He’s been called “the poet laureate of Appalachia,” but Robert Morgan would like to be remembered simply as a good storyteller, someone who’s been able to write about Appalachian people in a way that’s truthful and honest without pandering to the backwards hillbilly stereotypes that often depict the region.

Though he’s been an English professor for 30 years at Cornell University in upstate New York, far from his childhood in Henderson County, Morgan’s fiction, poetry and imagination are deeply rooted in the mountains of Western North Carolina. In fact, it was homesickness while working at Cornell that drove him to become an Appalachian scholar of folklore, history and literature in a way he never thought he would.

Morgan’s life is full of serendipity born out of struggles, much like the characters he writes about in his novels like Gap Creek, The Truest Pleasure and, his latest, This Rock, which he was promoting last week in Sylva at City Lights Bookstore.

At the age of 30, with his professorship at Cornell firmly in place, Morgan immersed himself in an intense study of Southern Appalachia, reading county histories, old diaries, accounts of explorations in the region, anything he could get his hands on.

He had grown up on a farm where the family plowed with a horse, but he knew if he wanted to be a complete writer, it would take more than personal experiences to draw upon when it came to crafting stories. Having written a stock of short imagist poems from which he’d fashioned a modest reputation as a poet, Morgan turned his energies toward fiction, history and American literature. He read Emerson, Frost, Eliot and the literary giants as well as classical literature, ancient philosophy and religion, including the pre-Socratic Greeks. He also became an ardent student of the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. It was a watershed time for him, a time to acquire a massive education as his intuition led him.

“You have to follow your excitement,” he said. “I knew I had to expand. I just exploded because I knew I had to grow and change.”

And in his studies, he discovered a sacredness that he says is very closely tied to writing. People with only a secular education lack that sensitivity, he explains, but as a professor he found himself drawn to students who were Orthodox Jews. Why? Well, he says, because they both shared a sacredness for language and a reverence for the words they chose. It’s that attention to detail and respect for language that sets Morgan apart from other writers of his generation. When he describes a creek along the side of a mountain or a cabin in the woods, you know he’s been there and spent a long time surveying it in his mind to capture what it feels like.

Morgan fell in love with books back in sixth grade when the Henderson County bookmobile pulled into the Green River Baptist Church parking lot. He had never seen so many books. After plowing through Little House on the Prairie and Jack London’s Tales of the Yukon, he dove into Dickens. Then at 15 years old, he discovered Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, and swooned over the sweeping prose and the story of Eugene Gant, who shared the same Oct. 3 birthday as Morgan. That got an aspiring writer thinking: if Wolfe could write about Asheville, maybe a kid from Green River could write about his own upbringing.

Lured by the epic stories that were delivered in the bookmobile, Morgan would eventually come across a big maroon copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, with the words “greatest novel ever written.” It was too much to pass up.

“It was slow going at first,” Morgan recalled, “and then I got into it.”

The farmboy from Henderson County was transported to grand ballrooms of imperialist Moscow and St. Petersburg. Perhaps no other book gave him such a grand scale of what a novel could be.

If Wolfe and Tolstoy inspired Morgan, Hemingway taught him how to write.

“Strip it down to what is absolutely necessary,” Morgan recites from the master of terse prose. And he still recalls the best advice he ever got from Hemingway: “The best dialogue reveals what is not said.”

Morgan writes his first drafts in longhand, living with the sentence before the rewrites on the computer. It’s long, arduous work, and when he explains his painstaking research, you know he’s serious about his craft.

But even with a deep knowledge of a subject and plenty of experience in writing, the story can have a mind of its own. Morgan found himself all ready to write one particular story when he got stuck. He didn’t know where to go, so he surrendered to someone else. It was perhaps the best move he made as a writer. Instead of writing from his own self, he created the persona of a woman who could tell the story. Switching over to the opposite sex proved to be intimidating, and he wanted to pull it off and make it believable, so he worked twice as hard and completely wrapped himself up in the character.

“I had to become a different kind of writer,” he said.

And so he did. Once again, out of struggle came discovery. Writing, he discovered, is not about the author’s self-expression but about submitting to the character’s expression — what the character feels, what the character needs, what the character wants.

“The voice is the key to the story,” he said.

It opened up a whole new world for him, and apparently, a good many people took an interest in his hard-working heroines set in the raw landscape of 19th century Western North Carolina. Mixing rich research with poetic detail and a love of the region, Morgan found the motherlode. The Truest Pleasure was a New York Times notable book and a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Then came Oprah.

Morgan still vividly recalls the phonecall two years ago that brought him international fame.

“It was a complete surprise to me,” Morgan said.

On a snowy January day, he got a phone call from a woman with a Southern accent who had high praise for Gap Creek, the story of Julie Harmon and her husband, Hank, as they grind out a harsh life for themselves in the late 19th century amid floods, grifters, disease and poverty.

“It’s the work of a master,” the woman on the phone said, quoting a back-of-the-book blurb from novelist Fred Chappell. She wanted to know what Masenier, Julie’s younger brother, dies of early in the book. The story details in an almost dreamy sequence a bunch of white worms coming out of Masenier’s mouth before he dies. And that’s the way Morgan believes it happened — the young boy dies from swallowing worms. It’s actually a true story from Morgan’s family. His grandmother’s brother really did get sick and really did have to be taken down the mountain to a doctor and really did die.

“It’s always the true stories that nobody believes,” Morgan said.

The woman was no doubt intrigued by Morgan’s storytelling and invited him to be a guest at her book club. Morgan, who was teaching at Cornell, figured it was a standard book-of-the-month club somewhere in the South, so he accepted the invitation, adding that he’d schedule a visit when he had the time. Then, the mysterious woman introduced herself as Oprah Winfrey in Chicago. Morgan agreed to set a date right away. Another phone call came from Winfrey’s producer, who scheduled Morgan for a guest appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

So how many additional books would need to be published to keep up with the publicity generated by Oprah’s national syndicated show? Morgan thought maybe 60,000, but he had no idea what Oprah’s Midas touch would do. Within a week, another half million copies had to be printed. And many more after that. The book went overseas and became an international hit. It won the Southern Book Award and vaulted into bestseller lists all over the country. When the fury finally subsided, Gap Creek had sold 2 million copies. Not bad for a guy who published his first novel at the age of 49.

With each new book, Morgan has been able to walk that fine line between revealing the poverty and rural history of Appalachia without succumbing to the ignoble images of the region made famous by such movies as “Deliverance.” By giving his characters a psychological sophistication and delving into their minds, he’s able to transcend their speech and thoughts to a higher literary level. At times when the character is passionate or excited, Morgan raises the bar a little more, giving his characters the opportunity to say things poetically and yet plain enough so that it’s not overdone.

So far, it seems to be working. Readers from the Appalachian region and beyond have welcomed Morgan’s books with open arms. Occasionally, a critic from another region notes that these characters aren’t capable of talking and thinking in such high, poetic language. But the way Morgan sees it, that’s probably because they think they have an idea of what mountain folks are supposed to think and sound like. As a testament to his efforts, Morgan says he’s received hundreds, if not thousands, of fan letters — some from as far away as Australia — declaring that Julie (the main character from Gap Creek) speaks just like their own grandmother spoke to them.

Perhaps it’s the fear of not getting it right that keeps Morgan on his toes, always researching his subjects intently to get all the historical facts straight.

Two of his current projects include a sequel to Gap Creek and a story about the Battle of Cowpens, which is set in South Carolina during the chaotic period of the Revolutionary War.

In This Rock, Morgan returns to the family from The Truest Pleasure. The story centers around the Powell brothers, Moody and Muir (sons of Ginny, who readers will recall from The Truest Pleasure). These siblings are much like the Biblical brothers, Jacob and Esau — vastly different in demeanor yet tied to each other by destiny. Muir wants to be a preacher and wrestles with an elusive plan he’s not sure of, while Moody is a good-for-nothing, irreverent moonshiner who gets into fights and drinks himself into oblivion. As with many stories, this one had its surprises. Moody, who started out as a minor character, became much more involved.

“To some extent, Moody took over the book,” Morgan said. “Sinners make better characters.”

Though the story is set in the 1920s, Morgan admits he didn’t have to do much research for this one. His family has a history full of moonshiners and enough wild tales to fill a good many more books. (One moonshining cousin did two stints in the Atlanta penitentiary. An uncle lost his farm to the bank when he was sent to prison. Another cousin drove his still on the back of his pickup and was arrested as well.) But Morgan is careful not to populate his fiction with jug-swigging yokels in overalls that fulfill easy stereotypes, so the reader finds passages in which Muir dreams about French cathedrals and stone churches. This Rock took Morgan 20 years to complete. The first draft was originally written back in 1980. So far, it’s been well received by the critics as an ambitious, gritty and redemptive tale. As Kirkus Reviews puts it, “Morgan’s fans will be pleased.”

Morgan continues to garner awards for his fiction and poetry. His short stories have been published in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best. Additional honors have included four NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, the James B. Hanes Poetry Prize and the North Carolina Award for Literature, the highest honor bestowed upon a North Carolina writer. Morgan’s poems have been published in Atlantic Monthly, the Yale Review and Poetry magazines. In all, he has published ten volumes of poetry and seven books of fiction.

Being a successful writer involves a certain amount of luck, Morgan explains. The call from Oprah was luck. While living in Chapel Hill, he happened to get his poems published in a nationally distributed literary magazine. Another case of writing at the right place at the right time. Cornell called him when he was working as a house painter in Henderson County. They were looking for someone to fill in for poet A.R. Ammons, who was on sabbatical. Other opportunities knocked once Morgan showed up at Cornell.

“You have to be ready for luck when it comes,” Morgan told a gathering at City Lights Bookstore last weekend.

If there’s any wisdom Morgan imparts to his students and fans, it’s the value of persistence. A writer learns by doing, he’ll tell you. Writing and rewriting and writing until one writes it right. And along with hard work, there’s faith that one word, one sentence, one page, one story will lead to that promised land.

“If there’s hope for me, there’s hope for anybody,” he said.