#ron rash

[bluewillowmoon]

“Spend a long time alone, especially if you're someone who's never been that social to begin with, and you find yourself craving solitude.”

— Ron Rash, from Above the Waterfall (Ecco, 2015)

[southern-gothic-soul]

[mmhawkes]

I have been thinking about the fact that two of my favourite fiction authors are Ron Rash and Becky Chambers, and how they are seemingly so very different, and yet are not? They both appreciate the beauty of tiny details. There is a book of essays about Ron Rash’s work that is called “The Radiance of Small Things” and that is it exactly. So, even though Ron Rash’s books are really sad and fairly rooted in the real world, and Becky Chambers’ are hopeful fantasy/sci-fi, they both have a similar sort of magic?

[sophi-aubrey]

…I felt as if we were traveling although the landscape did not change. It was like I could feel the earth’s slow revolution as August’s strange, pink glow tinted the evening’s last light.

© Ron Rash, Chemistry and Other Stories

Robert Starck, 1921

[farewell-to-lorien]

Novelist Ron Rash at his cabin in Cullowhee, North Carolina.

[judgingbooksbycovers]

In the Valley

By Ron Rash. 

Cover art by Neil Welliver. Design by Emily Mahon.

[elusivewordss]

The Day the Gates Closed by Ron Rash (2002)

We lose so much in this life.

Shouldn’t some things stay, she said,

but it was already gone,

no human sound, the poplars

and oaks cut down so even

the wind had nothing to rub

a whisper from, just silence

rising over the valley

deep and wide as a glacier.

[ukdamo]

The Exchange

Ron Rash wrtites of love, spontaneity, and his ancestors?

Between Wytheville, Virginia and the North Carolina line, he meets a wagon headed where he's been, seated beside her parents a dark-eyed girl who grips the reins in her fist, no more than sixteen, he's guess as they come closer and she doesn't look away or blush but allows his eyes to hold hers that moment their lives pass. He rides into Boone at dusk, stops at an inn where he buys his supper, a sleepless night thinking of fallow fields still miles away, the girl he might not find the like of again. When dawn breaks he mounts his roan, then backtracks, searches three days hamlets and farms, any smoke rising above the tree line before he heads south, toward home, the French Broad's valley where spring unclinches the dogwood buds as he plants the bottomland, come night by candlelight builds a butter churn and cradle, cherry headboard for the bed, forges a double-eagle into a wedding ring and then back to Virginia and spends five weeks riding and asking from Elk Creek to Damascus before he finds the wagon tethered to the hitching post of a crossroads store, inside the girl who smiles as if she'd known all along his gray eyes would search until they found her. She asks one question, his name, as her eyes study the gold smoldering there between them, the offered palm she lightens, slips the ring on herself so he knows right then the woman she will be, bold enough match for a man rash as his name.