Southern craftsman produced powerful, poetic voice

Credit, Greg Hobson

Hey folks, sorry about not posting, for like, a week! I know it’s the mortal sin of the blogging world. What can I say? I’ve been busy.

Anyway, I loved Jon Sealy’s commentary in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about novelist William Gay.

I have to admit I’ve yet to read William Gay, who is often compared with Cormac McCarthy. What I loved about the commentary was the hope and possibility Gay’s life gives to writers of all stripes, really, but especially those of us who’ve lived huge parts of our lives already and came to serious writing later on:

“Part of the mystique around his life is that, in an era where most fiction writers get a master of fine arts and either teach in the academy or freelance copy-edit in New York City until they break through, Gay spent several decades living his life, hanging drywall and honing his craft, before exploding out of nowhere on the literary scene in his mid-50s.”

The part about the MFA and the freelance copyediting made my spit up my milk, as I’ve asked around about those MFA programs in the past half-year and just recently completed editing someone else’s novel – yes, on a freelance basis!

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How good to know that the cliche way forward is not the only way forward. The truth, I think, is that those MFAs credential one to teach writing at the college level – but this is for writers who need a day job, not for people with a teaching vocation. I’ve also been assured by veteran and (sometimes) bitter educators that those positions are increasingly rare and when they do exist, most do not pay well or have any kind of hoped-for longevity.

On the other hand, there’s always something that needs copyediting.

Back to William Gay:

Sealy says that for him, the dominant emotion Gay’s stories call forth is sympathy – for characters caught in bad situations.

“Sympathy, at times, feels like an anachronism in our modern, me-first world, and the same could be said of Gay himself — that he is a relic from a bygone era. Maybe it was the wisdom that comes from age and lessons hard-learned, or maybe it was that he lived and wrote in rural Tennessee, where the pace perhaps is slower and cellular signals are scarce, but Gay was cut from a different mold.”

I do wonder about that sympathy emotion – are we so insanely driven in our wired and 24/7 connected world to see those threads that should exist among people, even among strangers?

A character in the novel I’m currently writing is a contemporary twentysomething, and he tweets. In the novel. Of course, I’d like to think this form of social media will last, so the book won’t appear dated for at least a little while. But I do like to read things that have a much different pace – and look forward to picking up a book by William Gay.