(Seated left to right) William Gay, Barry Hannah, host Gene Edwards, and Ron Rash

Language can do “magical things.” Novelist and poet Ron Rash became intrigued with words as a child, when he listened to “The Cat in the Hat.” It struck him “as something pretty marvelous that you could do with splotches of ink on paper.”

 

Acclaimed authors Barry Hannah and William Gay join Rash at the Writers' roundtable. The three masters of Southern Gothic talk about what they write, why they write, and how they write.

 

“When I'm really writing well on a book, I get up very early,” says Hannah, who works initially in longhand. “Four thirty or five. Write until about two in the afternoon.” “And I can't write sequentially,” adds Gay. “I don't know all the story at the same time.” So he writes what he knows and them assembles “it like a jigsaw puzzle.” Rash regards himself as a potter molding his first draft. “You just get in some clay,” he explains, “and then you're shaping it.”

 

These authors are proud to write on the wrong side of the tracks—where, as host Gene Edwards puts it, “People are yelling at each other and shooting guns and drinking whiskey and carrying on.” When it comes to sudden violence, Rash explains that “is where character is revealed. You get characters in these life and death situations, and that's when you really get to the essence of what a person is.” It's fiction that sheds light on people and society.

 

Gay let his “people talk the way people of that time and class would talk.” Hannah hears the lines in his head. “I didn't reproduce them from the speech of others,” he adds. Rash uses the similes and metaphors of his native western North Carolina . “They refer to the natural world, which is the most universal of languages.”

 

From stories of their earliest interest in writing, to their first publications, to what they're writing now, these Renegade Writers laugh as they regale us with stories of their writing lives.