Wiley Cash Reflects On His Debut Novel And The Creativity North Carolina Inspires

Wiley Cash comes from a long line of North Carolina storytellers. He's the New York Times bestselling author of books such as The Last Ballad and This Dark Road to Mercy. WFDD listeners chose Cash's first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, as their fall read. 

Assistant News Director Bethany Chafin spoke with Cash about his debut novel and the state that continues to inspire him.

Interview Highlights

On the role that North Carolina plays in his writing:

I think it's important for me to be a North Carolina writer because this is the place that I'm from and this is really the place that I know best. I know North Carolina better than any place in the world. I know its geography. I know its people. I know its cultural traditions. I know its political history. I know its cultural and sociological history. And so it's a place that I feel especially qualified to write about. And I come to it with a knowledge base that I can intuit, that I don't necessarily have to go find. And for a writer, especially a creative writer, being able to draw from an existing well that you don't have to continually reestablish after every book by hitting the library stacks with the databases. It's an incredibly invigorating thing to have a place just come out of you because it's always been in you. And that's what it feels like when I write about North Carolina.

On the title, A Land More Kind Than Home:

That wasn't the original title; the original title was much shorter. The original title was The Rain Barrel, and my editor, who's actually a Wake Forest grad, thought that that title didn't fully encapsulate the emotional landscape of the novel. And so we began looking for quotes from other North Carolina writers and we settled on that one. It's from Thomas Wolfe's novel, You Can't Go Home Again, which was his last published novel, published after he passed away. And for the purposes of my novel, "a land more kind than home" hinted at some better place than where these characters were psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. They are all wanting something. They're all striving for some kind of deliverance, even Julie, even Carson Chambliss to a certain degree, certainly Clem and Jess and Adelaide. And so that title does kind of fit that book — of people kind of crying out for a place that is not the place where they currently are.

On deciding to tell the book from three different perspectives:

The more I worked on it, I eventually knew that Jess was going to tell part of the story and then Adelaide, I knew, was going to represent kind of the stalwart spiritual purity of the story. And then Clem kind of came along much later. And he represents kind of the rational mind. His is the mind [that's] the closest to the reader. But he represents, kind of the outside community looking in on this tragedy and trying to make sense of it. And so by the time that I realized I had these three representatives from three different parts of the story — Jess represents the family, Adelaide represents the church, Clem represents the broader community, I knew I had kind of a holistic approach to this story that would check a lot of boxes.

On the takeaways from his first novel:

When I think about writing that book, I think about privacy and possibility and hope and how daring I was to believe that anything could ever come of it. That's what I think about when I think about that book. I started writing that book in the spring of 2004, sold it to my editor in the fall of 2010, and it came out in the spring of 2012. And so I lived with that book without it being a book for almost eight years. So I think about this great amount of time that I had. You know, I didn't have kids, we lived in West Virginia, and I think about the audacity of believing that something could come of it.

*Editor's Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.