Rivendell
New Native
I am driving Ryan to the airport. He's been in town for a week full of walks, talks and work on this long-delayed issue. Life has intervened; since Ryan moved to Vermont and Ali and I welcomed Avery into our lives, we've had to make do with little patches of time, short visits like this, to make progress on the journal. There’s strong coffee in our travel mugs, good tunes on WNCW and a warm, breezy day forming around us. I can tell that Ryan's happy to be getting back north though sad to leave this old familiar home.
We’re at the airport terminal before we know it and Ryan's hauling out his bag. We stand around for a moment laying out next steps toward getting this issue to press. A quick hug then back in the truck. I need a different route home, something besides the predictable drive along I-26 and so check with the luggage guy about the best back-road route. Soon I'm on Brevard Road bound for the Blue Ridge Parkway, windows open and radio blasting. I feel happy and free, a picture in my head of Ryan's plane lifting up over the greening hills before briefly shadowing the wide brown avenue of the French Broad. Funny how I, the transplanted Yankee, now reside in these mountains and Ryan, who grew up in them, lives off in my old territory.
It's not long before I'm down at the river, running alongside Bent Creek, smelling it through the open windows. Rivers are so much more alive when observed at this speed, at this level. At the end of my loop under the Parkway, I pass by the arboretum entrance and park along the road. The trailhead for the Shut-In Trail is across the way, and heads uphill right off, rhododendron and holly tunneling upward. Eventually I come to a ridgeline that overlooks the banks of the French Broad: a lone canoeist out in the middle of the slow current, a couple of crows floating above the trees.
I am reminded of my friend John, who teaches African Studies at UNC-A, and his ideas on authenticity and native-ness. During one of our evening talks, he questioned my idea of what it means to be “authentic,” suggesting that by placing a new stress on the interaction between outsider and native—the whole inter-relatedness of culture—I just might broaden my sense of place and ultimately conceive of a more fluid sense of authenticity. I am oversimplifying it, but in this way I am of this place as much as, as long as, I engage it. From highway to back road to parkway to trail, I seem to have walked my way to the middle of morning.
During Ryan’s stay, we interviewed poet Jonathan Greene. As editor of Gnomon Press, Greene has championed Southern Appalachian writers for more than three decades, publishing the likes of Jim Wayne Miller, James Still, Jonathan Williams, Martha Bennett Stiles, Ed McClanahan, Wendy Berry and Robert Morgan. He himself is the author of a shelf of books and has been featured in many journals and anthologies on Appalachian writing. During our discussion, Greene talked of his life on his farm in Kentucky and how he came to it via New York and San Francisco. How, because the mountains are some miles from his farm, he can’t call himself an “Appalachian” writer. (Though most editors tell him: “Close enough.”) Guided by an acute bio-regionalist sense, Greene walks into the mountains with a literary map, wisely using his friends who live in the mountains—the poets and novelists he publishes—to guide him into that familiar but ultimately alien terrain. Greene says of his Kentucky farm: “My mindset is rooted in this piece of land. My writing springs from living here.”
In a similar vein, I have turned often these last few years to poet and editor Thomas Rain Crowe for guidance. He has put me in touch with countless writers and artists, as well as connected me to layers of literary history here in Asheville. After many years away in Europe and San Francisco with the Baby Beats, Crowe returned to Western North Carolina to set down roots. With Thomas Wolfe in mind, Crowe writes in Zoro’s Field: My life in the Appalachian Woods: “I have come to believe that we must go home again. Whether home is literally where we are native or where our place-based imagination resides. To re-turn as ‘new natives’ to do the work. The ‘real work,’ as my California friend and mentor Gary Snyder says.” For Crowe that work was subsistent farming and Thoreauvian self-sufficiency. For me, it entails editing this journal, co-hosting a local radio show, teaching and writing. A transplant in these mountains, I look to Crowe the way he listened to Snyder’s call.
After years of moving around, my family is setting down roots here. I guess I am gradually—as part as a much longer process—becoming “native” to this place. My walks and drives and canoe rides bring me deeper into the place and its countless stories, for sure. My teaching at Warren Wilson and in the Great Smokies Writing Program has deepened my connection to this place and its people, just as sitting in on the twice yearly MFA residencies always bring me back in connection with old friends and friends of my father’s. And I’ve certainly gotten tangled up in the local arts scene, reading regularly with Thomas, Rick Chess, Glenis Redmond and Keith Flynn, among others, often reading as a group downtown at the Black Mountain Arts Center. At some point in the process of putting together this issue it became clear: we only need to look around us—in these Asheville streets, in the mountains surrounding them—for material, for inspiration. All of these interweaving connections can be found here in this issue. And then some.
Just a few weeks ago, following advice from my buddy John Lane, I drove home from Spartanburg along old Highway 176. I’d read for Hub City’s Writers Project that night before, and spent the morning walking John’s neighborhood river. “It’s a beautiful road,” he told me. “You shouldn’t miss it.” Indeed, it was: chock full with signs of a bygone era, dotted with old hotels and camps and roadside attractions built decades ago for Piedmont residents as they made their way up the mountain for weekend and summer retreats. The road switchbacked sharply, offering glimpses back down through the trees, as it shadowed the path of the famous old railroad.
At the top of the mountain, in the historic town of Saluda, I had the strange feeling of being a tourist and an Asheville resident. In fact, in this sleepy town, they were one and the same. The guy at the coffee store gave me my cup of coffee for free (I had no cash on me) and told me to pay him the $1.65 when I came through again. I chuckled all the way to my car. Maybe we’re all both native and exile all the time. As I drove out of town, bound for Asheville, I felt for a moment entirely comfortable in this place, perfectly at home in these old mountains.
Sebastian Matthews« Back to Excerpts