Ron Rash

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Ron Rash
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• Signs
• My older kin always believed
• in looking backward to explain
• the here and now, always a sign
• present in the past each time
• a barn burned down, a life was lost.
• So like boys turning over stones
• to find what dark had hid from the day,
• theyd turn over in their minds
• the way a mare turned from its stall
• as if she smelled hay smoldering,
• a living hand so damp and cold
• it seemed already in the grave.
• And so I learned to see the world
• as language one might understand
• but only when translated by
• signs first forgotten or misread.

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Serena

• Ron Rash spins a web of corruption set in 1930's
  North Carolina mountains at the beginning of the
  movement to create the Smokey Mountain National
  Park.  George and Serena Pemberton, newly
  married, set out to clear cut the forest and take
  down anyone who gets in their way.

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Meet the Characters - Serena

• This is what we want, she said, her voice
  deepening, the emotion so often controlled fully
  unbridled now. To be like this. No past or
  future, pure enough to live totally in the
  present.
• Serena slept all afternoon, and at dinner she ate
  until her stomach swelled visibly. Afterward,
  she sent Vaughn to the commissary, and he
  returned with a chamber pot and a gallon bucket
  filled with water. When Pemberton asked about
  food or quilts, Serena told him shed not eat or
  sleep again until the eagle did. For two nights
  and a day Serena did not leave the stall.
• Shed been told to stay in bed for six weeks, but
  when a month had passed Serena resumed
  supervising the cutting crews
• Secretary Albrights commissioned a photograph
  of the devastation weve wrecked upon the land,
  Serena said to Pemberton when he joined her. A
  further way to justify his park. Why not,
  Pemberton, Serena said. Im pleased with what
  weve done here. Arent you?

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Meet the Characters - Rachel

• And now this brown-eyed child. Dont love it,
  Rachel told herself. Dont love anything that
  can be taken away.
• Sell it, itll fetch a good price, Mrs. Pemberton
  had said when she handed Rachel the bowie knife.
  And it probably would, perhaps even as much as
  the ginseng, but Rachel couldnt abide doing what
  Mrs. Pemberton had commanded her to do. Shed
  sell the shoes off her feet before taking the
  knife out of the box trunk and selling it. Widow
  Jenkins would say that Rachel was just being
  prideful, and maybe Preacher Bolick would agree,
  but shed had enough proud shucked off her the
  last few months to believe God wouldnt begrudge
  her keeping just a little.
• You cut up your feet pretty good, but nothing
  deep enough to need stitches. That was almost a
  mile walk and you as sick as him, and barefoot to
  boot. I dont know how you did it. You must
  love that child dear as life.
• I tried not to, Rachel said. I just couldnt
  find a way to stop myself.

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Meet the Characters - Loggers

• The way things is balanced. Everything in the
  world has its natural place, and if you take
  something out or put something in that ought not
  be out or in, everything gets lopsided and out of
  sorts.
• So what happens when there aint nothing left
  alive at all? he asked.
• Used to be thick with trout too, this here
  stream. There was many a day you and me took our
  supper from it. Now youd not catch a
  knottyhead.
• And I had my part in the doing of it.
• We had to feed out families, Henryson said.
• Yes, we did, Ross agreed. What Im wondering
  is how well feed them once all the trees is cut
  down and the jobs leave.
• I think this is what the end of the world will
  be like., McIntyre said, and none among them
  raised his voice to disagree.

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One Foot in Eden
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• Mill VillageMill houses lined both sides of
  every roadlike boxcars on a track.  They were so
  close a man could piss off of his own front
  porch,hit four houses if he had the
  wind.Everytime your neighbors had a fight,then
  made up in bed as couples do,came home drunk,
  played the radio,you knew, whether or not you
  wanted to.So I bought a dimestore picture, a
  country scene,built a frame and nailed it on the
  wall,no people in it, just a lot of
  land,stretching out behind an empty
  barn.Sometimes at night if I was feeling low,
  I'd stuff my ears with cotton. Then I'd stare
  up at that picture like it was a window,and I
  was back home listening to the farm.But what
  was done was done.  Before too longthe weave
  room jarred the hearing from my ears,and I got
  used to living with a crowd.Before too long I
  took the picutre down.

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At Reid Hartleys Junkyard

• To enter we find the gap
• between barbed wire and briars,
• pass the German Shepherd chained
• to an axle, cross the ditch
• of oil black as a tar pit,
• my aunt compelled to come here
• on a Sunday after church,
• asking me when her husband
• refused to search this island
• reefed with past catastrophes.
• We make our way to the heart
• of the junkyard, cling of rust
• and beggarlice on our clothes,
• bumpers hot as skillet

• as we squeeze between car husks
• to find this forever
• stilled traffic one Ford pickup,
• tires stripped, radio yanked out,
• drivers door open. My aunt
• gets in, stares through glass her son
• looked through the last time he knew
• the world, as though believing
• like others who come here she
• might see something to carry
• from this wreckage, as I will
• when I look past my aunts ruined
• Sunday dress, torn stockings, find
• her right foot pressed to the brake.

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Poetry Collections
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Short Stories
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Other Novels
13
Honors

• 1987 General Electric Young Writers Award
• 1996 The Sherwood Anderson Prize
• 2002 Novello Literary Award and Appalachian
  Book of the Year for One Foot in Eden
• 2004 Saints at the River awarded Fiction Book
  of the Year by Southern Book Critics Circle
  Southeastern Booksellers Association
• 2005 Speckled Trout included in O. Henry
  Prize Stories
• 2008 Chemistry and Other Stories finalist for
  PEN/Faulkner Award
• 2009 Serena finalist for PEN/Faulkner Award