Blue Ridge Country March/April 2020 - 37

from his family's past, fusing
them to new shoots of imagination with wordsmithing
and creativity. He started writing poetry and short stories,
eventually producing the hybrid memoir, "One Apple at a
Time," based on his grandfather's life.
But he was drawn to fiction. "Fiction can be anything
you want. You have license,"
he says. To learn the art of
fiction, he enrolled in Charlotte's Queens University
low-residency MFA program,
producing "Ripples" as his
master's project.
"Ripples" tells the story of
Ben Bramley (named for an
heirloom English apple variety), a man who left his small
apple-growing
community
of Abundance and returns to
find that he has more than
outgrown the strictures of
small town society. A runner
who logs his miles to maintain his mental health, Bramley finds
that he can no longer outrun his past.
While Willams' life path may bear
some similarities to that of his main
character, "Ripples" is not biographical
fiction," he says. Abundance isn't Dana,
he says, although he certainly drew upon
his own experiences while writing the
book.
"I took a lot of license." But Bramley's
struggles with the dogmatism of his community reflects his own. Growing up, he
said, "four churches within a half mile was
just normal." He even worked as a minister on the side while pursuing his civil
engineering career.
Williams' themes and writing have
drawn comparisons to some of North
Carolina's most vaunted writers, including
Thomas Wolfe and Ron Rash. "I'm flattered
at the comparison," he says. but that's not
his goal. As he writes, he keeps a quote on
his wall to guide him: "I'd rather fail in
originality than succeed in imitation."
Like the orchard he's patiently tending,
he's cultivating stories with careful attention, letting the creative process take its
course.

"I'd rather fail in
originality than
succeed in imitation."
EVAN WILLIAMS

up there in the 1950s, his family had been
tending apple orchards for six generations. But they were hardly unique for the
area. There were few families around that
weren't involved in the apple trade. What
was a little unique about the family was
their deep commitment to education, and
for Williams in particular, his love of reading. While some boys might sneak off to
play in the woods, Williams' guilty pleasure was books.
Although his parents encouraged him
to leave the farm and go to college, he was
reluctant.
"It's a lot easier to do something you
know," he says. "And I do enjoy apple
growing." But they prevailed and he left
home and pursued a career in civil engineering, working in both Atlanta and
Charlotte for decades before returning to
Henderson County and renovating an old
storage shed on his family's property to
live in.
It was then that he started his own or-

chard, deciding to grow
now almost-vanished heirloom varieties of apples that
had been available before widespread
commercial growing took hold and reduced the number of cultivars available.
"Apples are unusual in the plant world
in that they do not reproduce by exact
kind," says Williams. Instead, he grafts
new trees from what's called a scion.
He uses scions (sprouts that grow
where the previous winter's pruning cuts
were made) then "bench grafts" them to
the rootstock of heirloom variety. If all
goes well, the new tree will produce fruit
about two years later. Williams is currently
growing a tantalizing array of varieties of
apples from the rich, juicy Scarlet Nonpareil to sweet, greenish-yellow Reinette
Grise de Portugal, selling them in Hendersonville's curb market.
But even as he began grafting trees,
Williams began to graft stories-taking
memories from the farm as well incidents

MARCH/APRIL 2020

37
Blue Ridge Country March/April 2020

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