Farmer and author Evan Willams’ orchard grows heirloom apples.
To cultivate an apple tree—not to mention a whole orchard of them—requires patience, forbearance and perhaps even a modicum of imagination. Evan Williams developed those qualities over a lifetime of growing apples, a trade he inherited from his family, growers in Dana, North Carolina, in the heart of Henderson County’s apple country. Those traits have served him well as he has built his heirloom all-natural apple business, Barenaked Apples, featuring dozens of rare varieties from around the world. But they’ve also been essential as he launched his career as an author, with his debut novel “Ripples,” released earlier this year from SFK Press.
Spring comes to Bare Naked Orchard in Henderson County, North Carolina in the form of pretty apple blossoms.
Williams’ roots in North Carolina’s apple growing community could scarcely go deeper. His first ancestors arrived in the area in the late 18th century with a land grant to settle this then-remote part of the state. By the time he was growing 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 orchard, 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.
Williams’ grandson, Evan Blackwell, is already carrying on the family tradition.
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 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” was published by SFK Press in 2019.
“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.
The story above appears in our March/April, 2020 issue. For more subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription. Thank you for your support!