Out of Nowhere

Hohenwald, Tenn., is a typical New South small town. One-story factories fashioned out of unpainted cinder blocks sit on its outskirts; a thin service economy of gas stations, fast food joints and moribund mom-and-pop stores populates the town center. Those who leave in search of higher wages or education rarely come back, and those who stay hover between struggling to keep their families afloat and wasting away at a local tavern, haunted by a sense of being left behind by the rest of the country.

It is a town—and a feeling—that William Gay knows well. The author of two novels and a newly released book of short stories, Gay was born in Hohenwald and today lives just four miles from where he grew up. He has watched the town change, watched the economically depressed but culturally distinct agrarian society he knew as a child turn into the more assimilated, bland sprawl it is today. “Inevitably, the South is going to change,” he said during a recent interview in the den of his single-wide trailer, just outside of town. “It’s moving toward a sort of sameness.”

Though he would likely never claim the title as his own, Gay has become, in just a few short years, the bard of rural Tennessee, preserving in his stories the people and places of his childhood that are now fast disappearing. Rural Middle Tennessee, either real or fictionalized, dominates Gay’s writing, the way the Delta region dominates Faulkner or tidewater Virginia dominates the work of William Styron. Gay’s novels—The Long Home and Provinces of Night—and all the stories in the collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down are set in and around Ackerman’s Field, a fictionalized Hohenwald, sometimes in the present, sometimes in the 1940s and 1950s.

“It seems like the South was changing and I wasn’t always pleased with what it was changing into so much,” he says. “I wanted to write about the South at the point where it started to be assimilated into the larger culture, but before that completely happened. I sort of think that’s happened now. The South had so many little idiosyncrasies and eccentricities that were different from anywhere else, and I hate to see all that difference disappear.”

Since the release of The Long Home in 1999, Gay has been building a strong base of fans throughout the South, people both urban and rural, bookworms and merely occasional readers. His writing is consistently praised as unique and evocative, but readers are just as likely attracted to the man himself: Fifty-nine years old and content to live in rural seclusion, Gay stands in opposition to the young literary phenoms who win critical and popular success one year only to vanish the next, never to be heard of again. Gay, like his writing, has an eminent maturity, a sense of permanence and being that defies everything that goes into the contemporary “literary fiction” industry.

All of which has him more than a little perplexed. “I was really surprised at some of the reviews,” he says. “I thought I was working a really narrow niche. I was writing about marginal people in marginal situations, and I didn’t think there would be a great deal of interest in that kind of stuff in New York. But apparently I was doing something a little different from what I thought I was doing.”

Nevertheless, “phenomenon” is a word not wholly inapplicable to Gay’s success. After struggling to get published for more than 30 years, he managed to place a short story in the Georgia Review in 1998. Soon after, he published The Long Home through a small press called MacMurray and Beck; at the time he didn’t even have an agent. But the book’s critical acclaim helped Gay win both the James A. Michener Memorial Prize and the William Peden Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, almost overnight making him a vibrant landmark on the map of contemporary Southern fiction.

Nor is Gay’s newfound career limited to literature. He has turned a lifelong passion for music into a side project as a reviewer and critic, primarily for the Oxford American. He has written on everything from John Prine to MerleFest, an annual gathering of country and folk musicians and fans in North Carolina. “I would not dare to put out a music issue that didn’t have a William Gay piece in it,” says Marc Smirnoff, editor in chief of the Oxford American, which is publishing again after an almost year-long hiatus.

Thanks in no small part to his critical reception, Gay has also fast become a favorite of the academic world, particularly at Sewanee, where he has several times attended the Southern Writers’ Conference, and where he taught a writing seminar as a Tennessee Williams Fellow. Wyatt Prunty, a Sewanee English professor who runs the conference, says that Gay’s work impresses him both for its maturity and its unique feel for the Southern landscape. “I wouldn’t make him a subset of anybody,” Prunty says. “I would say that he’s unique, he’s an original and I think the biggest thing is that he so vividly inhabits this world of people who are just getting by, and on the other hand, he writes about them on a completely different plane.”