Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.

Ron Rash was raised in Boiling Springs, but it’s his grandparents’ farm between Boone and Blowing Rock that defined his youth. His latest novel, The Caretaker, centers on a rural cemetery and a cold war between two families after a marriage crosses social lines.

While cemeteries are often found in Rash’s work, the one in The Caretaker is based on a real place that Rash cared for near his grandparents’ property.

“There was a cemetery up on the other side of the cow pasture hill,” he says. “I had a couple of relatives buried there, including one who’d been killed in World War II. When there’d be a storm, the flowers and grave decorations would blow over onto our land, and I was taught to go up there and put them back in the cemetery, where they belonged.”

In caring for the items left for the deceased, Rash understood “the connection between the living and the dead,” which he refers to as “a kind of abeyance.”

“I’d always wanted to write a book about that place,” he says, “because, in some ways, it’s the most important place in my childhood.”

Rash spent six years and about 1,000 pages working on the novel. The final, published version, a fraction of the original length, balances a finely honed plot with deep characterizations.

“It’s the hardest book I’ve ever written,” he says. He quit on writing the novel three times and published In the Valley — a collection of stories and a novella inspired by his breakout novel, Serena — instead.

Rash is no stranger to hard work. Before spending 20 years in his current position as the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, he taught multiple classes on composition at Tri-County Technical College in South Carolina while also raising two young children. But he never stopped writing. He published his first story collection, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth, in 1994. Since then, he’s published eight novels, seven story collections, five books of poetry, and one children’s title, racking up a bevy of national and international awards along the way.

According to Rash, The Caretaker might be his last novel, but he can’t imagine giving up writing altogether.

“Novels just take so much,” he says, “and you don’t want to start repeating yourself. But I’m writing some short stories, and I think that form fits me. And I’ve been reading a lot more poetry, so I may go back and write some poetry, too.”

He’s quiet for a moment, and it would be easy to assume that he’s looking back over the scope of his long, illustrious career, but he’s not. He’s already looking ahead, past the shorter forms of poetry and stories to something else.

“I may do some novellas,” he finally says. Then he laughs. “But, damn, those are hard, too.”

Guiding Spirits

photograph by Jennifer Callahan Photography

The Caretaker opens with one of the most harrowing scenes in all of Ron Rash’s work. The year is 1951, and instead of caring for his pregnant wife, Naomi, back in Blowing Rock, Jacob Hampton finds himself in North Korea, locked in deadly hand-to-hand combat with a sniper atop a frozen river. When Jacob’s parents, who never approved of Naomi, receive news of Jacob’s grievous wounds, they decide to lie to her and say that Jacob has died, hoping that she’ll go back to Tennessee.

When Jacob returns, his parents tell him that Naomi died in childbirth. Caught in the middle of the ploy is the unwitting Blackburn Gant, a childhood friend of Jacob’s and the caretaker at the cemetery where everyone believes Naomi is buried — including Blackburn.

The Caretaker is a gorgeous, tightly plotted novel that moves seamlessly through the points of view of relatives and townspeople caught in the path of these star-crossed lovers and their duplicitous families.

More to Explore: Catch Ron Rash in conversation with Wiley Cash. New podcast episodes air October 1 and 15. Find out where to listen at ourstate.com/podcasts.