“I never feel as at home anywhere in the world as I do when I wake up in the morning and I’m in Asheville,” says best-selling novelist Wiley Cash, the UNC Asheville graduate who will return to deliver the commencement address.
The morning of May 9, Cash ’00 will look out upon an audience of more than 470 of graduates, their friends and families, and talk about an important theme in his own life. “I’m probably going to talk about how to love what you do and do what you love, and have security in that kind of pursuit,” says Cash. “I think too often, young people are discouraged from doing what they love, from pursuing their true interests and passions. It’s dismissed as being impractical.”
Fortunately, Cash continued his practice of creative writing after his bachelor’s degree, delving deeper into his passion while earning a master’s degree at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a Ph.D. at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He continued to hone his writing while teaching at different universities including his alma mater. “I taught Humanities 214 and Arts and Ideas. … That was some of the most satisfying teaching I’ve done.” He later became an assistant professor of English at Bethany College, and this semester is teaching writing at UNC-Chapel Hill.
But his novels now provide his principal income. And his breakthrough first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home (William Morrow, 2012), takes its setting and flavor from Madison County just north of Asheville, a place Cash frequented as an undergraduate. “I’d go up there every chance I got and camp out or go up to Hot Springs, or just drive the roads. … When I went up to Madison in the 90s, it was wild in the best sense of the word, and traditional in the best sense of the word and I really felt that,” says Cash.
“I think for a writer, finding a place that’s ‘fixed’ in real life in the present time makes it easier to grasp that place in your mind to write about. That’s why many writers don’t write about contemporary America because we’re always in flux and trying to figure out what we value and what’s important to us,” says Cash. “But in the 90s, you went to Madison County and it could have been 1970. It could have been 1940 – it was relatively unchanged.”
Newcomers and new influences have changed Madison County since then, and Cash also is in a very different position than he was during his own May 2000 Commencement. He returns to the site with two best-sellers to his credit and a third novel in the offing. “UNC Asheville is always a place that I’m drawn back to,” he says.
Cash served for some years on the National Alumni Council and has maintained ties with classmates and professors. And on May 9, in a plot twist no one would have predicted 15 years ago, his alma mater will bestow upon him an honorary doctor of humane letters degree. “It’ll definitely be emotional and kind of amazing to me, kind of unbelievable.”
For more information, visit the commencement web page.