Q&A with Wayne Caldwell

Xpress: “Pisgah” offers a rich overview of the area and its changes over time. Can you speak to your own connection to Western North Carolina and how it’s influenced both your prose and poetry?

Wayne Caldwell: I was born and raised in WNC, and my Buncombe and Haywood roots go back at least to the early 1800s. I have lived most of my 73 years here, except for a dozen or so in academia. So I could hardly have helped being influenced by that. I have also spent a lot of time listening to local older folks, so something of their wisdom and a lot of their way of speaking have worked their way into my books.

Part of the history captured in this poem explores the influence of money in the development of the region and its impact on the natural world. What role do you see poetry and other forms of creative writing playing in the conversation around environmentalism?

Both poetry and fiction must play a vital role in our regional (and national) conversation about development and nature. An encouraging sign is Mountains Piled Upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene. Edited by Jessica Cory of Western Carolina University, published by West Virginia University Press [2019], this volume of prose and poetry hits hard on themes we need to keep in the public consciousness. Such collections, along with the works of such friends as Thomas Rain Crowe, Brent Martin and John Lane, are essential to keeping the balance tipped toward nature, not development.

Speaking of writers, is there a new collection of poems written by a local poet that you’re particularly fond of? If so, what makes the collection stick out?

It’s not brand-new, but my friend Jesse Graves has a volume called Merciful Days [Mercer University Press, 2020] that I’m very fond of. It is firmly bound to place and family, and Graves, who teaches at East Tennessee State University, is a keen and insightful observer of nature.

Given that you write both fiction and poetry, what is it that attracts you to the latter? What does the form offer that fiction and other forms of creative writing might not? 

Poetry has a way of seeing around corners. Good poetry can open windows that might otherwise remain shut. In short, metaphor stretches the imagination in a way that strictly informative prose cannot do.

Getting back to “Pisgah,” the poem ends on a nostalgic note. There’s some hope there, albeit fleeting. Do you share a similar view with your poem’s narrator? Is the region being developed into something unrecognizable and unsustainable? If so, what can and should be done?

Have we overdeveloped this region? Perhaps. I give thanks for the foresight of people who, despite the human cost, preserved the land in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and I advocate for any organization using conservation easements and other tools to prevent development on or near public land. I think Posey Green’s comments about what Pisgah had become in his day are pretty much on target, but there is hope — the air is cleaner now than when he looked at Pisgah, the French Broad, Pigeon and Swannanoa rivers are also cleaner. We can do the right things when we put our minds to it.