1Ron 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 The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Other Stories from Cliffside, North Carolina, to his 2020 In the Valley, Rash has set much of his work in or around the small college town of Boiling Springs, NC, where he moved at age eight with his family from Chester, SC, and in rural Madison County, NC, where his father’s ancestors settled in the eighteenth century. A third setting for his work is in the small community of Aho in Watauga County, NC, 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 or Watauga counties. This is the case for instance in Eureka Mill, the 1998 volume of poetry in which Rash honors family members who left western North Carolina to work in the South Carolina textile town where his parents met (see photo 1 at the end of the article).

2Rash has described to interviewers his sense of being destined to depict this region. As early as 2000, he told Jack Shuler:

I think I realized early on that the only thing I would ever be able to write about would be the Carolinas. I mean everything I’ve written, almost, is set almost exclusively in the Carolinas, and that’s just because that’s what I know. Eudora Welty has this great line about one place known helping us understand all other places better. One of the great things about literature—and it shouldn’t work this way, but it does—the more specific the setting, the stronger the sense of place, the more universal it can be. The more believable the literature is. Faulkner’s proven that, and so have Joyce and Gabriel García Márquez. (“Interview” 24)

3Almost fifteen years later, having achieved critical and commercial acclaim, he observed to Rob Neufeld: “[o]ne thing I’ve tried to do as a writer who writes about a particular place is to explore that world as deeply and intimately as I can” (“Interview” 197). Critics around the globe have lauded him for achieving that goal.

5Aho, however, should be to Rash readers as Oxford is to Faulkner fans or Dublin to admirers of Joyce. In a telephone conversation with Rash on June 28, 2017 he told me about the importance of Aho in his work: “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 the 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.

6The clearest evidence of Aho’s impact on Rash’s fiction appears in Burning Bright: Stories (2010) and Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (2014). Rash has noted that the former opens and closes with stories set in Aho and that nine of the thirty-four stories in the latter are set on Aho Road, with a tenth taking place a short distance up Highway 321 at Tweetsie. “The reader has to be really looking for that [element],” he acknowledges, “but it starts with ‘Hard Times,’ and the last story in there is about Tweetsie” (Personal interview). That final story, “Outlaws,” set in the amusement park featuring a train whose whistle resonates far beyond Rash’s grandmother’s house, was one of the new stories in Something Rich and Strange, while “Hard Times” appeared earlier in The Sewanee Review and subsequently as the opening story in Burning Bright. “Lincolnites” concludes the collection and also made the cut for Something Rich and Strange. Other stories that appear in both volumes are “Into the Gorge” and “Return.” Rash told Neufeld that from among the approximately one hundred stories he had already written, “I picked the thirty-four I thought were the best” (“Interview” 190) for Something Rich and Strange.

7Rash says he structured the collection of selected stories carefully. “Hard Times,” he told Neufeld, “set a tone and put the reader into I’d guess you say my psychic landscape [laughs].” Readily acknowledging the darkness of that landscape, he explained his intention that the subsequent story, the more hopeful “3 A.M. and the Stars Were Out,” would offer readers an emotional reprieve (“Interview” 190). In my 2015 interview with Rash, he elaborated on the varying moods of these stories and Aho as a critical setting for his work:

In Something Rich and Strange, where stories appear, which stories fit in this book, is very important. I want the reader to feel it’s like a good CD, that the sum is more than its parts. Through that book, and I did space them very carefully, there are like maybe seven, eight stories set on that Aho Road through time. To me, in a sense, if you want to talk about the psychic landscape and the geographical landscape coming together, it’s on that road because that place is probably more important to me than any place. (Personal interview)

8As he has mentioned in many print interviews, Rash paid tribute to his grandmother Ethel Mae Hampton Holder, with whom he spent weeks at a time during the summers of his boyhood and youth. His grandmother, Rash notes proudly, was the first woman in the Aho District to vote (Telephone interview).

9Mrs. Holder’s home was once part of a larger farm just before the “t” where Aho Road intersects with the Blue Ridge Parkway, a federally funded scenic highway that extends through North Carolina’s section of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Appalachian range (see photos 5 and 6). Although the white farmhouse still stands and his aunt and a first cousin still live on neighboring properties, Rash laments the regional changes he has witnessed. In 2000, he told Jack Shuler:

• 2 Myrtle Beach is a South Carolina vacation destination characterized by garish tourist attractions a (...)

In Watauga County, North Carolina, fifty or sixty percent of the land is owned by people out-of-state. My family lived up there since the seventeen-hundreds; they no longer know their neighbors. People have moved in from Florida, New York, Ohio, and it’s lost its distinctiveness. That bothers me. . . . [T]hey come here because they want to get away from the city. They want to leave all that behind, but they want to bring it with them. Boone is a city now. When I was growing up, it was a town. I went up to read six months ago . . . It was a nightmare. . . . I couldn’t believe it. Myrtle Beach2 had suddenly been transported up there. Another thing is it’s getting to where my relatives are having trouble holding onto their land because the property taxes have gone up because the land’s become so valuable. That’s unfortunate, but you know, at the same time, I’m sure that fuels my writing. It’s a high price to pay. (“Interview” 21-22)

10Seventeen years later, he said, “It hurts to go back [to Aho because it’s changed so much], but I can remember it as it was. Artists can keep us from forgetting. I tried to show that place through time. I like the idea of journey—of walking back and forth through time” (Telephone interview). Rash has walked the length of that road countless times. From his grandmother’s house, he recounts, “I’d walk up the Parkway, I’d wander around, I’d fish that creek, I’d walk all the way down to the 321 and fish that creek all the way up, and it ends as a spring on my grandmother’s farm” (Telephone interview). One of his earliest memories, he notes, is of his grandfather taking him there to fish (see photo 7). “Where that pasture used to be was kind of my Eden—the stream where I caught my first trout,” he reminisces (Telephone interview). He says he set the poem “Speckled Trout” directly across the road from the house.

11As idyllic as some of Rash’s memories are, Aho is hardly Edenic in his fiction—at least not a prelapsarian Eden. “Hard Times,” the opening story in both Burning Bright and Something Rich and Strange, ushers readers into Rash’s dark “psychic landscape” by depicting a Depression-era farmer’s economic and moral anguish. The beleaguered protagonist, Jacob, and his even-poorer neighbor Hartley experience a level of despair surpassing even that Rash witnessed as a teen when his uncle lost a year’s tobacco crop in a barn fire near Aho in the Bamboo community (“An Interview” by Shuler 23). Describing that incident in “Barn Burning: 1967,” Rash quotes his uncle: “A man who gets through a time / mean as that need not have fears / of something worse” (Poems: New and Selected 22). Rash leaves Jacob in “Hard Times,” however, trying in vain to imagine a place worse than where he is.

12The protagonist in “Lincolnites,” the seventh story in Something Rich and Strange and the second set in Aho, is in equally desperate straits. Lily, the pregnant mother of a year-old son, runs her family farm single-handedly while her husband fights for the Union during the Civil War. When a resentful and rapacious Confederate neighbor invades her home, she must decide just how far she will go to defend her property, her children, and her own life. Rash says that the story’s fatal encounter “actually occurred there [in Aho], in a house on that site” (Telephone interview). The story is one of several in which Rash explores humans’ capacity to turn against those closest to them. In my 2015 interview with Rash, he mused:

What is it that causes us to revert into where we’re even capable of killing our neighbors? People we’ve lived beside for generations. What is it in us that does that? I don’t have an answer. To me, that’s one of the great enigmas of being a human being. I don’t have any kind of answer. What is it in us that does that? I don’t understand it. To me, it’s a mystery. I mean a mystery in the biggest sense of the word. But I think you have to acknowledge that we’re capable of it, because we are. We continue to be. (Personal interview)

13Although he set the story over 150 years ago, its shocking account of rising political hostility among neighbors seems universal and as timely as this morning’s headlines.

14The story that follows “Lincolnites” in the collection, “Into the Gorge,” addresses more recent regional conflict involving land ownership and maintains the collection’s generally dark tone. The central character, Jesse, feels deeply rooted to his home, even though his father and aunts yielded to demands that they sell the family property to the US Parks Service in 1959. Jesse thinks often about his great-aunt, who “had been born on this land, lived on it eight decades, and knew it as well as she knew her husband and children” (Something 97). Jesse’s decision to harvest from the now federally owned land the ginseng roots his father had planted half a century earlier results in disaster, adding one—and possibly two—to the number of ghosts that haunt the gorge where his great-aunt went to die. Events in Rash’s poems “In Dismal Gorge” and “The Search” take place there as well (see photo 8).

15“Return” follows “Into the Gorge,” and Rash says it “actually is based on something that happened. My mother and grandfather were going to pick up my Uncle Robert. It snowed really bad, so they couldn’t drive up [Aho Road from Highway 321], so they all three walked up” (Telephone interview). Yet, in the story, Hampton walks the two-mile road toward home alone after returning from the Pacific during World War II, reflecting on “those nights the only way he’d been able to fall asleep was to imagine he was here at the foot of Dismal Mountain” (Something 111-12). As he makes his way toward home, he reflects on deaths he witnessed in battle, as well as on a painful loss in boyhood and eventually on his own sense of feeling dead. Remembering having heard that ghosts cannot cross running water, Hampton assures himself that he must still be alive when he passes over a footbridge near the story’s end.

17The fourth story after “Return,” “Where the Map Ends,” also takes place during the Civil War and is one of very few Rash stories that tackle the issue of race. Although Appalachian people are hardly immune to racial prejudice, few pre-Civil War farms in western North Carolina were large enough to need the labor of enslaved people. This situation helps account for the division of political loyalties between North and South among neighbors in “Lincolnites” as well as for the limited presence of African-Americans even today in the areas about which Rash usually writes. In “Where the Map Ends,” however, two enslaved men of African descent have fled an eastern North Carolina plantation; Rash said in the telephone interview that they “go up Aho Road; they go past Blowing Rock.” The farmer in whose barn they find shelter both teases out and manipulates for his own twisted purposes the complexities of race and politics in the antebellum South, many of which linger in America today.

18Political tension a little over a century later also informs the context for “The Magic Bus,” in which a sheltered teenager Sabra dreams of escaping Aho. As the story opens, her most exciting pastime is identifying license plates from faraway states on cars traveling the Blue Ridge Parkway (see photo 9). When two hippies from San Francisco stop their brightly painted van near her family’s farm, Sabra’s world widens to a dangerous degree. Alluring ambassadors of pacifism, recreational drug use, and free love, Wendy and Thomas urge Sabra to join them. Her loyalty stretched to the breaking point, Sabra ultimately pays a high price for her brief flirtation with adventure. Rash says he set “The Magic Bus” in the pasture near his grandmother’s farm and that his cousin Valerie Miller Dotson was his inspiration for the character Sabra. Mrs. Dotson and her brother Mike welcomed my family on two July Sundays in 2017 and 2018 when we worshipped at Friendship United Methodist Church, which Rash had attended during stays with his grandmother. When I mentioned after our first visit that I had come to learn more about Rash’s Aho settings, Mrs. Dotson acknowledged her awareness of her connection to Sabra’s character. When we returned the following year, she urged us to stay for a Christmas-in-July potluck lunch honoring their pastor, who had been transferred to another congregation. To ensure that the occasion was sufficiently celebratory, she had prepared enough gift bags for all of the regular congregants and any guests who might come—approximately 25 people in all. Each bag’s contents were unique, including such items as journals, pens, and craft items Mrs. Dotson had made herself. Also in attendance both Sundays were other relatives of Rash, several of whom were named Hampton. Having used the surname for the protagonist of “The Return,” Rash also assigns it nine stories after “The Magic Bus” to “Last Rite”’s central character, Sarah Hampton. Sarah is mourning her newly married son, whom the sheriff says drovers found shot dead near a trail between Boone and Mountain City, TN. This story, too, takes place in the past, although it offers fewer details than Rash’s other Aho stories about exactly when events occurred. Like grieving parents in any time or place, Sarah Hampton is desperate to honor her son’s brief life by finding his grave and memorializing him as best she can. Informing the character’s impulse are surely Rash’s own experiences of attending the funerals and visiting the graves of relatives, many of them Hamptons. He has expanded on such impressions in a number of poems, as well, including “Black-Eyed Susans,” “Spirit Point,” “August 1959: Morning Service,” and “Pentecost,” all set at Friendship United Methodist Church, and “White Wings,” set in the Laurel Fork Baptist Church cemetery, directly up the hill behind his grandmother’s house (see photo 10).

19Three stories follow “Last Rite” before “The Harvest,” which Rash says he situated “across the field on the other side” of his grandmother’s property (Telephone interview). “The Harvest,” too, is about death; its ten-year-old protagonist is helping his father and uncle finish cutting their widowed neighbor’s cabbage crop “on a drearysome day” (Something 383). Although the boy’s loss is indirect, he cannot bear to look at the overturned tractor that took Mr. Tilson’s life. Reminiscent of Hemingway’s character in “Indian Camp,” this boy awakens to realities of the human condition as he learns from his father how men interact with those around them. Unlike Hemingway in that story, however, Rash demonstrates in “The Harvest” how humble kindness offers hope that outlasts loss as the boy begins shouldering the burden of mercy.

20The setting for Something Rich and Strange’s concluding story, “Outlaws,” initially appears to be sunnier than that of “Harvest”; as it opens, the central character reminisces about his high school summer job performing with two other young men as cowboys at the fictional amusement park Rash based on Tweetsie. Performance stakes rise ominously high, however, when the protagonist’s co-worker Jason receives a Vietnam war draft notice and decides to stage an accident that will disqualify him from service. The episode haunts the protagonist, who becomes an accomplished author. Years later, he learns that a story he wrote about it delivered Jason from despair. Fiction has transfigured violence, and art proves redemptive.

21In discussing the significance of situating so much of his writing in and near Aho, Rash observed, “I’m trying to make my work almost like a quilt, I want it all—[fiction], poetry—to feel connected, and part of that connection is that place. That place is at the center of it” (Personal interview). He has also called Aho “the place I was happiest. That was a place I felt at home more than at home. Our whole family felt closer to that place than anywhere else” (Telephone interview). That the family decided to bury his father, James Rash, at Friendship Methodist Church rather than at the Baptist church they attended more often in Boiling Springs or among his own kin in Madison County, confirms Aho’s significance for all of them (see photo 11). Still, the lessons Rash absorbed in Aho were something other than merely “happy.” The work set there, particularly in Something Rich and Strange, suggests that life has been and continues to be difficult for mountain people and that some inevitably make dark choices in tough times. Even so, many show tremendous courage and generosity, and their capacity for storytelling equips them to wrest meaning from suffering.

22Of course, these realities are true for people everywhere and thus account, at least in part, for the universal appeal of Rash’s writing. In discussing Something Rich and Strange with Neufeld, Rash observed:

I’ve got stories set on the same road in Boone in 1865 and the early 20^th century, and during World War II, and in contemporary times. All these journeys are going on. Blending time is important to me. One thing that’s important in terms of placement of stories in books, I want the reader to sometimes feel unmoored from time. The reader might think, this is a contemporary story and then might realize two pages in, it’s 1930. I want that. . . . I think it does something as far as taking the reader into another place, a mental space, a kind of uncertainty. What did it do for you? Did it confuse you, or is there a fluidity of time? One thing it does is add a kind of depth in that there’s a repetition through the generations of these things, and there are variations. Time is a kind of geography as well. It allows us to go into different mindsets, different cultures. (“Interview” 195)

23By bringing the world thus to tiny Aho, NC, Rash reveals to his readers much about ourselves and our neighbors, no matter where—or when—we find ourselves at home.