It’s been a busy year of airports and hotels for UL Lafayette graduate Wiley Cash. He’s been pounding the national book tour circuit touting his debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home.
“Sometimes, I’ll be away from home for a month or more,” said Cash, a North Carolina native who lives in West Virginia, during a recent phone interview.
The 35-year-old writer isn’t complaining, just marveling at the success of his tale about what happens after a 9-year-old secretly witnesses a tragedy during a religious healing ritual in western North Carolina.
A Land More Kind Than Home has caught fire with readers and critics. It landed on The New York Times’ best-seller list, scored a Library Journal Top Ten Book of 2012 nod and scooped up the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom.
According to National Public Radio, the novel “is a thriller, but it’s so beautifully written that you’ll be torn about how fast to read it. This is great, Gothic Southern fiction filled with whiskey, guns and snake-handling.”
Cash honed his knack for mixing literary style and page-turning action at UL Lafayette, where he started the book while pursuing a doctoral degree in English he earned in 2008.
“I learned how to be a writer there and I learned what it means to be a working writer there and I learned what I would write about there, so I think Lafayette’s where everything kind of began for me,” he said.
The primary reason Cash enrolled at the University was to study under writer-in-residence emeritus Ernest J. Gaines, best known for novels such as the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying.
“I read a collection of his stories, Bloodline. I wanted to write southern stories about growing up in the South and Bloodline really appealed to me. I wasn’t familiar with Louisiana, and through his (fiction) I was learning about Louisiana and learning about the people of Louisiana. That always struck me, that he taught me about a place I had never even visited.”
UL Lafayette also appealed to Cash because it offered a quality program in a region famous for its rich cultures.
His time in Lafayette ultimately afforded him more than mentoring and a front row seat to Mardi Gras. Inspiration for A Land More Kind Than Home struck Cash in the form of a newspaper account that one of his English professors, Dr. Reggie Young, brought to class.
The article was about a young, autistic African-American boy who had been smothered in a religious healing service at a storefront church in Chicago. Cash used the real-life story as the foundation of his fictional account, a multi-layered novel told through the eyes of three characters. The narrators are 9-year-old Jess; the charismatic but evil pastor, Carson Chambliss; and the church matriarch, Adelaide Lyle.
It’s a book he’s not sure he could have written as well had he been in his home state.
“It’s like doing laundry. You can’t tell what color a black sock is until you hold a blue one up beside it. When I was in Louisiana, I heard North Carolina more clearly. I saw the landscape more clearly. I heard the music more clearly. A fiddle sounds differently in bluegrass than it does in zydeco,” Cash said.
Gaines, in a blurb at wileycash.com, said: “Wiley Cash is a talented and disciplined young writer, and his first novel proves it. I think this could be the beginning of a long, fruitful career.”
Cash isn’t resting on his laurels. He recently completed the manuscript for his second novel, a story about a washed up minor league baseball player who kidnaps his two daughters from a foster home.
“He tries to go on the run and be a Dad to them. But, of course, there are complications that come into play,” he said.