As a child Robert Morgan plowed with a horse and kept milk and butter in the springhouse. Now he’s an English professor at Cornell University in New York. He never saw a movie in a theater until college, but the nation saw him on television when his novel Gap Creek was featured on Oprah’s Book Club in January 2000. Morgan says: "I heard of Oprah, but I’d never watched her show before. I assumed it was just a book of the month club. I had no idea of the scale of it all." It didn’t take long for Morgan to realize the scale of it when Gap Creek sold two million copies. His life has certainly changed, yet Morgan rxemains true to his North Carolina roots as a source of inspiration for his writing. Morgan explains, "Sometimes I feel as though I have one foot in the nineteenth century."

Morgan will be the Shepherd College 2003 Appalachian Writer-in-Residence this fall. He says: "I’m coming there to learn and find out what’s going on at Shepherd. The greatest pleasure of traveling these days is meeting the readers." Morgan will host public readings of his novels on campus, give speeches about his life as a writer, and hopefully inspire future writers. While Morgan is filling the Appalachian Writer-in-Residence position, he admits that he didn’t always know he was Appalachian. He never used the term "Appalachian" or heard it in academic circles until the 1970’s. He jokes, "We just called ourselves mountain people."

Morgan explains the characteristics of Appalachian literature: "The setting and speech patterns are Appalachian. It has universal themes like struggle, family relationships, and loyalties. It includes Appalachian music and instruments such as the dulcimer, and strong women are often central characters." He adds that there’s not just one specific characteristic that makes Appalachian culture unique; instead, "we overlap with Southern culture, rural culture, and even Midwestern farming culture." Besides the speech patterns and some of the regional musical instruments, other regions can easily identify with Appalachian literature. He thinks that’s part of the literature’s appeal. The more specific a story is to a certain region, the more accessible it becomes to others outside of the region. The details draw them into the story.

The physical details of Morgan’s novels -- pig butchering, hunting, planting crops -- are based on his own experience. He was born in 1944 and grew up on a small farm. He recalls: "I was a shy kid. I sat in the corner and listened to the women talk while the men were away." That’s how he developed his ear for a story. Morgan says, "My first talent is for listening -- getting the inflections of speech, understanding what people say and what they don’t say." He publishes stories that he learned while living in Appalachia, especially the stories of his grandpa. "I wanted to write voices that I’d heard as a child," he says.

He started reading as a child when a bookmobile came to his town. The first book that made him think about writing was Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, about a boy who vows that he will become a writer. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is another book that influenced Morgan. He began his literary career as a poet, writing nine volumes of poetry and then branching out to include two collections of short fiction and four historical novels. Morgan’s accomplishments include four NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. He earned his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Morgan’s deep voice carries across the telephone line as he tells me why he prefers writing about women characters: "Women are closer observers of detail, strongly tied to their families, more willing to talk about their feelings." He wrote from a woman’s perspective for the first time in The Mountains Won’t Remember Us. "It was scary writing from the point of view of a woman, so I had to work twice as hard," he says. Morgan estimates that ninety percent of his readers are women.

He believes that writing from the voice of a strong female character, Julie, helped Gap Creek achieve its success. Julie Harmon works "hard as a man." Slaughtering hogs, nursing the dying, and chopping fire wood are all in a day’s work. She’s barely eighteen, and she marries Hank, a lazy, brooding man, that she doesn’t realize is so darn lazy and brooding until after the I do’s are said. Yet Hank is more complex than he initially appears. Julie and Hank literally go through fires and floods together, and they lose a baby, all in the matter of a year. Women readers find the birth scene particularly vivid in Gap Creek, and Morgan explains his accuracy easily by saying that he went to birthing classes with his wife and watched when his children were born.

Do strong, "traditionally male" characteristics make it easier for a male writer to achieve the female voice in writing? Morgan says: "I identified with somebody who is tough. I got interested in seeing things from the point of view of a woman who spent her life working to help people." Julie is modeled after his grandma. Morgan remembers: "She believed that you show your Christianity through helping people, through your actions. She spent her life helping people." Morgan’s faith plays a strong role in his novels. He grew up with the Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches, and he enjoys studying the effect of Christianity on a community. Ministers even tell Morgan that they quote his books from the pulpit occasionally.

When readers tell Morgan that they can’t plow straight through Gap Creek, and they "had to put the book down," he takes it as a compliment. In fact, Morgan wouldn’t have accomplished his goal in writing the book if readers could plow right through the book. His themes are too true, too painful for pleasure readers. Morgan writes of sickness, loss, and God watching over it all, seemingly indifferent to human pain. It also explores the ways that humans deal with pain -- anger, escape through work, turning to God and finding a sense of community through worship. Morgan’s book rings with truth. Even though the book is set in the early 1900’s on a small farm called Gap Creek in Greenville County, South Carolina, the themes certainly could be applied to the hard times that our country is facing today.

Morgan has a secret for fans of Gap Creek -- you don’t have to wonder whether or not Hank and Julie survive when they leave Gap Creek anymore. They definitely survive. Soon the secret will be out because Morgan is working on a sequel to Gap Creek, in which Julie and Hank return to North Carolina and survive. "They’re tough people," Morgan says. For those who haven’t read This Rock, Hank’s character reappears in a less central role as a carpenter. Speaking of Morgan’s future writing plans, his newest book, Brave Enemies, will come out when he is at Shepherd. Brave Enemies is about a woman who dresses as a man and fights in the Revolutionary War. She blends in well until doctors have to examine her and make a pivotal discovery.

Morgan has a great deal of wisdom to offer future writers. His first piece of advice: "You always go where the pain is, the struggle -- a character who wants something badly. You examine their fears, their shame, their ambition, their frustration, and what makes them happy." He enjoys the theme of physical and emotional work, exploring how people work through their pain. Morgan tries to imagine the experience of his characters deeply, and he puts himself into his characters, especially Muir from This Rock. He reminds writers that fiction is voice driven. "Writers have to train themselves to listen to living speech. Once I have a character’s voice, I can go with it," Morgan explains. Another piece of advice: "You have to let your characters teach you. You can’t impose your beliefs on them." One of the differences that Morgan recognizes between himself and his characters is a college education. "I’ve tried to be true to characters who never got a college degree, to see things from their perspective and not judge them," he says. He believes that the goal of a writer is "to write a book that’s smarter than you are" by writing, rewriting, and editing. Above all, "If a novel doesn’t surprise me, it won’t surprise the readers."

Morgan writes early and keeps farmer’s hours. He scribbles his first draft in spiral notebooks with a ball point pen for the sensation of feeling the paper, touching the pen, and physically making letters. Then he writes his revisions on a laptop. He writes where ever he is, at home or in a hotel room. He can’t write for hours at a time, only two or three hours each day.

Morgan only teaches at Cornell in the fall semester, and an assistant will teach his classes at Cornell while he fills the Writer-in-Residence position. It might seem a bit ironic that someone so tied to his Appalachian and Southern heritage is living in New York, but it makes perfect sense to Morgan. The main reason that he left North Carolina for New York was the job offer at Cornell. He says, "I was working as a house painter before Cornell." Plus Cornell is in the country. "It looks like the mountains of North Carolina, but not quite as high," he explains. When he first came to Cornell he was homesick for the southern mountains, and that is when he became a "student of Appalachia," once he left the South.

From farm boy to award-winning novelist, Morgan is truly a success story. He’s excited about visiting Shepherd just as his novel Brave Enemies is published. Shepherd certainly extends a warm welcome to him and invites the public to attend his speeches this fall.