Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
“The Epicenter of Who I Am”: Ron Rash’s Roots in Aho, North Carolina
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Ron Rash’s sense of rootedness in southern Appalachia informs all of his writing: poetry, essays, novels, and short fiction. From the stories in his 1994 MFA project, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Other Stories from Cliffside, North Carolina, to his 2016 novel The Risen, Rash has set much of his work in or around Cleveland County, NC, where he moved at age eight with his family from Chester, SC, and rural Madison and Buncombe counties, where his father’s ancestors settled in the eighteenth century. A third setting for his work is Aho in Watauga County, where his mother grew up and where he himself spent summer weeks on end with his grandmother. The characters in Rash’s works set elsewhere generally trace their roots to Madison, Buncombe, or Watauga counties. Among them are several in Eureka Mills, the 1998 volume of poetry in which Rash honors family members who left southwestern North Carolina to work in the South Carolina textiles town where his parents met.
While critics have especially celebrated the depth and intimacy of Rash’s explorations of Shelton Laurel in Madison County, scholars have yet to pay sufficient attention to Rash’s similarly focused attention to Aho, a tiny community about three hours north. Unlike Shelton Laurel, which holds an understandable if macabre fascination as the site of a Civil War-era neighbor-on- neighbor massacre, Aho has no notable historical or geographical significance. Aho, however, should be to Rash readers as Oxford is to Faulkner fans or Dublin to admirers of Joyce. In a 28 June 2017 telephone conversation about Aho, Rash told me “If you want the epicenter of who I am and what I’m about, that’s it.” Those seeking a deeper understanding of Rash’s writing will thus benefit from considering this landscape that has shaped his literary consciousness. He continues to plumb his memories of Aho for narrative images, and personal and familial experiences there offer emotional ballast for his work.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Martha Greene Eads 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). Before joining the faculty of Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA, she taught at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women and at Valparaiso University in Indiana, where she held a Lilly Fellowship in Humanities and the Arts from 2001-2003. 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.
“The Epicenter of Who I Am”: Ron Rash’s Roots in Aho, North Carolina
Ron Rash’s sense of rootedness in southern Appalachia informs all of his writing: poetry, essays, novels, and short fiction. From the stories in his 1994 MFA project, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Other Stories from Cliffside, North Carolina, to his 2016 novel The Risen, Rash has set much of his work in or around Cleveland County, NC, where he moved at age eight with his family from Chester, SC, and rural Madison and Buncombe counties, where his father’s ancestors settled in the eighteenth century. A third setting for his work is Aho in Watauga County, where his mother grew up and where he himself spent summer weeks on end with his grandmother. The characters in Rash’s works set elsewhere generally trace their roots to Madison, Buncombe, or Watauga counties. Among them are several in Eureka Mills, the 1998 volume of poetry in which Rash honors family members who left southwestern North Carolina to work in the South Carolina textiles town where his parents met.
While critics have especially celebrated the depth and intimacy of Rash’s explorations of Shelton Laurel in Madison County, scholars have yet to pay sufficient attention to Rash’s similarly focused attention to Aho, a tiny community about three hours north. Unlike Shelton Laurel, which holds an understandable if macabre fascination as the site of a Civil War-era neighbor-on- neighbor massacre, Aho has no notable historical or geographical significance. Aho, however, should be to Rash readers as Oxford is to Faulkner fans or Dublin to admirers of Joyce. In a 28 June 2017 telephone conversation about Aho, Rash told me “If you want the epicenter of who I am and what I’m about, that’s it.” Those seeking a deeper understanding of Rash’s writing will thus benefit from considering this landscape that has shaped his literary consciousness. He continues to plumb his memories of Aho for narrative images, and personal and familial experiences there offer emotional ballast for his work.
