Mississippi novelist William Faulkner once said of the place in which most of his fiction is set, “. . . I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it. . . .” His “little postage stamp of native soil” was Oxford, Mississippi, and the surrounding Lafayette County. These he imagined as his town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County, where created people, entire families, local history, and more. I’m not a Faulkner scholar, so I don’t know how many novels he built on his “native soil,” but his oeuvre includes many of the greatest works of 20th-century American literature.
I make no claim at all in the direction of challenging Faulkner and his achievement, but I’m not above stealing his “postage stamp” idea. The first short story I wrote–“Jamboree,” for Dr. Jeff Rackham’s fiction writing class at UNC-Asheville, circa 1994)–was set in a place very much like Madison County, North Carolina, where I grew up after my parents “moved back home” in the early 1960s. The second story, “To the Moon, Alice,” was set in Nashville, long (and maybe still) my second home, but after that, all other stories, including Gabriel’s Songbook, are set in Madison County, specifically in and around my recreation of a town called Runion.
Runion was a sawmill town that existed on the French Broad River between Barnard and Hot Springs in the first few decades of the 1900s. But when the sawmill shut down (in the late 1920’s or early ’30s, I’m guessing), the town followed. When my brother Jerry and I went there a number of springs ago, we found a few structures remaining: a chimney and house foundation, with two lines of jonquils still blooming (probably on each side of a walkway up to the house’s front or back door); the foundations of the sawmill; the concrete vault for the paymaster’s shack; a pile of wooden rubble where the one-room schoolhouse had fallen in on itself. Besides the row of jonquils, the most haunting image in my mind is that of the grass growing beneath the trees. This wasn’t the variety of grass that would grow naturally in a wooded area. It must have grown in the front yards of a few streets’ worth of shacks in which Runion’s 1,000 or so people lived.
I recreated Runion as the place to set my Madison County fiction. As you can see from my hand-drawn map below, I made Runion mostly from bits of Marshall and Mars Hill. It has Marshall’s river setting, its Main Street and Back Street; it has Mars Hill’s university in Runion State University, which is in turn a mash-up of Mars Hill College (as I knew it), UNC-Asheville, and East Tennessee State University. I imagined an island similar to the one in Marshall, but right up against the town side of the river rather than on the other side — that’s Stackhouse Park, where Gabriel’s Songbook begins. Across the French Broad from Runion is Piney Ridge, which is mostly an indiscriminate mash-up of Sandy Mush, Little Pine, and Big Pine. Walnut (not pictured in the map), where I grew up, comes into the fiction some but wears its earlier name Jewel Hill.
I recently finished the first draft of my second book of fiction, a collection of twelve stories, each of which takes place in or near Runion a single month of the year 1999. (That is, a story set in January, one in February, and so on through December, but further info on that in another post.) Much more so than Gabriel’s Songbook, these stories bring Runion to life. So, I wanted to be able to see where my characters were when they were in town or on the RSU campus. I’d made a sketch of Runion some years ago, but the hand-drawn map below is much more detailed. If the story collection–working title: A Twilight Reel–finds a publisher, then it would be cool if a real artist could make this into something that could be printed in the book.
It looks like a terrific little town, like some place where I would love to live!