by William Gay
JMW But now we have The Road; what do you say about The Road?
WG I knew when I read The Road it was going to win the Pulitzer Prize, I actually did. I called Tommy and told him that. The writing is gorgeous, nobody else can write like that.
JMW That’s not quite true. There’s one guy around who can.
WG The end of it has that little uplifting thing. I knew the awards people were really going to go for that and they did. That carrying the light thing and those people showing up when the kid needs them. That book didn’t bother me the way it bothered a lot of people. It bothered Chris really bad, it messed him up for a couple of weeks. It messed up Franklin for a while, it depressed him. It made him think too much he said. I think the reason is that Chris has a little boy and Franklin has two young kids. I think that might have something to do with it. But you have Coby and you weren’t that bothered by it.
JMW Well shit, once you’ve read Outer Dark, the horrific parts of The Road aren’t any more horrific than Outer Dark.
WG It doesn’t get more gothic than Outer Dark. When I did that thing up in Lebanon somebody asked me what I thought was the darkest gothic novel and I didn’t even have to think and I said Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy and that guy said, “You ever read a book called Twilight?” He thought Twilight was a darker gothic novel than anything he had read. Chris won’t even read that book Twilight. He read it a long time ago and he said he probably won’t ever read it again. Too bleak and too dark for him.
Outer Dark has the darkest ending of any book I have ever read where the blind man is going into the swamp and you would think somebody would show a blind man the way but he doesn’t bother to do it. When that guy comes to the end of the road, where the road ends in the swamp he calls it, “a sucking velvet waste” and that is all the guy comes to and then they do the thing about the dream where they reference the dream that the guy has at the start of the book. I think that is the first book I ever read I was really affected by; everywhere the guy goes something terrible happens. It’s like he is a harbinger of doom everywhere he shows up, and I think that Twilight is a lot like that; that’s where I got that when the kid shows up at somebody’s house. I didn’t know I was doing it at the time when I was writing it but it does sort of remind me of Outer Dark now.
Nothing ever seems to happen to him, he seems to survive when all these other people get butchered. You know the place where Holmes goes and the guy gives him the rattlesnake rattles and tells him that people put them in guitars and put them in boxes and then sometime in the night when Holmes leaves those three people show up, the guy with the scythe and says, “When he fell he fell sidewise and without a cry and when he fell he fell”. I loved that. In reading his stuff I always felt he didn’t care; he wanted to do it the way he wanted to do it and if you didn’t like it that was just tough.
JMW He sure made that clear and lived that ethic for a long time
WG Yeah, until he showed up at the Oscars. I was disappointed to see him out in the crowd. In a tux no less. But if anybody deserves it, he deserves it. I don’t know what year he got that Macarthur Grant.
JMW It was a long time ago. He got it pretty early on.
WG He must have got it before Blood Meridian. He probably got it and headed out. One of his ex-wives seemed pretty bitter about him; of course ex-wives always are. After All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award Time and Newsweek was trying to talk with him and he wouldn’t do interviews, they went behind his back and talked to his ex-wife. She was kind of complaining about when they lived in Maryville and she said they lived in a converted dairy barn with a telephone outside on a pole like Green Acres on television. Colleges were offering him $1,500 to come and talk and he refused to do it and said, “I don’t have anything to say that is not in the books that nobody is reading anyhow.’” I don’t know if that was true or not but that would have been the timeframe when I was talking to him on the telephone. I didn’t know that the telephone was outside. You remember that show Green Acres where the telephone was outside.
JMW Sure, sure.
WG I used to think that was a pretty funny show. I haven’t seen it in thirty years
JMW Yeah so did I. We watched it in my house when I was a kid. When I read that book by Tim Gautreaux I didn’t get into that book much. I felt like the main characters were raping the earth, clear cutting the old growth forests, exploiting their laborers as much as they possibly could without any conscience about it and the plot of it carried out that these guys, who were clear cutting the forest, were the good guys. They were clear cutting hundreds of acres of cypress and then the bad guys come in, and the bad guys were a bunch of immigrants, and then the good guys kill the bad guys, and that just didn’t play well with me.
WG To be honest I don’t remember much about that book. He wrote me a really nice letter after I gave his editor the blurb. I’ve been reading a book by a guy named John Wray, you ever read anything by him?
JMW Never heard his name before.
WG I read about him in the New Yorker, I saw a book by him a couple of years ago that was compared to Blood Meridian and the New Yorker had this long review for his new book. Low Boy was the name of it and it is about this bipolar sixteen-year-old who runs away from home and he is off his medication and he is in New York I guess and he and his girl friend just sort of elope and take off and it is all about what happens to him on his trip but the writing is kind of hallucinatory. The guy is a really good writer. There is a woman who runs a bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina and she told me if there was ever any book I was interested in she would send it to me, so I called her and told her to send me Low Boy and she did. She started sending me stuff about Thomas Wolfe, anything that was published about Wolfe, she would send it to me.
JMW What about Sonny Brewer, is he coming out with anything?
WG Sonny has a book that MacAdam Cage is supposed to publish this fall. Sonny told me about when he married his first wife, she was a lawyer and Sonny was traveling with a rock ‘n roll band, he had a band that did Neil Young songs. But they didn’t make any money; they were really struggling. They would go on the road and they were trying to get a record deal. I have actually heard Sonny do a Neil Young song and he can sing like Neil Young. He said this woman was like trying to get him to settle down and get away from the rock ‘n roll band. So she wanted some kind of resolution and he said they were on the road one night and they were all in the same hotel room and they hadn’t had enough money that day to buy anything for supper and they hadn’t had any food and he was laying there listening to those people snore and he just got up in the middle of the night with everybody else asleep and drove back to Mobile and married that woman.
JMW Is there going to be anymore Blue Moon?
WG He thought they were doing one, of course that was MacAdam Cage too. I don’t know why they couldn’t do something like that; they were getting the writers to give them the stuff and nobody was getting paid anything for it. Tommy said Sonny was telling him about the new Blue Moon Café book and they were going to have a party and were going to spend eight or ten thousand dollars to put up everybody in Jackson at a big hotel and Tommy said if they had that kind of money it looks like they could give all the writers a couple of hundred bucks instead of doing this big party and Sonny got mad at him and didn’t speak to him for a while. Sonny was the editor for those things and he was the one talking people into contributing.
JMW Are you writing any articles now?
WG I got really interested in that Todd Snyder song, The “Thin Wild Mercury”, the one I played for you and I had talked to Marshall Chapman about him. She knows him and she had opened for him a couple of times or they had opened for somebody bigger. He has a new CD, so I had tried to talk Oxford American into letting me do some writing about Snyder and he said he had too many pieces on singer/songwriters and he wasn’t really interested in it. He has to answer to that college and the whole thing is about selling magazines; it isn’t as much fun
as it used to be. I only enjoy writing when it is about something I want to write about and the idea of writing about Glen Campbell has no appeal.
Todd Snyder is an interesting guy. He is still plugging away, playing in small venues and still manages to put out albums and he had that deal with MCA and they paid him a big advance and then when the records didn’t sell he lost the deal and then he lost his band and went back to playing acoustic guitar and harmonica in bars and wherever he could get a gig. That seems kind of interesting to me, especially if you have talent. I think “Thin Wild Mercury” is a good song and he had a song on that same album about the Bush brothers. “You Got Away With It” was the name of that; it was a good song too. He is an engaging guy to watch, he is sort of charismatic but not charismatic enough to sell all kinds of records.
The record business is so damn fickle. The sorry stuff that is coming out of Nashville now, they ought to go hide their faces or something. The people the record companies are pushing are no good, and the new crop is even worse. Country music, like when Hank Williams was around, country music used to be real; I wasn’t that crazy about it, but it was real anyway. Now it is formulaic, cowboy hats and buffed up shoulders. They have some of the biggest tours in the country. That guy that married Nicole Kidman, his tours are some of the biggest things going.
JMW One last question before we have to go, I’ve noticed your characters aren’t religious; they don’t seem to believe in anything?
WG I’m suspicious of people who say they don’t believe in anything. I’m not religious but I believe in all sorts of things. I was at a reading and someone wanted to ask me what I believed in so I just quoted from a scene at the end of Twilight where Tyler comes up on these people who are digging up a grave of a relative so they can be sure the body wasn’t desecrated and he watches them for a few minutes and then turns to go and the man doing the digging stayed him and said that digging up his relatives was the least he could do for them, that he owed them that much. (He had a copy of the book beside his chair and he picked it up and read.)
I’d hate to meet em up yonder and have to explain why they was done so shoddy. Ain’t that the way you think?
What Tyler really thought was that the dead were so absolutely beyond anything the living might do for them it was almost past comprehension and he had no commitment to meet anyone anywhere. He feared that beyond the quilted gray satin of the undertaker’s keep there was only a world of mystery that bypassed the comprehension of men and did not even take them into consideration. A world of utter darkness and the profoundest of silence.
JMW Well, I guess that about says it. The dark night, the long home.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTE: The “Bibliography” does not include all his shorter reviews, liner notes or other miscellaneous prose. Everything in the book, except for the excerpt from Lost Country and the “Interview”, has been previously published. The “Bibliography” indicates the first publication of each of the other pieces included in this book.
NOVELS
The Long Home, MacMurray and Beck, Denver, CO, 1999
The Long Home, Faber and Faber, London, England, 1999
Provinces of Night, Doubleday, New York, NY, 2000
Provinces of Night, Faber and Faber, London, England, 2000
Provinzen der Nacht, Argon Verlag GmbH, Berlin, Germany, 2001
Twilight, MacAdam/Cage, San Francisco, CA, 2006
Twilight, Faber and Faber, London, England, 2007
Lost Country, Forthcoming
NOVELLAS
The Paperhanger, the Doctor’s Wife and the Child Who Went into the Abstract, The Book Source, Hohenwald, TN, 1999
Come Home, Come Home, It’s Suppertime, The Book Source, Hohenwald, TN, 2000
SHORT STORY–COLLECTIONS
I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down, The Free Press, New York, NY, 2002
Wittgenstein’s Lolita and The Iceman, Wild Dog Press, Brush Creek, TN, 2006
SHORT STORY–PUBLICATIONS
‘Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues” Missouri Review, (Fall l998)
“I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down” Georgia Review, (Fall 1998)
“Closure and Roadkill on the Life’s Highway” Atlantic Monthly, (November l999)
“The Paperhanger” Harpers, (February 2000)
“A Death in the Woods” GQ, (November 2000)
“My Hand is Just Fine Where it is” Oxford American, (September October l999)
“The Crimper” Harpers, (October 2000)
“Good Til Now” Oxford American, (January February 2001)
“Charting the Territories of the Red” Southern Review (Spring 2001)
“Wreck on the Highway” Chattahoochee Review, (2005)
“Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?” Tin House, (2007)
ARTICLES
“Sweet Songs Never Last Too Long” Oxford American, Music Issue, (July August l999)
“Queen of the Haunted Dell” Oxford American (October 2000)
“Sitting on Top of the World” Oxford American Music Issue (2000)
“Time Done Been Wont Be No More” Oxford American, (July/August Music Issue, 2001)
“Crossroads Blues” Oxford American (2002, website only)
“Blind Willie McTell” Oxford American, (Summer, 2005)
“Calves Howling at the Moon” Oxford American, (Fall, 2005)
“The Man in the Attic: A Memoir” Paste, (June/July, 2006)
“The Banjo Man” Oxford American, Music Issue, (Summer, 2006)
ANTHOLOGIES
New Stories from The South, The Year’s Best, Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 1998
New Stories from The South, The Year’s Best, Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 1999
New Stories from The South, The Year’s Best, Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 2000
Best New American Voices, Edited by Tobias Wolff, 2000
New Stories from The South, The Year’s Best, Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 2001
O’ Henry Prize Stories, Edited by Larry Dark, 2001
Best Mystery Stories, Edited by Lawrence Block, 2001
Best Music Writing, Edited by Nick Hornby, 2001
New Stories from The South: The Year’s Best, Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 2002
Stories From the Blue Moon Café, Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2002
Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe II, Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2003
They Write Among Us, Edited by Jim Dees, 2003
Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe III, Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2004
Anchor Book of Modern Short Stories, Edited by Ben Marcus, 2004
Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe IV, Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2004
Best of the South: The Best of the Second Decade, Selected by Anne Tyler, 2005
A Cast of Characters and Other Stories, Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2006
Best American Short Stories, Edited by Steven King, 2007
Best American Mystery Stories, Edited by Carl Hiaasen, 2007
The Surreal South, Edited by Pinckney Benedict, 2007
The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, Edited Joyce Carol Oates and Christopher R. Beha, 2008
EDITOR
With Suzanne Kingsbury, The Alumni Grill, Anthology of Southern Writers, MacAdam Cage, 2004.
INTERVIEWS
“Out of Nowhere: After decades of laboring in complete obscurity, Middle Tennessee author William Gay has finally found literary acclaim,” by Clay Risen, Nashville Scene, (January 16, 2003), p. 23 – 27.
“A Natural Talent: Author William Gay, snug amid woods of his native Hohenwald, reflects on lifelong love of words.” By Julie Gillen, The Daily Herald, (Sunday, March 7, 2004), 1D, 4D. Columbia, TN.
“An Interview with William Gay,” by Georgia Afton, Water-Stone Review: A Literary Annual, Volume 7, (Fall 2004), p. 42-59.
Bookmark with Don Noble, “Interview with William Gay,” Produced by The Center for Public Television at the University of Alabama (c) 2007 by Unive
rsity of Alabama Center for Public Television (DVD) “Interview William Gay,” Tennessee Literary Project, MTSU, Conducted by MTSU student Kenny Torrella, (April 13, 2008), www.mtsu.edu/tnlitproj
“Inventing Tennessee’s own Yoknapatawpha County,” by Clay Risen, (10/2009), Tennessee Committee for the Humanities www.chapter16.org
“William Gay: Featured Writer of the Month”, November, 2009, Oxford American webpage:
www.oxfordamerican.org/interviews/2009/nov/04/featured-writer-month/
“Positively William Gay,” Interviewed by Anthony Scarlati, Nashville Arts Magazine, (December 2009), p. 27 - 31.
“Ackerman’s Field and Lewis County: Lewis County author William Gay’s stories to hit the big screen.” By Jordan Blie, Lewis County Herald, (January 7, 2010). p. 1, p. 5.
AWARDS
1999 William Peden Award,
1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize
2002 Guggenheim Fellowship
2007 United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow
2009 Writer of the Year, Tennessee Literary Association
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank William Gay for his generous offer to work with Wild Dog Press to bring out this volume of his collected prose, and for allowing me to photograph his paintings and record our conversations, and finally for the beautiful poetry of his prose. I’d also like to thank Susan McDonald for all her support. Patty Baker, Patty Wagner and Renee Leonard helped with the typing. Lamont Ingalls is a friend and cohort who helped design the book along with John Cipollina who did the cover. Greg Hobson is an amazing photographer whose expertise is much appreciated. And for their friendship and support of all my endeavors I’d like to thank Susan White, Jerry Risner who helped me find William Gay in Hohenwald, Frank Evans, Anthony Blake, my daughter Coree and my son Coby.