SAINTS AT THE RIVER by Ron Rash
  SAINTS
AT THE RIVER began with a single image, a child’s face peering up
through water. Soon afterward I began a novel about a twelve-year-old girl
whose body is trapped in a whitewater river. I chose to write the novel
from the perspective of a male newspaper reporter named Allen Hemphill, an
outsider who comes to the South Carolina mountains to cover the conflict
among parents, environmentalists, and local people about what can and
should be done to retrieve the child’s body. But I soon realized that it
was not the reporter who could best tell the story but the female
photographer who accompanied him, a woman named Maggie Glenn who had grown
up in the Appalachian community where the drowning had occurred. That
Maggie would reveal insights an outsider would not have was important to
the novel, but that wasn’t why I made the change. As soon as I had
introduced Maggie into the story, I sensed that there was some deep
connection between her and the drowned girl. The connection was not
something I could articulate, but I did know that Maggie, not Allen, was
the narrator who would best allow me to enter into the mystery of that
connection.
One other, more conscious decision came early on. My family has deep
roots in the southern Appalachian Mountains, and it is this landscape that
is the setting of almost all my work. The natural beauty of the region has
been greatly damaged in my lifetime-rivers dammed and polluted, mountains
leveled and scarred for developments, government-sponsored clear cutting
of forests. Even what is “protected” is threatened, as is the case of
the Chattooga and Tuckasegee rivers where silting and pollution are caused
by construction on each stream’s headwaters. But despite my
environmental leanings, I’m a writer first, and fiction works best in
muddied waters. So I tried to write a novel where issues of right and
wrong (as well the characters who held them) were complex, where
environmentalists and those who opposed them would both vie for the reader’s
sympathies as these true believers in their causes, these saints, gathered
at the river.
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