Novelist William Gay remembers his early days as a novelist and explains why he writes better in Hohenwald than anywhere else on earth

Chapter16

In just over a decade, William Gay has gone from being an unpublished drywall hanger to one of Tennessee's most acclaimed living writers. Often compared to writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell and Thomas Wolfe, Gay was born in 1943 in Hohenwald, Tenn. After living in New York City and Chicago in the 1960s and '70s, he returned to his hometown—where he still lives—to work in construction by day and write fiction by night. His first novel, The Long Home, won the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize. He subsequently published two novels, Provinces of Night and Twilight, and a book of short stories, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down. In 2007 Gay was named a USA Ford Foundation Fellow, and in 2010 he will publish his fourth novel, The Lost Country.

Edgewater, the protagonist in your new novel The Lost Country, is a guy getting out of the Navy and traveling around a bit—an experience you yourself had as a young man. How much of the character is autobiographical, and are there other autobiographical elements in the book?

There probably are. I'm probably closer to Edgewater than any of the other characters I've written about. Edgewater is like an alternate me. Philosophically we're similar; he looks at things the way I used to when I was younger. When I got out of the Navy, I'd already been writing, and it was my idea to bum around, have what adventures I could and then write about them at my leisure.

And I thought in order to be a writer you had to leave where you are from and see other places. I thought all novelists had to go to New York City, so I was in New York for a while, but not much was happening. Then I lived in Chicago—I worked there in a pinball machine factory for a while. I eventually came back here, met a girl; we got married, started having kids, and I had to find a way of making a living. I wound up being a carpenter, a drywall hanger and different aspects of construction work. All the time I was writing on the side, writing at night, typing things up, trying to get an agent. It was only when I started writing about things I was familiar with that anything clicked, that it started to feel right. When I started writing about the sort of people I grew up with, hung around the pool room with, drank with, it just rang truer. I could tell it was better right away.

What was that like, going from working construction to being a famous novelist?

I'm still a little surprised by it, frankly. I was a member of Cormac McCarthy's cult audience back when Cormac was not cool, when no one read him hardly. I thought it would be great to have a cult audience. Not a lot of people, but enough to buy the book so that it would encourage the guy who published it to publish the next book. That's what I expected. I expected a few decent reviews, but there were actually more than I expected. And they were frankly better than I had expected.

I try not to think about what it's like being a writer and living here. I tried not to ever have that mentioned. It sounds ridiculous, but that's what I thought—that if I don't talk about it, no one will know. I thought everything would continue like it was, that I could go to the convenience store to buy a six-pack and a pack of cigarettes and not get into a literary discussion about who the characters were in some book and if they were based on real people. But it's hard to stay under the radar, you know.

Do people recognize you now around town?

Right [when] I began to get published, this woman asked if I had someone who helped me with my writing. I said, "What do you mean by that?" And she said, "Well, I knew your family a long time, and they're not that smart. I knew you when you were younger, and you're not that smart. I was wondering if you had somebody who took out the little words and put in the big words."

What did you say to that?

There was nothing to say. I just turned my head and walked away.

Most of your novels and stories revolve around a fictional town in rural Tennessee called Ackerman's Field, sort of like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Was that a conscious decision, or did it just emerge that way?

It was more of conscious decision. When I was a kid we lived in a place called Grinder's Creek. We didn't have a car—I grew up pretty poor—so on Sunday we used to walk to my grandmother's house. And we went through the woods to get there, and we always went through this big field where there used to be a house. I asked my father what was the name of that field, and he said it was Ackerman's Field. That stayed with me, and when I needed a town in my first published novel, I made my town Ackerman's Field.