Author of the week

Ron Rash

“It hasn’t been an easy glide to the top of Mount Parnassus,” said Bronwen Dickey in Garden & Gun. But Ron Rash, who today is the blue-collar bard of southern Appalachia, has always been willing to reach literature’s greatest heights. Now 66, the author of Serena and nearly two dozen other works of poetry and fiction committed to writing at 28 and spent the next two decades honing his craft. He approached it like the distance runner he’s been since high school. While teaching full-time, he woke early to write almost daily. He also threw away two finished novels before earning publication of One Foot in Eden, when he was 49. Even today he remains convinced that persistence can lift a story from failing to transcendent. “The days you’d rather stick pencils in your eyes than write,” he says, “are the days that’ll make you a writer.”

Rash has a gift for pulling universal tragedies out of ordinary lives, said Tom Mayer in the Boone, N.C., Mountain Times. His new story collection, In the Valley, is set, like all of his previous books, in southern Appalachia. And most of the characters are “a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be,” to use one of Rash’s favorite William Faulkner lines. The glaring exception is the ruthless 1930s lumber baroness who dominates the book’s title novella. Serena Pemberton is a force of destruction in a world full of destructive forces. But Rash would never write a book where the average person had no hope. “You’re seeing people in trouble,” he says. “But I hope you’re also seeing people who rise above it. People who fight it. To me, that’s also important.”