Apple-latcha, not appa-laytcha

Moderator Bev Marshall and authors Mark Powell, Ron Rash, and Sharyn McCrumb.

The first thing they established on the Appalachian writers' panel this morning is that the region is properly pronounced apple-latcha, not appa-laytcha. In a town with street names like Tchoupitoulas, people understand the import of getting it right.

Sharyn McCrumb read an engaging snippet of her novel St. Dale, and kept things popping with some tart observations and notable quotes, several of which made everyone in the room crack up:

“I grew up in an atmosphere of Johnny Cash meets Debussy.”

"On tour, I kept running into people who thought Deliverance was a documentary.”

“It’s fun to talk to the literati about NASCAR, because they think it’s the former president of Egypt.”

Actually, I wasn't too impressed with that last quote; there are probably racing fans in the halls of Harvard as surely as there are Dante fans in the woods of Tennessee. As any New Orleanian who has spent significant time Uptown and downtown knows, there's snobbery and then there's reverse snobbery. But McCrumb is a good reader and an even better writer.

Ron Rash, I'm ashamed to say, is a writer of whom I knew nothing, but after listening to him read, his books are going to the top of my reading pile. He's got a gripping, quiet, pared-down style that's incredibly powerful. Same with Mark Powell, who read a selection from his book Blood Kin, which won the 2005 Peter Taylor Prize for literature. Powell brought up the ongoing problem of the suburbanization of the South and Appalachia in particular, with McMansions going in atop the mountains and Wal-Mart clear-cutting the old downtowns.

Mr. Rash made one particularly poignant point about that: “There’s three ways that the culture will survive," he said. "Music, cooking, and literature.”

Which shows, perhaps, that Appalachia and New Orleans aren't that far apart at all.