As a teenager, I would sometimes cut through the woods to my great-great-grandparents’ house. It stood empty above Clear Creek, and I could sit on the porch, look off at Huckleberry Mountain, and think angsty, adolescent thoughts in relative silence. From that spot, I could also see clear across the creek to the cemetery, where nearly all my people were buried; one afternoon, it struck me that they’d lived their whole lives on that patch of earth only to be laid to rest into it for eternity. Then I thought, I’ve got to get out of here.

Fred Chappell Photography courtesy of National Park Service, the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives at UNCG

I spent most of my twenties running away from the North Carolina mountains. I wasn’t running from danger or trauma — I’d come up on that land with a kind and caring family — but I felt sure that life was happening in other places. The prospect of living and dying on the same hundred acres as the generations before me squeezed me tight. So I left.

It isn’t wholly accurate to say that books brought me back, but it isn’t far off, either. In a cement apartment in Honduras, I stumbled across a Fred Chappell story within the small pile of books I’d grabbed in a rush before I left the country. At 22, I’d intended to find the world along the cobblestone streets of a tiny town in Central America, but most afternoons, after leaving my adobe classroom of fourth graders, I ambled back to my tiny room to read. I opened Ernest Hemingway and Robert Penn Warren, and anthologies and literary magazines that I’d been assigned in college. I found Chappell there, and, in his story, I stepped into a world immediately familiar and yet also surprising: the mountains of North Carolina.

• • •

I’m embarrassed to say that, as a college-educated teacher, I was taken aback to discover that living, breathing writers came from western North Carolina. Sure, I’d read Carl Sandburg’s cat-pawed poem “Fog” in third grade, and I’d seen his house from the road in Flat Rock, but he was long gone. I knew of Thomas Wolfe in the way that people know of Warren G. Harding — I could attach some trivia to his name, but he sat solidly in the unreachable past.

Carl Sandburg Photography courtesy of National Park Service, the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives at UNCG

In Chappell, I found a man who’d come up not far from me — in Canton, where I bought my first car — and was still sitting at a desk in North Carolina, hammering words onto the page that I could read in Honduras.

Of course, I knew that fully alive Southern writers were out there writing somewhere: One of the books that I’d stuffed into my overflowing backpack when I decided to leg it to Honduras was a recent New Stories from the South. But while I recognized the worlds created by North Carolina writers like Reynolds Price and Michael Parker, that Chappell story revealed something more intimate, something I’d begun to suspect wasn’t exactly Southern — or not only Southern — and that was the particularity of southern Appalachia. The particularity of home.

• • •

I decided I wanted to be a writer in Honduras. I moved back to the States and set out for Iowa to immerse myself in words (and corn). The sidewalks of Iowa City both thrilled and terrified me. Plaques lined the way, displaying quotes and names from the many writers who’d come there to study writing: Flannery O’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver, and on and on. I devoted myself to reading everyone I thought mattered. Living authors. Dead authors. But none of them mountain authors.

Like I’d felt as a teenager on my ancestors’ porch, I assumed that all of the writing that was worth anything was about other places, so I spent my first couple of years at Iowa writing about Latin America, writing about travel, writing about running away.

But one summer, during a return trip to North Carolina, I found a copy of Robert Morgan’s short story collection The Mountains Won’t Remember Us at my in-laws’ house. The title caught my attention, and before I’d turned the page of the first story, something opened up in me when I read: “Son, it was the most money I’d ever had.”

That was the first line of “Poinsett’s Bridge,” and it could’ve been the voice of my grandfather. In nearly every story in that collection — some of them set more than 100 years before and some here and now (and at least one set in the parking lot of the mall where I rented my tux for prom) — I came to understand that there was plenty of life to write about in western North Carolina. This was a world lush with complexity and beauty, and seeing it on paper changed how I saw it around me as well. I went back into the flat landscape of Iowa with new questions and images and voices. All of them from the mountains of home.

• • •

The Mountains Won’t Remember Us stayed within reach for months. I returned over and over to those stories, marveling at how Morgan settled seamlessly into the lives of characters in and around Henderson County. Every person was ordinary and remarkable, and I found in the book the inspiration and permission to write about everyday mountain people, to write about my people.

Before long, I was a hundred pages into fashioning what I hoped would be a book about where I come from. I left Iowa with my degree and my scattered pages and moved to Charleston, South Carolina. There, I spent my days teaching, sweating through my collared shirt as I walked across campus in the lowland heat, and devoted my evenings to writing about western North Carolina. Fred Chappell was doing it. Robert Morgan was doing it. I would aim to do it, too.

“Have you read Serena?” a colleague asked me one morning in Charleston. I hadn’t. But I did.

If Chappell proved to me that living writers came from the North Carolina mountains and Morgan showed me that extraordinary lives lived there, Ron Rash’s Serena lured me deeper into the history of the region. In the novel, the widespread timbering of the early 20th century is the backdrop for murder and love and betrayal. Like any reader, I sank into the plot, but what most struck me was the entangling of setting and history within this plot. The place and the time weren’t simply frames for telling a story; they transmuted every element of the book. They were the story.

In their books, Morgan and Rash displayed constant, careful attention to the natural world and near-obsessive curiosity about history. As a wide-eyed wannabe writer who’d also been a near-feral kid roaming the woods and sitting on the porch of an empty old homeplace, I loved this. I wanted this.

So, I, too, started digging into questions about regional history and development trends and environmental shifts. In short, I started asking better questions about where I come from. And, ultimately, those questions brought me home.

• • •

I don’t know if distance really makes the heart grow fonder, but for a stretch, distance made it easier for me to write about home. With The Mountains Won’t Remember Us and Serena under my arm, I kept piling up my own pages, and before long, I seemed to have a book about those mountains I’d been running from for a decade.

But by then, I didn’t simply want to write about them; I wanted to be back in them. I’d come to see the region anew — the mountains blanketed in green, the squeak of Grandma’s screen door, the tartness of apples just picked. The writer Will Wallace Harney may have meant it derisively when he called Appalachia a “strange land and peculiar people” in the 19th century, but in my time away, I’d learned that the region was indeed unlike any other.

Life was happening there — or at least mine would. When a chance to move back appeared, I took it, and then I sat again on my great-great-grandparents’ porch, only now the view was as wide open and inviting as a good book.

Looking for more reads that celebrate western North Carolina’s literary landscape? Click here for six recommendations from local booksellers.