64
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
MINDING THE GAPS: NECESSARY SCHOLARSHIP ON THE WORKS OF RON RASH a review by Elisabeth C. Aiken John Lang. Understanding Ron Rash. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. Randall Wilhelm, ed. The Ron Rash Reader. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014.
ELISABETH C. AIKEN was born in Pittsburgh, PA, and was raised largely in and around Winston-Salem, NC. She has a BA from James Madison University, an MA from Western Carolina University, and a PhD from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Leo University in Saint Leo, FL. Much of her scholarship is focused on the works of Western North Carolina writers such as Ron Rash, Fred Chappell, and Kathryn Stripling Byer. She currently lives in Clermont, FL, with her husband Peter and sons, Jack and Tucker. Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, RON RASH is the author of seven novels, six short story collections, and four poetry collections. His writing has been featured regularly in NCLR: poetry in 1997 and 2000, interviews in 2004 and 2014, an essay in 2008, and essays about his work in 2010 and 2011.
As accolades and awards for the various works by North Carolina’s Ron Rash pile up, both popular and what might be deemed more staid, “scholarly” appreciation for his writing continue to accumulate in the form of interviews and articles. However, this body of secondary sources surrounding his oeuvre has been, up to this point, absent of two foundational types of scholarship that signal the longevity and relevance of an influential writer’s career. Enter the 2014 releases from the University of South Carolina Press. This publishing house brings Rash aficionados and critics alike two works that will provide the foundations for further Rash studies: Understanding Ron Rash by John Lang and The Ron Rash Reader edited by Randall Wilhelm. While the first text is a critical study that explicates most of Rash’s key works and the second is an anthology from which representative pieces are culled from his overall canon, these publications work in concert to propel the body of scholarship on Ron Rash’s work ahead for further discussion and insight. Throughout his career, John Lang’s scholarship has established his position as a prominent and thoughtful scholar and supporter of writers, not just from North Carolina, but throughout the southern Appalachian region. With Understanding Ron Rash, Lang enters the subject into a critical book series that includes authors from his specific geographic locale (such as fellow North Carolina writer Fred Chappell, also
written by Lang), his broader Southern background (placing Rash in company with Eudora Welty and Anne Tyler, for example), and those who share similar themes or concerns (here Gary Snyder, Flannery O’Connor, or perhaps Cormac McCarthy come to mind). Heralded as the first booklength study on Rash’s works, Understanding Ron Rash is a detailed and critical look at Rash’s work, from his first collection of short stories The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth (1994) to Nothing Gold Can Stay (2013). In the first, eponymously titled chapter, Lang opens an overview of Rash’s career with a discussion of his focus on southern Appalachia, an essential component present in each of Rash’s works. As Lang notes, Rash’s fiction and poetry “testifies to his fierce allegiance to Appalachia – its people, it landscape, its vernacular, its history, its folklore” (2). This allegiance is supported with a detailed discussion of Rash’s upbringing, from his childhood in Boiling Springs, NC, to summers spent on his grandmother’s farm in Watauga County, close to Boone and in the heart of what is known as the High Country. Lang brings the narrative of Rash’s background full circle with a complementary discussion of Rash’s career as a writer, much of which is focused on “combating erasure, combating amnesia,” which Lang identifies as the “major aims of Rash’s fiction and poetry” (4). Having defined the pieces that will provide the structure for the remainder of this study, Lang moves on to address Rash’s works in
JOHN LANG was a Professor of English at Emory and Henry College in Emory, VA from 1983 until he retired in 2013. He edited The Iron Mountain Review for just over two decades. He has also authored Understanding Fred Chappell (University of South Carolina Press, 2000) and edited Appalachia and Beyond: Conversations with Writers from the Mountain South (University of Tennessee Press, 2006). Read his essay on Fred Chappell in NCLR 1998.