connections, heal wounds, and take action to “build a more truthful, just and connected society.” Through love—of one another and of Appalachia’s outcasts—Leonard and Travis confront the traumagenic roots of their, and their region’s, crippling despair, and Travis develops a hopeful vision for his life, a vision he had been denied for his first seventeen years.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Martha Greene Eads, Professor of English at Eastern Mennonite University, grew up in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains and studied literature and theology at Wake Forest University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Durham (UK). Her research and teaching interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century drama, English modernism, and contemporary Southern fiction, and her articles on those topics have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Christianity and Literature, The Cresset, Modern Drama, The Southern Quarterly, and Theology.
Presentation #3 Title
"I Am Haunted Still": The Shelton Laurel Massacre in Rash's Fiction and Poetry
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
The Shelton Laurel Massacre haunted Rash for more than a quarter century before he published The World Made Straight (2006). Through twelve italicized ledger entries purportedly written by Dr. Joshua Candler in that novel and poems dating back to the seventies, Rash invited the ghosts of Shelton Laurel into his writing. For Rash that massacre becomes emblematic of what Melville called "the mystery of iniquity" and emblematic of human beings' rejection of the divine command to love one's neighbor. As Rash declares, "One of the most troubling aspects of history is how some of the worst atrocities have occurred among people who have shared a particular place.”
The burden of the Shelton Laurel massacre resonates not only in The World Made Straight but also in several other works: Saints at the River, "Dead Confederates," The Cove, and several poems about the massacre. And both a poem and a recent short story titled “The Dowry” depict the intense antipathy and intransigence present in Madison County in the post-Civil War years. For Rash, the massacre typifies the profound flaw in human nature that leaves many of his characters convinced that "we live in a fallen world" desperately in need of redemption. In The World Made Straight, such redemption occurs through confronting the ghosts of history. The massacre attests both to human cruelty and to the difficult necessity of forgiving the perpetrators of such violence, a moral and religious challenge that remains central to Rash's artistic vision.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
John Lang is Professor of English Emeritus at Emory & Henry College, where he edited The Iron Mountain Review from 1990 through 2012. He is the author of Understanding Fred Chappell (2000), Six Poets from the Mountain South (2010), and Understanding Ron Rash (2014).
Presentation #4 Title
Convener
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
Three contributors to the forthcoming collection Summoning the Dead: Critical Essays on Ron Rash (eds. Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon), John Lang, Martha G. Eads, and Jimmy Dean Smith discuss Ron Rash in this charged critical moment. With the publications of Summoning the Dead, The Ron Rash Reader (2014), Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories, and John Lang’s own Understanding Ron Rash, the time is more propitious than ever for re-visiting the ghosts—of people, wildlife, places, and history itself—that haunt Rash’s fiction and poetry. By summoning, and confronting, the dead, Rash suggests, we find a way to fight our way out of our own graves, in which the trauma of memory, both personal and regional, has buried us. Erin Presley will moderate this session.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Erin Presley is Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Appalachian Studies.
“Morning’s Fawnlight Yokes Inside Dew Beads, Each Hued Like a Rainbow’s Hatchling”: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Imprism-ment in Ron Rash
With Above the Waterfall, Ron Rash clarifies how significantly the incarnational art of Gerard Manley Hopkins influences his fiction and poetry. For the novel’s Becky Shytle, a park ranger and poet, Hopkins is both inspiration and scripture. Traumatized by a school shooting years before, imprisoned by that dark memory, Becky yearns to be “inside the earth’s pulsing heart,” to “slow … [her] bloodbeat to that rhythm.” Under the influence of such Hopkinsisms as inscape and invision, Becky spontaneously coins the term imprismed to describe the process of willful immersion in the world’s sacred body, an integration through which attentiveness to the evanescent leads to an epiphany of deeper permanence (cf. Hopkins’s unleaving, “Spring and Fall”). Besides elevating the mundane moment when Becky wakes in a campground, the striking neologism imprism encapsulates Rash’s Hopkins-inspired aesthetic, both in this novel and throughout his oeuvre. This paper briefly surveys imprism-ment in Rash’s poems, then tends to evanescence in The World Made Straight and The Cove, before focusing at length on the last transcendent passage of the drowning scene (“she is now inside the prism”) that begins Saints at the River and its re-vision for the essential short story “Something Rich and Strange.” Throughout his fiction and poetry, Martha Eads and John Lang will argue in this session, Rash depicts a traumatized “fallen world.” But “Hopkins has provided a model for reconciling the fact of a fallen world with the immensity of God’s love” (Sarah Gordon).
