![“[Literary success] is like a crap shoot. Like rolling the dice. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t really understand it. But I’m a little superstitious about it. If I start looking for an explanation, it’ll all go away. What I wanted to be most in life was a writer, and it sometimes seems unreal that that’s what I am. I’m not saying I’m famous, but I have published stuff, and readers know who I am. I never considered myself a writer before I actually got paid for it. The way I looked at it, if someone eventually paid you, even fifteen cents, if they saw any monetary value, you were a writer. As long as you were sending stuff out, getting it back, that was like trying to be a writer.”
—William Gay, from Q&A interview “Inventing Tennessee’s own Yoknapatawpha County” at online blog Chapter 16
Photographer: Anthony Searloff
* * * * *
The Southern literary community lost a talented writer this week.
“Acclaimed as the ‘William Faulkner of Tennessee’ and compared to Cormac McCarthy, William Gay was one of the brightest stars of the Clarksville Writers Conference for the past few years.
A quiet man who shunned the spotlight, William read his work as if he were speaking softly to a friend on the front porch of his log home in Hohenwald, TN. His books did not quiet the soul however; they showed the lowest forms of human beings creating havoc in the lives of others.
William Gay grew up in Hohenwald and finished high school there. He went off with the U. S. Navy to the Viet Nam War but was not known to discuss those years as is common with many other Veterans. He would talk about living in New York and Chicago because he believed you had to do that to become a writer. He outgrew that belief [and returned to the South]. He supported his family by painting, hanging dry wall and being a carpenter [and wrote at night].
He loved books from the time he was a child and was encouraged by one of his teachers who led him to turn from consuming Zane Grey’s books to loving those of Thomas Wolfe. William Gay’s great ambition in life was to become a writer, but he firmly held to the idea that unless someone paid for your work, you had not yet become a real writer.
‘I wrote a lot when I was in the Navy,’ he relates. ‘I had never been to college. I wanted to be a poet when I was a kid but then I found out I’d have to be able to write poems.
At first, I would send a story to the New Yorker and when it came back, I’d send it to The Atlantic, or Harper’s or Esquire. I didn’t know about the college literary magazines but when I found out about them, I started getting published.
After I finally got published in the Georgia Review, I got a call from the editor at The Atlantic. He asked why I wasn’t sending them something because they’d like to publish my work. I told him I’d been sending things for years. He said they never got to his desk. I had to wonder what kind of operation they were running.
I was about 55 when I first got published. Before that happened, one editor didn’t buy my story, but he wrote me a letter and said he’d like to see some more of my work. I sent him five and he wrote a critique of each one of them. I learned a lot about self-editing from him.’”
—Taken from “On the Passing of William Gay” :
http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2012/02/25/on-the-passing-of-william-gay/
Rest in Peace, William Gay (b. 1943 - d. Feb. 23, 2012).](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzylugRmLZ1qe0r71o1_r1_1280.jpg)
“[Literary success] is like a crap shoot. Like rolling the dice. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t really understand it. But I’m a little superstitious about it. If I start looking for an explanation, it’ll all go away. What I wanted to be most in life was a writer, and it sometimes seems unreal that that’s what I am. I’m not saying I’m famous, but I have published stuff, and readers know who I am. I never considered myself a writer before I actually got paid for it. The way I looked at it, if someone eventually paid you, even fifteen cents, if they saw any monetary value, you were a writer. As long as you were sending stuff out, getting it back, that was like trying to be a writer.”
—William Gay, from Q&A interview “Inventing Tennessee’s own Yoknapatawpha County” at online blog Chapter 16
Photographer: Anthony Searloff
* * * * *
The Southern literary community lost a talented writer this week.
“Acclaimed as the ‘William Faulkner of Tennessee’ and compared to Cormac McCarthy, William Gay was one of the brightest stars of the Clarksville Writers Conference for the past few years.
A quiet man who shunned the spotlight, William read his work as if he were speaking softly to a friend on the front porch of his log home in Hohenwald, TN. His books did not quiet the soul however; they showed the lowest forms of human beings creating havoc in the lives of others.
William Gay grew up in Hohenwald and finished high school there. He went off with the U. S. Navy to the Viet Nam War but was not known to discuss those years as is common with many other Veterans. He would talk about living in New York and Chicago because he believed you had to do that to become a writer. He outgrew that belief [and returned to the South]. He supported his family by painting, hanging dry wall and being a carpenter [and wrote at night].
He loved books from the time he was a child and was encouraged by one of his teachers who led him to turn from consuming Zane Grey’s books to loving those of Thomas Wolfe. William Gay’s great ambition in life was to become a writer, but he firmly held to the idea that unless someone paid for your work, you had not yet become a real writer.
‘I wrote a lot when I was in the Navy,’ he relates. ‘I had never been to college. I wanted to be a poet when I was a kid but then I found out I’d have to be able to write poems.
At first, I would send a story to the New Yorker and when it came back, I’d send it to The Atlantic, or Harper’s or Esquire. I didn’t know about the college literary magazines but when I found out about them, I started getting published.
After I finally got published in the Georgia Review, I got a call from the editor at The Atlantic. He asked why I wasn’t sending them something because they’d like to publish my work. I told him I’d been sending things for years. He said they never got to his desk. I had to wonder what kind of operation they were running.
I was about 55 when I first got published. Before that happened, one editor didn’t buy my story, but he wrote me a letter and said he’d like to see some more of my work. I sent him five and he wrote a critique of each one of them. I learned a lot about self-editing from him.’”
—Taken from “On the Passing of William Gay” :
http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2012/02/25/on-the-passing-of-william-gay/
Rest in Peace, William Gay (b. 1943 - d. Feb. 23, 2012).
