She-Rain's Brush With Cold Mountain. My Open Letter to Charles Frazier
One Carolina Writer Salutes Another Who Won Many Hearts (and The National Book Award).
Charles Frazier, I must thank you.
Across the pages of Cold Mountain, your imagination ran in full color. You committed an act of beauty. You proved the power of fiction to reveal our deepest humanity. These years later, I still stand in awe of the world you called to life.
In Ruby, you tapped an under-estimated heart, and the survivor latent in us all poured out. Rene Zellweger’s portrayal of her on film, though brilliant, reveals only a glance at the woman you gave to us. In your Ruby I saw so many of the great women who raised me, only a scant few miles from North Carolina’s Cold Mountain itself.
I saw them, too, in Ada – a survivor who proves, alongside Ruby, that women need never yield grace for strength. For her, your Inman walks a trail of longing whose path calls to us all. Through his journey, you tell the world how a man’s heart can grow strong and worthy when it’s enameled in undiluted love.
Mister Frazier, such praise and much more you’ve clearly heard. Such is the intoxicant of any writer. So many of your readers who venture in here will join me in raising a glass of celebration in your honor.
But in thanking you for the brilliance of Cold Mountain, I must thank you for the existence of She-Rain.
Reading your beautiful book helped give life to my own imagination. It caused me to raise up, from that same Western North Carolina ground, my She-Rain -- a novel of curative love, deep longing, and human heart’s capacity to rise above the worst of times and expectation.
From your pages, to this day, you place a hand to my back. A reminder to my ear that literature, to live with lasting power, must never dwell only in the mind. It must make good room for itself in the heart. While She-Rain takes place in a different time (the early 20th Century), your great Civil War journey story is a part of its legacy. In times when I threatened not to write on, vowing my full-time job in television allowed no room for fiction, your National Book Award-winning novel led me to put one word in front of another, and with joy, as if on a fine trip toward home. Your long journey to the end of Cold Mountain cut a good trail to the celebration of language and storytelling. Sometimes I still open a copy of your book, at random, just to bless myself with its music. The sound of it has a way of leading me to the unique voice that is my own.
So thank you, again, Dr. Charles Frazier. Readers of Cold Mountain, I know legions of you join me in this gratitude. She-Rain debuts nationally March 31 -- a story making way through the same blue Appalachia, venturing to tell a new story of it to the world. Charles Frazier, our tales are vastly different. Yet they ring with the comforts, harsh beauty, and magnetic lore of the American South. To tell such tales becomes a sacred trust. Readers, I hope you find this North Carolina writer kept that trust in good hands. May She-Rain, in some way, live up to the high legacy of Cold Mountain.
Charles Frazier, I must thank you.
Across the pages of Cold Mountain, your imagination ran in full color. You committed an act of beauty. You proved the power of fiction to reveal our deepest humanity. These years later, I still stand in awe of the world you called to life.
In Ruby, you tapped an under-estimated heart, and the survivor latent in us all poured out. Rene Zellweger’s portrayal of her on film, though brilliant, reveals only a glance at the woman you gave to us. In your Ruby I saw so many of the great women who raised me, only a scant few miles from North Carolina’s Cold Mountain itself.
I saw them, too, in Ada – a survivor who proves, alongside Ruby, that women need never yield grace for strength. For her, your Inman walks a trail of longing whose path calls to us all. Through his journey, you tell the world how a man’s heart can grow strong and worthy when it’s enameled in undiluted love.
Mister Frazier, such praise and much more you’ve clearly heard. Such is the intoxicant of any writer. So many of your readers who venture in here will join me in raising a glass of celebration in your honor.
But in thanking you for the brilliance of Cold Mountain, I must thank you for the existence of She-Rain.
Reading your beautiful book helped give life to my own imagination. It caused me to raise up, from that same Western North Carolina ground, my She-Rain -- a novel of curative love, deep longing, and human heart’s capacity to rise above the worst of times and expectation.
From your pages, to this day, you place a hand to my back. A reminder to my ear that literature, to live with lasting power, must never dwell only in the mind. It must make good room for itself in the heart. While She-Rain takes place in a different time (the early 20th Century), your great Civil War journey story is a part of its legacy. In times when I threatened not to write on, vowing my full-time job in television allowed no room for fiction, your National Book Award-winning novel led me to put one word in front of another, and with joy, as if on a fine trip toward home. Your long journey to the end of Cold Mountain cut a good trail to the celebration of language and storytelling. Sometimes I still open a copy of your book, at random, just to bless myself with its music. The sound of it has a way of leading me to the unique voice that is my own.
So thank you, again, Dr. Charles Frazier. Readers of Cold Mountain, I know legions of you join me in this gratitude. She-Rain debuts nationally March 31 -- a story making way through the same blue Appalachia, venturing to tell a new story of it to the world. Charles Frazier, our tales are vastly different. Yet they ring with the comforts, harsh beauty, and magnetic lore of the American South. To tell such tales becomes a sacred trust. Readers, I hope you find this North Carolina writer kept that trust in good hands. May She-Rain, in some way, live up to the high legacy of Cold Mountain.
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