The Common Word Community Read brings the UNC Asheville community together each semester around a shared text to engage in a collective educational experience that features lectures and discussions in a welcoming and respectful environment. The program is curated by Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author, alumnus of the class of 2000, and UNCA’s Executive Director of Literary Arts.
Friends, I’d long planned for the spring selection to be We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy by Natalie Baszile, and I was thrilled that Baszile would be joining us as the 2025 Wima Dykeman Writer-in-Residence. But nature had other plans, and because the Dykeman homestead was damaged by Hurricane Helene we’ve had to reschedule Baszile’s residency to next academic year. Pivot to the local boy.
I’ve always considered selecting Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel for Common Word because the spring series usually ends in April, and if you know anything about Wolfe’s fiction you know that in Wolfe’s fiction it is always either October or April, perhaps because fall and spring are the best times to be in Asheville, North Carolina, where Wolfe was born in 1900 and where his autobiographical debut novel is set. But then Hurricane Helene ravaged Western North Carolina – is still ravaging Western North Carolina -, and my reasons for selecting Look Homeward, Angel changed. I’ve now selected it because it’s about a place I love.
Why do we love a place? I love my current home Wilmington, North Carolina, for many reasons. My wife Mallory was raised there, and the ways in which the place shaped her speaks to why I love her. Our two daughters, Early and Juniper, were both born there, and I love them more than anything in the world, and I especially love the ways their senses of nature and art and justice have been informed by this place’s environment, culture, and history.
But I have never loved a place more than I love Asheville, North Carolina, and the mountains that surround it, so I want to talk about that place and about one of the writers, Asheville native Thomas Wolfe, who is most resonant of my feelings about the place itself.
My introduction to Asheville came in December of 1993 during a winter storm when my sister Jada moved to the city just after Christmas. She moved into an apartment in a nineteenth century rambling hotel on Charlotte Street called the Manor Inn. Hardwood floors, plaster walls, leaded windows, drafty hallways echoing with footsteps. It was the spookiest place I’d ever spent the night, and I loved it. It shaped how I would always view the city of Asheville: old, dusty, Gothic, mysterious, but full of possibility, perhaps the same possibility my sister was feeling in that moment, freshly graduated from nursing school and excited and nervous to be living alone in a new city.
Looking back, that trip to Asheville reminds me a little of how Thomas Wolfe wrote about W.O. Gant’s arrival to the town of Altamont, a fictionalized version of Wolfe’s hometown, in the late nineteenth century, back when the railroad heading west stopped at the town of Old Fort, which Wolfe calls Old Stockade, and travelers would have to take horse-drawn wagons over the pass into Asheville. W.O. Gant is based on Wolfe’s father W.O. Wolfe. Both the man and the character were stone cutters from Pennsylvania, impossibly tall and thin, impossibly self-centered and theatrical. In the novel and in his life, W.O. heads into the North Carolina mountains all alone.
All day, under a wet gray sky of October, Oliver rode westward
across the mighty state. As he stared mournfully out the window at
the great raw land so sparsely tilled by the futile and occasional
little farms, which seemed to have made only little grubbing
patches in the wilderness, his heart went cold and leaden in him.
He thought of the great barns of Pennsylvania, the ripe bending of
golden grain, the plenty, the order, the clean thrift of the
people. And he thought of how he had set out to get order and
position for himself, and of the rioting confusion of his life, the
blot and blur of years, and the red waste of his youth.
By God! he thought. I’m getting old! Why here?
The grisly parade of the specter years trooped through his brain.
Suddenly, he saw that his life had been channeled by a series of
accidents: a mad Rebel singing of Armageddon, the sound of a bugle
on the road, the mule-hoofs of the army, the silly white face of an
angel in a dusty shop, a slut’s pert wiggle of her hams as she
passed by. He had reeled out of warmth and plenty into this barren
land: as he stared out the window and saw the fallow unworked
earth, the great raw lift of the Piedmont, the muddy red clay
roads, and the slattern people gaping at the stations–a lean
farmer gangling above his reins, a dawdling negro, a gap-toothed
yokel, a hard sallow woman with a grimy baby–the strangeness of
destiny stabbed him with fear. How came he here from the clean
Dutch thrift of his youth into this vast lost earth of rickets?
The train rattled on over the reeking earth. Rain fell steadily.
A brakeman came draftily into the dirty plush coach and emptied a
scuttle of coal into the big stove at the end. High empty laughter
shook a group of yokels sprawled on two turned seats. The bell
tolled mournfully above the clacking wheels. There was a droning
interminable wait at a junction-town near the foot-hills. Then the
train moved on again across the vast rolling earth.
Dusk came. The huge bulk of the hills was foggily emergent. Small
smoky lights went up in the hillside shacks. The train crawled
dizzily across high trestles spanning ghostly hawsers of water.
Far up, far down, plumed with wisps of smoke, toy cabins stuck to
bank and gulch and hillside. The train toiled sinuously up among
gouged red cuts with slow labor. As darkness came, Oliver
descended at the little town of Old Stockade where the rails ended.
The last great wall of the hills lay stark above him. As he left
the dreary little station and stared into the greasy lamplight of a
country store, Oliver felt that he was crawling, like a great
beast, into the circle of those enormous hills to die.
The next morning he resumed his journey by coach. His destination
was the little town of Altamont, twenty-four miles away beyond the
rim of the great outer wall of the hills. As the horses strained
slowly up the mountain road Oliver’s spirit lifted a little. It
was a gray-golden day in late October, bright and windy. There was
a sharp bite and sparkle in the mountain air: the range soared
above him, close, immense, clean, and barren. The trees rose gaunt
and stark: they were almost leafless. The sky was full of windy
white rags of cloud; a thick blade of mist washed slowly around the
rampart of a mountain.
Below him a mountain stream foamed down its rocky bed, and he could
see little dots of men laying the track that would coil across the
hill toward Altamont. Then the sweating team lipped the gulch of
the mountain, and, among soaring and lordly ranges that melted away
in purple mist, they began the slow descent toward the high plateau
on which the town of Altamont was built.
In the haunting eternity of these mountains, rimmed in their
enormous cup, he found sprawled out on its hundred hills and
hollows a town of four thousand people.
There were new lands. His heart lifted.
The first time I visited my sister in Asheville she took me to Malaprop’s, a now iconic bookstore in downtown Asheville. That day we visited Malaprop’s first location, where the bookstore was on the street-level floor and a coffee shop sat in the basement down a flight of stairs. On my first visit to Malaprop’s I bought a copy of Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, a novel based largely on Kerouac’s experience of working as a lonely fire spotter in the forests of the Great Northwest. Although some of you might not have heard of Thomas Wolfe before reading this, I bet most of you have heard of Jack Kerouac, author of the iconic American novel On the Road and one of the leading minds of the Beat Generation. Kerouac grew up enamored of Thomas Wolfe’s writing and biography, even going so far as to believe he spotted Thomas Wolfe in 1937 when Kerouac made his first crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge on foot. Who knows? At 6’6” and with his lumbering gait, Wolfe would have been easy to spot. While Kerouac owes his autobiographical prose and lush language to Wolfe, I think he also owes his titles: Wolfe had Of Time and The River in 1935 and Kerouac had On the Road in 1957. Wolfe had Look Homeward, Angel in 1929 and Kerouac had Desolation Angels in 1965. Wolfe had The Web and the Rock, which was published after his death in 1939, and Kerouac had The Town and the City, which was his debut novel, in 1950. Kerouac defended Wolfe as America’s greatest writer, and even Wolfe’s contemporary, William Faulkner, believed that Wolfe was the most talented of their generation, a group of writers that included Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
But when I moved to Asheville to attend the university there in 1996 I would learn of Thomas Wolfe not because of his literary legacy, but because in 1998 an arsonist set fire to the boarding house Wolfe’s mother operated from 1906 until her death in 1945, and where Wolfe had been raised from the age of five until he left for college in Chapel Hill at the age of sixteen. The boarding house, which Wolfe’s mother Julia eventually expanded to 29 rooms and over 6,000 square feet, never felt like home to Thomas Wolfe, perhaps because the house was always seen as nothing but a piece of property by his mother.
Eliza saw Altamont not as so many hills, buildings, people: she saw
it in the pattern of a gigantic blueprint. She knew the history of
every piece of valuable property–who bought it, who sold it, who
owned it in 1893, and what it was now worth. She watched the tides
of traffic cannily; she knew by what corners the largest number of
people passed in a day or an hour; she was sensitive to every
growing-pain of the young town, gauging from year to year its
growth in any direction, and deducing the probable direction of its
future expansion. She judged distances critically, saw at once
where the beaten route to an important center was stupidly
circuitous, and looking in a straight line through houses and lots,
she said:
“There’ll be a street through here some day.”
Her vision of land and population was clear, crude, focal–there
was nothing technical about it: it was extraordinary for its direct
intensity. Her instinct was to buy cheaply where people would
come; to keep out of pockets and cul-de-sac, to buy on a street
that moved toward a center, and that could be given extension.
Thus, she began to think of Dixieland. It was situated five
minutes from the public square, on a pleasant sloping middle-class
street of small homes and boarding-houses. Dixieland was a big
cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty high-
ceilinged rooms: it had a rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance,
and was painted a dirty yellow. It had a pleasant green front
yard, not deep but wide, bordered by a row of young deep-bodied
maples: there was a sloping depth of one hundred and ninety feet, a
frontage of one hundred and twenty. And Eliza, looking toward the
town, said: “They’ll put a street behind there some day.”
In winter, the wind blew howling blasts under the skirts of
Dixieland: its back end was built high off the ground on wet
columns of rotting brick. Its big rooms were heated by a small
furnace which sent up, when charged with fire, a hot dry enervation
to the rooms of the first floor, and a gaseous but chill radiation
to those upstairs.
The place was for sale. Its owner was a middle-aged horse-faced
gentleman whose name was the Reverend Wellington Hodge: he had
begun life favorably in Altamont as a Methodist minister, but had
run foul of trouble when he began to do double service to the Lord
God of Hosts and John Barleycorn–his evangelical career came to an
abrupt ending one winter’s night when the streets were dumb with
falling snow. Wellington, clad only in his winter heavies, made a
wild sortie from Dixieland at two in the morning, announcing the
kingdom of God and the banishment of the devil, in a mad marathon
through the streets that landed him panting but victorious in front
of the Post Office. Since then, with the assistance of his wife,
he had eked out a hard living at the boarding-house. Now, he was
spent, disgraced, and weary of the town.
Besides, the sheltering walls of Dixieland inspired him with
horror–he felt that the malign influence of the house had governed
his own disintegration. He was a sensitive man, and his promenades
about his estate were checked by inhibited places: the cornice of
the long girdling porch where a lodger had hanged himself one day
at dawn, the spot in the hall where the consumptive had collapsed
in a hemorrhage, the room where the old man cut his throat. He
wanted to return to his home, a land of fast horses, wind-bent
grass, and good whisky–Kentucky. He was ready to sell Dixieland.
Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully, went to town by
way of Spring Street more and more often.
“That’s going to be a good piece of property some day,” she said to
Gant.
I purchased my first copy of Look Homeward, Angel in the spring of 2003 when I was about to leave Asheville to move to Louisiana for graduate school. I didn’t open the novel until I was living in Lafayette, and what I found in reading Wolfe’s autobiographical novel set in Asheville was a map of a place I loved, which meant I found a map of my heart. Speaking of maps, in the winter of 2006 I won a grant from the Thomas Wolfe Society to study Wolfe’s papers – which amount to over two tons of material – that are housed in the Widener Library at Harvard, where Wolfe received a master’s degree in playwriting after graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill.
While I was researching Wolfe’s early plays, I couldn’t help but have a look at his early manuscripts of the novel that would become Look Homeward, Angel. Imagine my delight when I picked up a folder and a tattered, browned piece of paper slipped out. I picked it up and saw that it was a map, drawn and labeled in pencil in Wolfe’s instantly recognizable hand. The map was of downtown Asheville, and on it Wolfe had written the names of streets I recognized, streets I had walked countless times over the years: Broadway, Walnut, Spruce, Market. On the map, Wolfe had crossed out the names and written the names he would use when recasting the streets in his fictionalized Altamont. It was no mystery that he had done this, but to me it felt like I was holding the Rosetta Stone, a great key or legend that would reveal the art of transmogrifying our lives into literature. I remember gathering the materials on my desk and turning them in, then packing up my belongings and walking down to Harvard Square in the snow. I went to a coffee shop and ordered a cup of coffee and a donut and stood at the window, staring out onto the gathering snow where it blanketed the sidewalk and the cars parked along the curb, reflecting on the bit of magic that had just passed through my hands. I can remember this moment as clearly and cleanly as any other moment in my life.
Aside from writing about a place I love, Wolfe also wrote about characters I grew to love, most of them his real family members that he recast in starring roles, portrayals that many found unflattering or denied altogether. For example, his mother Julia Wolfe, owner and proprietor of a boarding house known as the Old Kentucky Home in the city of Asheville, refused to acknowledge that she might just be the basis of a fictional character named Eliza Gant, owner and proprietor of a boarding house known as Dixieland in the city of Altamont.
But one undeniable portrait was that of Wolfe’s older brother Ben, who was eight years older than Wolfe, and who died from influenza in an upstairs bedroom at the Old Kentucky Home when he was 26 and Wolfe was 18. In a family of outspoken, larger than life personalities, Ben, in both his life and in Wolfe’s literature, was soft-spoken and slight, ironic yet caring, overly conscious of his younger brother’s needs but also the first to tell him to wash his face or change his clothes or work harder on his paper route, which Ben oversaw.
In one particular scene, not long after Eugene, Wolfe’s fictional alter ego, has returned home from a semester at the state university, Ben breaks the news that he too is in college, unbeknownst to the rest of the family. The scene is heartbreaking in its delicate portrayal of Ben’s tentative hope and Eugene’s understanding of his older brother’s bruised ego, much of it a result of not having the chances that the baby of the family has had.
“How’d you get along at college this year, ‘Gene?” he asked
presently.
“I passed my work. I made fair grades–if that’s what you mean? I
did better–this Spring,” he added, with some difficulty. “It was
hard getting started–at the beginning.”
“You mean last Fall?”
Eugene nodded.
“What was the matter?” said Ben, scowling at him. “Did the other
boys make fun of you?”
“Yes,” said Eugene, in a low voice.
“Why did they? You mean they didn’t think you were good enough for
them? Did they look down on you? Was that it?” said Ben savagely.
“No,” said Eugene, very red in the face. “No. That had nothing to
do with it. I look funny, I suppose. I looked funny to them.”
“What do you mean you look funny?” said Ben pugnaciously. “There’s
nothing wrong with you, you know, if you didn’t go around looking
like a bum. In God’s name,” he exclaimed angrily, “when did you
get that hair cut last? What do you think you are: the Wild Man
from Borneo?”
“I don’t like barbers!” Eugene burst out furiously. “That’s why!
I don’t want them to go sticking their damned dirty fingers in my
mouth. Whose business is it, if I never get my hair cut?”
“A man is judged by his appearance to-day,” said Ben sententiously.
“I was reading an article by a big business man in The Post the
other day. He says he always looks at a man’s shoes before he
gives him a job.”
He spoke seriously, haltingly, in the same way that he read,
without genuine conviction. Eugene writhed to hear his fierce
condor prattle this stale hash of the canny millionaires, like any
obedient parrot in a teller’s cage. Ben’s voice had a dull flat
quality as he uttered these admirable opinions: he seemed to grope
behind it all for some answer, with hurt puzzled eyes. As he
faltered along, with scowling intensity, through a success-sermon,
there was something poignantly moving in his effort: it was the
effort of his strange and lonely spirit to find some entrance into
life–to find success, position, companionship. And it was as if,
spelling the words out with his mouth, a settler in the Bronx from
the fat Lombard plain, should try to unriddle the new world by
deciphering the World Almanac, or as if some woodsman, trapped by
the winter, and wasted by an obscure and terrible disease, should
hunt its symptoms and its cure in a book of Household Remedies.
“Did the Old Man send you enough money to get along on?” Ben asked.
“Were you able to hold your own with the other boys? He can afford
it, you know. Don’t let him stint you. Make him give it to you,
‘Gene.”
“I had plenty,” said Eugene, “all that I needed.”
“This is the time you need it–not later,” said Ben. “Make him put
you through college. This is an age of specialization. They’re
looking for college-trained men.”
“Yes,” said Eugene. He spoke obediently, indifferently, the hard
bright mail of his mind undented by the jargon: within, the Other
One, who had no speech, saw.
“So get your education,” said Ben, scowling vaguely. “All the Big
Men–Ford, Edison, Rockefeller–whether they had it or not, say
it’s a good thing.”
“Why didn’t you go yourself?” said Eugene curiously.
“I didn’t have any one to tell me,” said Ben. “Besides, you don’t
think the Old Man would give me anything, do you?” He laughed
cynically. “It’s too late now.”
He was silent a moment; he smoked.
“You didn’t know I was taking a course in advertising, did you?” he
asked, grinning.
“No. Where?”
“Through the Correspondence School,” said Ben. “I get my lessons
every week. I don’t know,” he laughed diffidently, “I must be good
at it. I make the highest grades they have–98 or 100 every time.
I get a diploma, if I finish the course.”
A blinding mist swam across the younger brother’s eyes. He did not
know why. A convulsive knot gathered in his throat. He bent his
head quickly and fumbled for his cigarettes. In a moment he said:
“I’m glad you’re doing it. I hope you finish, Ben.”
“You know,” Ben said seriously, “they’ve turned out some Big Men.
I’ll show you the testimonials some time. Men who started with
nothing: now they’re holding down big jobs.”
“I hope you do,” said Eugene.
“So, you see you’re not the only College Man around here,” said Ben
with a grin. In a moment, he went on gravely: “You’re the last
hope, ‘Gene. Go on and finish up, if you have to steal the money.
The rest of us will never amount to a damn. Try to make something
out of yourself. Hold your head up! You’re as good as any of
them…”
All 600-plus page novels need an ending, and Look Homeward, Angel features one of my favorite endings in all of literature, combining the place I love with characters I’ve come to love. By now, Ben has died, and Eugene’s post-graduation summer home from college is coming to an end. He is about to leave for the North to study playwriting. One night, after midnight, he escapes the chaos of his mother’s boarding house and wanders up to the empty square, which is Pack Square, where so much of his life in Altamont has been lived over the years.
The Square lay under blazing moonlight. The fountain pulsed with a
steady breezeless jet: the water fell upon the pool with a punctual
slap. No one came into the Square.
The chimes of the bank’s clock struck the quarter after three as
Eugene entered from the northern edge, by Academy Street.
He came slowly over past the fire department and the City Hall. On
Gant’s corner, the Square dipped sharply down toward N-town, as
if it had been bent at the edge.
Eugene saw his father’s name, faded, on the old brick in moonlight.
On the stone porch of the shop, the angels held their marble
posture. They seemed to have frozen, in the moonlight.
Leaning against the iron railing of the porch, above the sidewalk,
a man stood smoking. Troubled and a little afraid, Eugene came
over. Slowly, he mounted the long wooden steps, looking carefully
at the man’s face. It was half-obscured in shadow.
“Is there anybody there?” said Eugene.
No one answered.
But, as Eugene reached the top, he saw that the man was Ben.
Ben stared at him a moment without speaking. Although Eugene could
not see his face very well under the obscuring shadow of his gray
felt hat, he knew that he was scowling.
“Ben?” said Eugene doubtfully, faltering a little on the top step.
“Is it you, Ben?”
“Yes,” said Ben. In a moment, he added in a surly voice: “Who did
you think it was, you little idiot?”
“I wasn’t sure,” said Eugene somewhat timidly. “I couldn’t see
your face.”
They were silent a moment. Then Eugene, clearing his throat in his
embarrassment, said: “I thought you were dead, Ben.”
“Ah-h!” said Ben contemptuously, jerking his head sharply upward.
“Listen to this, won’t you?”
He drew deeply on his cigarette: the spiral fumes coiled out and
melted in the moon-bright silence.
“No,” he said in a moment, quietly. “No, I am not dead.”
Eugene came up on the porch and sat down on a limestone base, up-
ended. Ben turned, in a moment, and climbed up on the rail,
bending forward comfortably upon his knees.
Eugene fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette, with fingers that
were stiff and trembling. He was not frightened: he was speechless
with wonder and strong eagerness, and afraid to betray his thoughts
to ridicule. He lighted a cigarette. Presently he said,
painfully, hesitantly, in apology:
“Ben, are you a ghost?”
Ben did not mock.
“No,” he said. “I am not a ghost.”
There was silence again, while Eugene sought timorously for words.
“I hope,” he began presently, with a small cracked laugh, “I hope,
then, this doesn’t mean that I’m crazy?”
“Why not?” said Ben, with a swift flickering grin. “Of course
you’re crazy.”
“Then,” said Eugene slowly, “I’m imagining all this?”
“In heaven’s name!” Ben cried irritably. “How should I know?
Imagining all what?”
“What I mean,” said Eugene, “is, are we here talking together, or
not?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Ben. “How should I know?”
With a strong rustle of marble and a cold sigh of weariness, the
angel nearest Eugene moved her stone foot and lifted her arm to a
higher balance. The slender lily stipe shook stiffly in her
elegant cold fingers.
“Did you see that?” Eugene cried excitedly.
“Did I see what?” said Ben, annoyed.
“Th-th-that angel there!” Eugene chattered, pointing with a
trembling finger. “Did you see it move? It lifted its arm.”
“What of it?” Ben asked irritably. “It has a right to, hasn’t it?
You know,” he added with biting sarcasm, “there’s no law against an
angel lifting its arm if it wants to.”
“No, I suppose not,” Eugene admitted slowly, after a moment.
“Only, I’ve always heard–“
“Ah! Do you believe all you hear, fool?” Ben cried fiercely.
“Because,” he added more calmly, in a moment, drawing on his
cigarette, “you’re in a bad way if you do.”
There was again silence while they smoked. Then Ben said:
“When are you leaving, ‘Gene?”
“To-morrow,” Eugene answered.
“Do you know why you are going, or are you just taking a ride on
the train?”
“I know! Of course–I know why I’m going!” Eugene said angrily,
confused. He stopped abruptly, bewildered, chastened. Ben
continued to scowl at him. Then, quietly, with humility, Eugene
said:
“No, Ben. I don’t know why I’m going. Perhaps you’re right.
Perhaps I just want a ride on the train.”
“When are you coming back, ‘Gene?” said Ben.
“Why–at the end of the year, I think,” Eugene answered.
“No,” said Ben, “you’re not.”
“What do you mean, Ben?” Eugene said, troubled.
“You’re not coming back, ‘Gene,” said Ben softly. “Do you know
that?”
There was a pause.
“Yes,” said Eugene, “I know it.”
“Why aren’t you coming back?” said Ben.
Eugene caught fiercely at the neckband of his shirt with a clawed
hand.
“I want to go! Do you hear!” he cried.
“Yes,” said Ben. “So did I. Why do you want to go?”
“There’s nothing here for me,” Eugene muttered.
“How long have you felt like this?” said Ben.
“Always,” said Eugene. “As long as I can remember. But I didn’t
know about it until you–” He stopped.
“Until I what?” said Ben.
There was a pause.
“You are dead, Ben,” Eugene muttered. “You must be dead. I saw
you die, Ben.” His voice rose sharply. “I tell you, I saw you
die. Don’t you remember? The front room upstairs that the
dentist’s wife has now? Don’t you remember, Ben? Coker, Helen,
Bessie Gant who nursed you, Mrs. Pert? The oxygen tank? I tried
to hold your hands together when they gave it to you.” His voice
rose to a scream. “Don’t you remember? I tell you, you are dead,
Ben.”
“Fool,” said Ben fiercely. “I am not dead.”
There was a silence.
“Then,” said Eugene very slowly, “which of us is the ghost, I
wonder?”
Ben did not answer…
But as he spoke, the phantom years scrolled up their vision, and
only the eyes of Ben burned terribly in darkness, without an
answer.
And day came, and the song of waking birds, and the Square, bathed
in the young pearl light of morning. And a wind stirred lightly in
the Square, and, as he looked, Ben, like a fume of smoke, was
melted into dawn.
And the angels on Gant’s porch were frozen in hard marble silence,
and at a distance life awoke, and there was a rattle of lean
wheels, a slow clangor of shod hoofs. And he heard the whistle
wail along the river.
Yet, as he stood for the last time by the angels of his father’s
porch, it seemed as if the Square already were far and lost; or, I
should say, he was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town
he has left, yet does not say “The town is near,” but turns his
eyes upon the distant soaring ranges.
While Eugene “turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges” as he hopes to breach the rim of the hills in his escape from Altamont, or Asheville, I spent years and years turning my eyes “upon the distant soaring ranges” in an attempt to get back in. My debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, whose title is taken from a quote in Wolfe’s final, posthumously published novel You Can’t Go Home Again, is a love letter to Western North Carolina and Thomas Wolfe. So much of my fiction has been.
Why do we love a place? I’ve spent a little time telling you why I love Wilmington and Asheville. But I want to ask you another question before our time is up. How do we love a place? We love it by writing fiction or poetry or songs about it, and we love it by supporting it through organizations like UNC-Asheville and BeLoved Asheville. By reading this, whether you’re in Asheville right now or at some other spot elsewhere in the world, you are loving a place, and I hope you’ll spend the semester reading Look Homeward, Angel and joining us in-person or virtually for these events so you can discover more reasons to love this place that so many of us have loved so well and for so long.
Wiley Cash, January 18, 2025