If you happened to see Maximum Shelf yesterday, you will notice that our lovely Mr. Wiley Cash was featured. A Land More Kind Than Home comes out in paperback next week, so it will be an excellent opportunity for you to grab some copies for book clubs.
I'm going to include just one question and thoughtful response from the interview, but you should really click here to read the whole thing:
What was the most challenging aspect of writing this novel for you?
The early drafts of the novel were written while I was in graduate
school in Lafayette, Louisiana, and the later drafts were written and
all of the revision was done while I was teaching at Bethany College in
West Virginia. I wanted this novel to feel thick with the atmosphere of
western North Carolina, but I obviously wasn't anywhere near that place
while I was writing it. But that's probably the place I love more than
any other in this world, and I wrote about the landscape to honor it and
experience it as if I were there. But writing about a place you love
but can't visit whenever you'd like is challenging.
First, I wanted to write an atmospheric novel in which place was just
as important a character as the protagonist and antagonist. But because
I wrote this novel while I was in school and revised it while I was in
my first year of teaching a 4/4 load, I had to take long breaks from it.
Sometimes it was difficult to go back and re-immerse myself in the
place I'd created on the page. But I can tell you that music helped a
lot; western North Carolina musicians like Malcolm Holcombe and Shannon
Whitworth really took me back there, as did the photography of folks
like Rob Amberg and Tim Barnwell. Of course I went back to the mountains
of North Carolina every chance I got. My sister and her family live in
Burnsville, which is right next door to where this novel is set in
Madison County, and I've still got a lot of friends who don't mind me
showing up for a weekend at their homes in Asheville.
Second, it's hard to write about a place you love while staying true
to what it is. You don't want your romantic perception of that place to
cloud the reality of what it is. You also don't want to disappoint or
offend anyone who calls that place home. I love the North Carolina
mountains and I longed for them every second I sat down at my desk to
write about them; I hope people who read this book can feel that.
– Annie