You once said Cold Mountain was inspired by an ancestor. Is it fair to say this one is inspired by your ancestors' relationship to the land and who came before them?
Yes, in a way. My ancestors came here soon after one of those treaties after the Revolutionary War opened up land west of Asheville to white occupancy. What happened is what usually happened: Some more well-to-do people came in and bought big chunks of land and leased them to less well-to-do people. And there have been parts of my family in that part of western North Carolina for over 200 years.
Did you hear stories about their interactions with people living inside the Cherokee Nation?
No, but when the army came to throw out the Cherokee, they kept ledgers of possessions because they were going to be reimbursed when they got out West. So you can go through farmstead after farmstead and see what all they owned. Over and over, the lists would have been exactly what my ancestors had back then: a little cabin, some fields, a few animals, a plow, axes, kitchen equipment.
How do you find all these details?
For this book, it came from rare-books rooms; special-collections kinds of things helped a lot: letters, documents, government reports. That kind of thing. But then on top of that, I did a whole lot of reading about Cherokee food.
Did you try to make any of it yourself?
No. Well, like the soup that Bear makes that has the rooster combs in it? I've had that soup, but it had chicken feet and combs in a clear broth. This was in the Andes, and I read a description of a soup that sounded a little like that, a Cherokee soup. Where the chicken legs just float right in there. A funny-looking soup.
Did you learn the Cherokee language?
No, it is really hard. We're working on this project, to translate "The Removal" section of this book into Cherokee. At the rate that it's going, [with] expert speakers dying, it will be a dead language in 20 or 30 years. And it doesn't have to be this way. Over in Cherokee [North Carolina], they've got this immersion program for two-year-olds. It's like day care done completely in Cherokee. The little kids are picking it up fast, but there is nothing much to read in Cherokee. So the idea is to translate the middle of this book, and to learn what the problems for publishing in Cherokee are. I'm paying for the project, and any money that it might generate will go back into the project. Hopefully it will wind up with books for kids coming out of the immersion program.
What has the reception to the book been?
It's been really warm. I went over early in the summer once we had some readers' copies and gave them to some of the elders on the tribal council and Chief Hicks and other people in the community to read, and then had a lunch just to talk about it. One of the things I said that day is what I'm trying to do in this book is not tell your story, I'm trying to tell our story—this land that we've all occupied together. It's home for all of us.
How much did the attention on Cold Mountain and the anticipation of this book slow you down? Did you ever just wish you could unplug from the world and go away?
Well, I sort of did. I haven't done any of the public writer things: the book fairs, readings, university visits. I've just done none of that for several years.
Seems to have really decimated your sales.
[Laughs.] There was a couple of years where I barely talked to anybody in New York, publishers agents, all that. I remember having dinner with a couple of writers a couple of years ago. One of them said, "How often do you speak to your agent?" I started thinking back, and I said, "Well, it's been about six months." He said, "What?! I speak to my agent every day!" For me, if I start thinking about expectations, sales or anything else, it'd be so easy just to get totally stuck. I just kept trying to tell myself, I want to finish this book without having rewritten Cold Mountain.