William Gay

On February 12, 2011—just over a year before his passing—fiction writer William Gay welcomed MTSU student and Tennessee Literary Project intern Derrick Hill into his Hoheneald, Tennessee home for an extensive interview. Following is the transcript from that conversation.

Derrick Hill: What can we expect from you in 2011?

William Gay: I really don’t know whether I’ll turn in The Lost Country. I’m probably going to finish that other novel [The Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train] before. I had a falling out with my agent after I dealt with MacAdam Cage because she advised me not to do it and I did it anyway. Turns out she was right and I was wrong. I’m back with my agent and she is trying to find out if MacAdam Cage has any life left to them, or if they’re dead, or if the guy left for Mexico, or whatever. She has had interest from other people—two or three New York houses are interested in the book, so it will probably wind up somewhere else. But in the meantime I started writing a story about this guy who was a psychic and a bunch of his relatives move in on him and they start trying to get him to write a living will and leave all their property to him. I couldn’t do it all in a story and it wound up as the book I’m working on, The Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train, which came from that old Uncle Dave Macon song.

DH: What about short stories?

WG: I’ve got several short stories that are
in long hand that I’ve never typed up and submitted. I’m not sure why. It seems to me that the fun is in writing them and after that it’s just work to put them on the computer. Just writing the story, that’s the real fun part of it. Counting some that have already been published, there probably is enough for another collection. There’s two or three that didn’t make it into that first collection.

DH: Does the Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train take place in the same area as your other books?

WG: Yeah, it’s in the same area. It’s more contemporary. Most of that other stuff was in the 1950’s. This is a little more current. It may not be right now, but there are things like video cameras and stuff like that—so it’s pretty contemporary.

DH: It sounds like it could be very humorous.

WG: Yeah, it’s got humor, but this guy, he’s been sort of psychic that people send an article of clothing from a missing kid, or something like that, and he’s is supposed to find what happened to the kid. A lot of that stuff—he is kind of messed up—is starting to get to him. It seems to mainly deal with tragedy, or the bad things that happen to people. They consult him when, say, their lives fall apart for whatever reason.

DH: Is this psychic based on your real life uncle?

WG: Yes. He was a weird fellow. He never married and after everybody else died off, he lived alone a long time before he
died. That’s why people were kind of scheming on his property, because he owned a couple hundred acres, a nice farm. He had accumulated a little money down through the years. People were fighting over his money after he died. One of the proud things out of my life—I refused to get involved with the lawsuit when some of my cousins tried to break his will. I said I wasn’t fighting over no dead man’s stuff.

DH: That all sounds like the catalyst for this novel.

WG: Yeah, but all that stuff—it starts out to be one thing and
it winds up being another. He was sort of the model for the guy
in Provinces of Night, but the guy in Provinces if Night wound up not being a whole lot like him. There wasn’t anything villainous about Scott [Gay’s uncle]. He was just kind if an eccentric guy. He had a bunch of divorcees and widow women show up over there and get their fortunes told. Something cataclysmic would happen in some woman’s life and she would want her fortune told. Plus a few of them probably had eyes on him. He was a middle-aged guy, he lived alone, and had a little property, so these people came to see him.

DH: Do you believe he was really a psychic?

WG: He was certainly weird. When I was young he always wanted to tell my fortune and I would never let him. I was superstitious. If it was good, it would happen anyway, and if it was bad, I didn’t want to know. I think the guy was like a cross—I think he had psychic flashes part of the time, but he knew human nature really well. He knew what they wanted to be told and he did quite a bit of that, I think. Another uncle, the one was always suspicious of that whole fortune-telling business, and he told me one time that he was over there when somebody came to get their cards read. He got up to leave, to give them privacy to get their fortunes told. He said he made it all the way to the doorstep of the kitchen and he thought he’d stay there for a while and listen to what they said. He said he [the psychic] was telling some woman about some job she was going to get or some good fortune that was going to come her way. She said, “Naw, naw...I don’t care anything about none of that. I want to know about this man. I want to know about this man I met a couple of weeks ago and I want to see where that’s going.” And he said immediately Scott jumped on it and said, “Yeah, that’s this Jack right here. That’s what I was going to tell you about next.” He said that he [the psychic] told her a whole bunch of stuff about this man he didn’t know about thirty seconds before. When those people moved up to Tennessee from Alabama, he [Scott] went down to move them with a flat bed truck with side boards on it and had all their furniture and stuff on there. Somebody ran a stoplight and ran into him, and tore his truck up on the way back. My other uncle said, “You know, I’ve always wondered why a man that can see into the future didn’t just wake up that morning and say, ‘Well, I guess I’ll just go back to bed.’”

DH: Seems like a fortuneteller would be uncommon around here, back in the fifties. It just seems like—especially in the Bible Belt—that wouldn’t happen.

WG: I was in Oxford once on a book tour, at a reading, and this woman came up to me and said, “Do you know Scott Gay?” She had been driving all the way from Mississippi to talk to him. I never really got it. I never saw the allure of knowing something like that. Weird things happened to that guy all his life. He did have kind of a strange life. He always had a fixation on dogs; he always had all kind of dogs over there. Living alone, after his mother died, I guess that would be a lot of company.

DH: Did he always think he was a psychic or was that something he picked up on later?

WG: No, he always was a guy who was supposed to be able to see into the future. He told me when he was 13 or 14 he was coming
in from work—he had been clearing ground for somebody over in Grinder’s Creek. He said he was walking home and his dog fell in behind him and followed him like it always did. And when he got to the house, the dog wasn’t there anymore, and they told him the mail carrier had run over the dog and killed it that morning. He really believed that. He wasn’t making that up.

DH: You had one of your short stories and one of your novels turned into films. Have you been involved with the production or the writing on either one of those?

WG: On the first one [That Evening Sun] the guy sent me the script, and they had him saying and doing things he wouldn’t have done. I changed a little bit of the dialogue, but not much at all. I had nothing whatsoever to do with the one based on the novel, which I hear is not particularly great.

DH: Have you seen it [Bloodworth, based on the novel, Provinces of Night]?

WG: No, I didn’t go [to the Nashville Film Festival]. My kids went up. I don’t know exactly why, but I didn’t really want to go. Those guys, they treat all that stuff like a photo op. They get their picture made with so-and-so and they walk the red carpet and all that. I did it for that first movie and I really didn’t want to do it again. My daughters and one of my sons, William, went up. They said it was a pretty good movie, not terribly like the book. It’s got pretty good people in it: Kris Kristofferson, Val Kilmer. I think Dwight Yoakam is in it, and Hillary Duff.

DH: Scott Teems [director of “That Evening Sun”] also made a short film too, didn’t he, of your short story, “A Death in the Woods.”

WG: Yeah. He did a pretty good job. It was only twenty minutes long or something like that. He did a good job with it. That was the hardest story that I ever wrote, probably. It was hard to know how much to tell. The guy is finding this stuff out little by little. It was really tricky. I wrote it a bunch of different times. I almost sold it a time or two, before I got the thing right, or what I thought was right. Something about that story, though, that kind of makes you cynical about the whole writing business. I tried to sell that story just about everywhere. It didn’t do any good doing it and as soon as I sold those other two stories this editor read the story in manuscript and called somebody that he knew at GQ and said, “You need to publish this guy; You need to look at this story.” This woman called me from GQ, and I sent her a story and she immediately bought it after it had been turned down by New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic, and Esquire—everywhere you’d normally send literary short stories. It was the same story. Mark Smirnoff at Oxford American was like that too. I used to send him that stuff before I sent it anywhere else. I sent him several at one time. All of them wound up being published and he turned down the whole lot. He wrote me a nice letter, but he turned it all down nonetheless. Then, after those first two stories came out, I ran into him—I had never met him— just a voice on the telephone. I met him at Sewanee, up there at that writers conference. He asked me for a short story, and I got about half pissed. I said, “You’ve seen about practically every story I wrote and turned them down. Why do you want a story now?’ He said, “Well, it’s occurred to me that the William Gay Express is leaving the station and I want to get on board.”

DH: The first story they [Oxford American] published was “My Hand is Just Fine Where It Is.”?

WG: That’s one of my favorites of those stories.

DH: What are you working on now for OA?

WG: They asked a bunch of different people to write something about Barry Hannah and confine it to two or three hundred words, which is a page basically. I never could get it short enough. I don’t see how you could write one page on Barry Hannah. It’s pretty much impossible. I was just going to write about
the first time I saw him. I thought it was an interesting experience, but there was no way I could do it in a page. I wrote it several different times and finally quit on it.

DH: Are you talking about when you met him at Sewanee?

WG: Yeah and I recognized him. He was sitting on the porch up there at Rebel’s Rest. It was like he was studying me and watching me. I had never met a writer before; I was a little apprehensive about talking to him. He was sitting there, drinking a club soda. He said, “Well, what have we here? Who are you?” I told him what my name was and where I came from. He said, “What’s your favorite Bob Dylan album?” Why he thought I would even know about Bob Dylan was kind of weird. I said either Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited. What’s yours? He said, “Either Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited. What’s your favorite Cormac McCarthy novel?” I said either Suttree or Blood Meridian, either or the other, what’s yours? He said, “Either Suttree or Blood Meridian.” I don’t know whether it was because I was so scruffy-looking or because I was older than a lot of those people up there, but he sort of took an interest in me. He wanted to see the story I was going to workshop.

DH: Were you in his workshop?

WG: Yeah, I was in his workshop. After he read it—the next day—he said, “What the hell are you even doing here?” I didn’t know whether he meant you got a lot of damn nerve to try to participate in my workshop, or I didn’t know whether he thought I was good enough without the workshop, which is I guess what he meant.

DH: What story did you workshop?

WG: “The Paperhanger.” He wound up choosing it for the best of the workshops or something. You know, the anthology they put out every year. That story wound up being in that. It’s the most anthologized thing I’ve done. It’s been in six or seven anthologies. Joyce Carol Oates chose it for the Ecco Book of Modern Fiction. There was a book that came out last fall called Greatest Noir of the Century, and that story wound up being in that, which I was really proud of. I was real into noir fiction when I grew up and still like reading it. I interviewed Barry Hannah one time, did the first half of the interview, and it went fine. The second half of the interview we were going to do the next day and he didn’t really want to do it. He said, “I’m tired of talking about this. Can we just talk about Jesus, or Bob Dylan, or anything except this?” I said, “Well I’ve got some questions I need to ask you,” and he said, “Oh, just paraphrase it.” But I wasn’t about to paraphrase Hannah so I wound up never completing the interview.

DH: It’s hard to come up with questions that haven’t been asked before.

WG: Yeah, he got bored. We were actually looking for an acupuncturist. He had heard there was an acupuncturist in Tupelo and he picked me up at Tom Franklin’s house. The idea was that I was supposed to talk to him while he hunted this acupuncturist, but really all he knew abut the acupuncturist was that somebody had told him it was in a two-story brick house in Tupelo. You’d be surprised how many two-story brick houses there are in Tupelo, Mississippi. We actually did wind up finding the acupuncturist and he was in some pain and on medication— that’s probably why he got bored with it.

DH: About how old were you when you started sending out short stories to people?

WG: Probably 15 or 16, somewhere around there. We used to get a magazine called Progressive Farmer that published this Kentucky writer named Jesse Stewart’s fiction. I thought I could come up with something similar to that. I sent a story out longhand and it came back and they said I had to have a typewriter, they didn’t accept handwritten manuscripts.

DH: Did you get a typewriter?

WG: Not for a long time. I started trying to write after I got out of the seventh grade. I had a teacher that turned me onto Thomas Wolfe. This was a guy who noticed I was reading a lot of books bit he thought I could be a little more selective in what I was reading. I was reading a lot of Zane Grey westerns and I was real big on Erle Stanley Gardner, Perry Mason novels. He gave me Look Homeward, Angel, on the condition that I actually read it and then talk about it to him later and tell him what I thought of it. After that he gave me other stuff.

DH: Did your parents encourage you to start reading, or did you just have a natural inclination to it?

WG: I just picked it up on my own. I have no idea why. They encouraged me. They didn’t discourage me from reading or anything like that, but they didn’t read themselves. We didn’t have books. I wound up accumulating books wherever I could get them. The Signet edition of A Good Man is Hard to Find was the best thirty- five cents I ever spent. Signet used to publish a lot of books like that. Someone out to write an essay about Signet Books. There is no telling the people that got interested in literature because they thought they were going to read some soft- core pornography or something like that. They had real lurid covers on them. The gals with their clothes about half torn off and their breast half -exposed and that kind of stuff. Signet had just about everybody: Thomas Wolfe, James T. Ferrell, William Faulkner, Truman Capote. They published everybody from Hemingway to Mickey Spillane. Spillane probably paid for a lot of those books they didn’t make money on. The Spillane books were such best sellers. He created this guy, Mike Hammer, a private eye. I remember reading that book when I was about 15 years old. Mike Hammer, all the way through the book, has been trying to figure out who killed his best friend. They just got out of World War II and went through hell together and then somebody murdered the guy. He fell in love with this woman during the course of the book, and on the last couple of pages he figures out she was the one who killed his best friend. It’s one of the great endings in noir fiction. The guy is sitting in an armchair with a 45 automatic, waiting for her to walk into the room. She sees him holding the gun on her and immediately figures out what he’s doing—that he knows she killed his best friend. She starts taking her clothes off and by the time she gets completely nude, she is standing there in front of him. He shoots her right in the abdomen and she says, “How could you?” Mike Hammer says, “ I had only a few seconds before I’d be talking to a corpse, but I got it in. It was easy, I said.” That’s the last sentence of the book. “It was easy, I said.” That guy is one of the worst writers of all time. He has horrible, horrible stuff. I tried re- reading some of them not long ago. I was in a junk store and found this book that had seven Mickey Spillane novels in it. I tried to read one of them and I don’t know how I read it when I was a kid. But he was huge, I had these older cousins and they had Spillane’s book, the one I was talking about, and I tried to borrow it from one of them and he said, “Nah, you’re too little. This is a big grown person’s book.” I soon got a copy of it anyway. Back then you could go in a drug store and buy a paperback for a quarter or thirty- five cents. The thick ones were thirty-five cents and the ordinary, run-of-the-mill paperbacks were a quarter.

DH: You mentioned Flannery O’ Connor earlier. Has she been a big influence in your writing?

WG: Yeah, she certainly has. I’d read a lot of Southern; well, I’d read a lot of Erskine Caldwell, and I never could connect with the characters in Caldwell’s fiction. They weren’t like anybodyI knew. The people in O’ Connor, they seemed like real people. Caldwell’s characters seem to think about sex all the time. That’s pretty much what the books were about. They were supposed to be starving to death, fighting over a sack of turnips. I read that when you start starving, the libido is the last thing you are thinking about. Read Outer Dark and you’ll see McCarthy was influenced by O’ Connor too. The guy in Outer Dark is a whole lot like the Misfit. I’m not sure I understand that novel [Outer Dark]. I’m not sure I completely get it, but it’s fun to read anyway. I read an essay one time called “The Empty Road,” and it was a review for that book. This guy’s idea was that by committing incest they sort of started the fates up and that’s why everything goes wrong. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. The ending sort of tied in with the beginning. I never really completely bought that because she is sort of involved in it too and the chapters about her are kind of light—birds are singing, the sun is shining. Nothing goes right for her.

DH: What do you think the challenges are, like in Child of God, where the main character is so dark, yet you are kind of sensible to him? You created Fenton Breece in Twilight, which is dark. What are the challenges in creating a character like that and not making them too repulsive?

WG: I don’t know. I sort of do that stuff instinctively. I don’t plan what I’m going to have happen to the character particularly. I try to have something that makes them human. Even like Ballard in Child of God, that scene at the end where he got that dream kind of humanizes him. I used to know this guy who lived uptown. At the time I was managing a furniture store. He got in a habit of coming in there and talking to me. I guess because I would listen to him. He was always telling me these stories. He told
me one time if I got into any trouble just tell him. He said, “I’ll take care of it. There’s old wells and cisterns out in the woods that people disappeared into and got rocks thrown down onto them—nobody know what ever happened to those folks.” I couldn’t stop thinking about that for two or three days. That’s kind of a chilling thought. You kill somebody and throw them off in a dry cistern, throw rocks on them. He ultimately ended up killing somebody that everybody knew about. He was tried for it and got out of it, sort of like the guy in Twilight. He had more of a sense of humor than Granville Sutter. I heard him on Trade Time on the radio. He was a bootlegger. He called in one time to Trade Time and said he had all kinds of half a pint whiskeys hid out behind his house—come on out. They cut him off while he was still talking. Another time he called in and asked the guy— he said he heard there was a whorehouse in Columbia, but he wasn’t sure where it was at and wondered if somebody could give him directions. They cut him off again. When he was going to be tried for killing that guy, he went out to a doctor—they had a doctor out here, I don’t remember his name—and tried to get that doctor to write up a note, like from your mother—a thing saying he wouldn’t physically able to stand trial. That guy wouldn’t do it, so he burned his car—a really nice Lincoln. He stuffed gas-soaked rags down the throat of the gas tank and set it on fire. He was a bad dude. I had a friend that ran a restaurant uptown, and I didn’t know this while it was going on, but he was losing money and he hired Jim to burn it. He went to West Tennessee for the weekend because he had relatives. Jim was supposed to burn it while he was gone. Jim got drunk and forgot to burn the restaurant until early Monday morning. This guy, the one that owned the restaurant, had just drove into town and Jim, hung-over, was out there trying to get a fire started. Wayne wound up going to the pen for hiring somebody. Jim turned state’s evidence the minute they caught him and informed who hired him. I told Wayne, whoever would name their restaurant The Belly Stretcher Café deserved what was coming to them and deserved to be in the penitentiary.

DH: These characters, like your undertaker, do they go places where you are uncomfortable? I know I’ve heard you say you just want to see how far these characters will go, sometimes, in their actions. Do you look for that and edit back?

WG: I had seen this story on the news about some undertaker—it was here in TN, I’m not sure where—I’m not sure what city he lived in. This guy was successful, middle-class income and all that—a good reputation. They discovered once they started opening caskets where he had just dumped the garbage—orange peels and Coke bottles, all that kinds of stuff dumped with the body. I couldn’t quit thinking about it for two or three day, you know? I just wandered about a person like that. I’ve never known anybody as kinky. Also, I had read this book, Hollywood Babylon, about Fatty Arbuckle. For some reason I was thinking about Fatty Arbuckle when I wrote some of that, the stuff about him killing the prostitute with the pop bottle.

DH: When you were writing the book did Fenton Breece go farther than you wanted him

to?
WG: No, I pretty much knew that once I had written the scene where he tries to date that girl— and once he is presented with her body—I knew pretty much what he was going to do. I had been reading something about Mahler. He had a piece called “Songs for Dead Children,” and that just tied right in, for him to be listening to that. He [Breece] creeped me out a little bit, to be honest, especially later when he is about to be mobbed. He grabs the girl and gets in the van and jets out and wrecks the van. All these people are coming across the field towards him and he threatens to kill himself, which is not exactly going to influence these people too much. That’s what they got in mind themselves.

DH: It’s weird to think that he’d have to be this educated guy. To me that was the weird twist in it. In one way he is really smart, then he has got this dark ambition.

WG: When that book was going to be published, they wanted a couple more scenes written. I was normally used to taking stuff out rather than putting stuff in. They wanted another scene with Fenton Breece. So I wrote the scene where he locks himself in the back part of the funeral home and he is listening to soap operas and Granville Sutter comes after his money. When I was a kid my mother used to listen to all that stuff—well, watched it on TV. Some of the plots they had for those things weren’t more far fetched than the plot I used in there.

DH: Do you think Dallas Hardin [The Long Home] is a more evil character?

WG: I don’t think I’ll ever top Dallas Hardin, for sheer perverse evil, you know, or just a guy that will do anything. I always heard old people talk about somebody and they’d say, “He don’t cull nothing.” That was Dallas Hardin. He would do anything. I think the guy totally ignores all of what’s expected of human behavior. That’s best exemplified by the scene where these people come to visit the sick guy—that guy who’s in bed. The guy takes his wife, well not his wife but the sick guy’s wife, back in the other room and starts having sex with her with these church people sitting in here listening. That’s just like absolute contempt for what’s expected of human behavior. I kind of like Dallas Hardin anyways. I thought that he was kind of funny. When that book first came out, I was always running into people—which is one reason I don’t go to town no more often than I do—who wanted to know who characters were. This guy said he knew who everybody in that book was, except for one person. He said, “I don’t know who that Buttcut is, but I know who all these other people are.” Which is really ridiculous because I never knew anybody nearly as evil as Dallas Hardin.

DH: You said somewhere that the novel was originally a lot longer.

WG: Yeah, it was about a hundred pages longer.

DH: Was it a whole other sub-plot or just different scenes?

WG: It was just more episodes. I don’t know of any characters who got cut. There was a lot about Motor Mouth. In the published novel Motor Mouth goes to Chicago and then he comes back from Chicago. Nothing happensto him while he is in Chicago and there was quite a bit of that. There was a long scene where Nathan Winer goes to visit a cousin who lives uptown. She is a more respectable, or better off branch, of the family. She is married to this really creepy guy who offers Winer moneyto have sex with his wife. He wants to watch through the window, but that wound up getting cut. It was sort of out of character anyway. It probably needed to be cut. Editors are different. The guy who edited that book—that was an unpleasant experience. I fought to keep things and we wound up cutting them. Provinces of Night, when it was published, was pretty much the manuscript I turned in. Very little was done to that manuscript. The guy who edited The Long Home, we had different ideas about what kind of book that was. I thought it was a family saga like Look Homeward, Angel, or some Thomas Wolfe thing, and he wanted a more noir mystery. That kid is trying to figure out what happened to his father, so we wound up focusing on that.

DH: Was Twilight pretty much intact? Was it edited much?

WG: It was edited barely, just barely. They asked for two or three more scenes and I wrote them and they went into the book intact. There is hardly anything cut from it. I suggested cutting a scene, or I was sort of ambivalent about it.
On the one hand I thought it was a good scene and on the other hand I didn’t know if it was absurd or not. I thought about cutting the scene where Fenton Breece dresses up like this old grandmother and gets Tyler to unload some feed for her. I thought the guy in drag might be a little much and it might be over the top. The woman who edited it said that was one of her favorite parts of the book and wanted to keep it. So, we kept it.

DH: What gave you the idea for that?

WG: I had an idea that the whole thing was like a fairytale, like Hansel and Gretel. That scene fit right into it, like the Big Bad Wolf dressing up like the grandmother in “Little Red Riding Hood.” Plus, it was really fun to write. I really got a kick out of writing it. biographies of writers, like that Gerald Clark biography about Truman Capote. I’ve read that book four or five times and it always occurred to me the situation that Capote was in later on in the book—nobody has probably ever been in that position before. If those guys are executed, he has a best seller and is going to be the most famous writer in America. He is sort of about half in love with this guy and feels really close to him. It’s a quandary, the only one like it that I know of. I was thinking, “This would make a really good movie.” Then later, Bennett Miller had the same idea and wrote the script. That’s what he focused on in the movie, the In Cold Blood part. But that’s part of what destroyed Capote though. There’s no question about it. That ruined him. I saw him on a TV talk show one night. It was like the guy had already give up to die or something. He was summing his life up. He said he had invented a new kind of writing, he had written a non-fiction novel, and he had written three or four short stories that he wasn’t ashamed of—one that was as good as anything in the English language. The host was looking at him like he was being a little immodest or something. I thought he was talking about the story, “Children on Their Birthday,” but he was talking about “A Christmas Memory,” which is an awful good story.

DH: What’s made you persistent all those years? You said you started sending out stories when you were fifteen and you were fifty-five when you sold one.

WG: Yeah, but I wasn’t doing it all the time. I wasn’t doing it every week or every month.

DH: But you were writing all the time?

WG: Yeah, I was pretty much writing all the time. What would keep me going was, I would get discouraged after a while and quit, but then I would get another idea or a character that wouldn’t let you go and kept tugging at you. I thought, “This is the one, this is going to work.” When I wrote “Those Deep Elm’s Brown Ferry Blues,” I told my wife, “I wrote a story so damn good that if nobody publishes it, I’ll never write another.” And she said, “Yeah, you say that every time.” I guess she knew me a it?

DH: That novel started as a short story didn’t

WG: Yeah, I’d seen that undertaker on TV and I started thinking what a person like that would do to hang on to their respectability and keep all that from being known, and came up with the idea of a girl trying to blackmail him. Again, that was kind of fun to write and I just stayed on it. It’s weird how persistent writers are. You get turned down so many times and people think you are wasting your time, yet they go on doing it for no good reason that I can see. I think whatever makes a person write seems interesting to me. That’s why I like reading little better than I thought she did at the time. I really thought that story would sell somewhere. I didn’t think it would sell first time out, but it did, to Missouri Review. They are putting out an anthology of the best fiction of the last 20 or 25 years and they are going to use that story. Georgia Review is doing the same thing and they are going to use “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down.”

DH: You mentioned before that you had a lot of editors tell you to quit writing in a quasi- poetic style. What gave you the persistence
to keep writing in your own style and not be tempted to change it in order to maybe make it a little easier to get published?

WG: I didn’t want to get published just to get published. I thought I had a way of looking at things that I wanted to be intact. I did change a little without meaning to, I’m sure. Sometimes you write stuff that sounds really great and a month later you go back and look at it and you are almost embarrassed. You know how over the top some things were. I did need a little distance, I guess.

DH: You were real persistent in keeping your own voice. Now that you’ve had success with your writing, have you had any writers that you respect offer you any advice on writing and if so, how do you take the advice they give?

WG: Cormac McCarthy is the only person who actually ever gave me any advice. Most of the writers that I’ve met since then have sort of treated me like a peer. I had sent him [McCarthy] some material to read and see what he thought. I didn’t know any writers. I didn’t even know anybody that was interested in writers. I asked him if he thought it was publishable, or if he thought it could be made publishable, and he said, “Well yeah, probably so.” I kept prodding him to tell me more and got a little abrupt. He said, “A writer doesn’t need anyone to tell them how good they are,” which made no sense to me at the time, but the more I thought about it the more sense it made. He like talking about books that he liked or writers that he liked, but he didn’t like talking about his stuff.

DH: Who did he want to talk about?

WG: Flannery O’Connor, mainly. When I actually called him, just out of the blue, it surprised me that he even talked to me. At first he wasn’t very friendly but then something was said about Flannery O’Connor and he started chuckling to himself and he quoted some stuff out of Wise Blood. Immediately, he became friendly when he found out that I was huge fan of O’Connor. The whole tenor of the conversation changed. That’s why I was surprised after All the Pretty Horses got to be so well known, and McCarthy started to get so well known. There were stories in Time and Newsweek about how rude he was to people or about how reclusive, and that’s not the way he came across to me at all. There was never a shortage of courtesy.

DH: How many times did you and McCarthy talk on the phone?

WG: I don’t know, a bunch. The woman he was married to at the time called my house once and wanted to know the last time I talked to him because she wasn’t sure where he had gone. She said sometimes he would just walk off back into the mountains. I thought it was an interesting kind of way to live.

DH: You read Suttree in manuscript?

WG: Yeah, I read it and my brother did too. I would send him pages as I got through with it. I’d read 40 or 50 pages and give it to him. He was reading it right behind me. He had actually read a book by McCarthy before I had, The Orchard Keeper. I was living over in Perry County, and he made a special trip all the way down to Sinking Creek just to bring me that book. It was an old beat up paper back of The Orchard Keeper and he said, “You have got to read this book.” He was right. His judgment was pretty good in that case. McCarthy recommended an agent to me. I was trying to get an agent at the time. He hooked me up with this guy who had been his first agent. I sent the guy three or four things and he never was able to sell anything.

DH: Did you send The Long Home to McCarthy?

WG: No, I sent him some early stuff from Provinces of Night. It wound up not being anything like Provinces of Night, but it was the same kid.

DH: I want to know what that first conversation was like. Did you have it planned out what you were going to say to McCarthy?

WG: No, and I was caught off balance because I wasn’t expecting him to even be on the phone. I had just finished Child of God and it said Cormac McCarthy lives in Louisville, TN, with his wife, the former Anne DeLisle, or something like that, and I just called Louisville and asked if there was a listing for McCarthy—and there was. So I just dialed it. I later read that his wife said that the telephone was outside on a pole. You know, like that old show, “Green Acres.” She said the were living in a dairy barn and the telephone was outside and he was turning down offers of $1500 to come to colleges and read by saying, “There is nothing I know to say that isn’t in the books that nobody is reading anyway.” She sounded a little bitter. I don’t know if it was in Time or Newsweek.

DH: That was the 70’s when you talked to him?

WG: It must have been in the early 80’s because I he mentioned in a letter that sections from the book he was working on had just been published in the Southwestern Review. That would have been Blood Meridian. The book came out in ’85, so it must have been around 1980 probably. It must have been the late 70’s when Iwas talking to him because he sent me the manuscript in a cardboard box. I thought that was a trusting thing to do because this was back before everyone had printers and computers and you could just crank out. It was actually a typed manuscript. My brother called me while he was reading it. While were growing up we always read while we were eating. He said, “You notice that you can’t eat and read this book?” He said, “Every time I try to read it while I’m trying to eat a meal, I hit some really gross part.” There was quite a bit of stuff like that in there. It starts out real early in the book when they are dragging that body out of the water.

DH: You mentioned earlier that someone wanted to put together a collection of your artwork for a show.

WG: Yeah, this guy, the first person I ever sold a picture to, has got quite a few of them and he knew this guy that runs Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi. He talked him into showing some pictures down there. I got to come up with a bunch of pictures. I don’t have nearly enough yet.

DH: Do you find the creative process that takes place similar between writing and painting? Do you get an idea and work from there?

WG: I never really thought about having a show or selling a painting or anything like that. It is more relaxing than writing. Writing is like the least relaxing thing in the world, at least for me. On one hand it is exhilarating, but on the other hand it’s nerve-wracking. I was always interested in art. I always liked Andrew Weiss’ paintings. I like the way Weiss’ paintings look. I just liked painting old barns and buildings, that kind of stuff. I’m no good with people. Apparently, March 11, they are actually going to have this thing if I turn out with enough pictures.

DH: Do you think your paintings are like your writing?

WG: No, not really. Well, in a way. They are rural—old houses and that kind of stuff. I never really thought about it that much to be honest about it. I don’t quite know how to answer it.

DH: I know landscape seems to be really important in your writing.

WG: Yeah. That’s sort of what I like writing. Sometimes I write stuff I don’t particularly want just in order to get to write about the way something looks.

DH: Landscape becomes almost a character in some of your work, Twilight especially, the Harrikin.

WG: I wonder why that is. I think a lot of it has to do with the way we were raised when we were kids. We lived right out in the middle of the woods. In the summertime it would be hot. There was not even any electricity, much less an air conditioner. We would always have the windows open and at night you could hear the whippoorwills and it sounded like they were right in your yard. I mean trees actually grew up right to the edge of where this house was. Living so close to the ground like that, I wonder if that’s not why I’m still so interested in that kind of stuff. I never lived in town. Daddy never had a car so we didn’t go to town very much. It was mostly being in the country all the time. The way my grandkids are being raised is so different from the way I was raised and even from the way my kids were raised. Its like everything is speeded up. Things have changed in just the last decade or decade in a half. It just seems like things are different in the rural South. My grandkids are probably more sophisticated than I was when I got grown—than when I got out of school. It’s like information overload. Everybody’s got computers and iPhones.

DH: Are any of your kids or grandchildren interested in writing?

WG: My oldest daughter is interested in it but she doesn’t work at it the way you have to work at it in order to do it. Chris writes songs. Last time he played that Southern Festival of Books he was approached by this guy who wanted him to come up and record some songs. This guy was paying for the sessions and everything. He recorded three songs and was supposed to record a CD full of them, but hasn’t done it yet.

DH: Are there any new artists out that you like to listen to?

WG: I like Ray Lamontange. I like Conor Oberst. I like that guy, M. Ward. I saw him with the guy from the Old 97’s, I can’t remember his name. That was good.

DH: You listen to Todd Snider.

WG: Yeah, I think that guy ought to be more well known than he is. It’s a criminal injustice that guy’s not famous. I’ve talked to Mark Smirnoff I don’t know how many times trying to talk him into letting me do a profile of Todd Snider. He said he is kind of burnt out on singer- songwriters. From the moment that Rolling Stone magazine came to be, I was probably the only subscriber for several counties around. I still got some of those old magazines. The nude John Lennon/ Yoko Ono cover? I got that one.

DH: Going back to the creative process, you mentioned that writing is a natural development after you start reading a lot and you have a inclination to start writing. Do you think for people who never had that urge creatively, that it’s hard for them to understand what someone with that urge goes through? You mentioned that if you weren’t writing you were wasting time.

WG: Well, for most of the people that I was kin to and knew, that experience would be foreign to them. They couldn’t imagine sitting in a room with a notebook just writing stuff that probably no one would read. Things are probably a little different now than they were then. It seemed like most of the people that I knew were living pretty close to the ground and they were trying to make a living. Things like a job and just surviving took precedence over any kind of artistic commitment. I sort of got used to the idea early on that nobody else took it seriously. I took it seriously, but other people were probably a little amused by it and thought it was eccentric behavior to make up stories and write stuff down. It took me forever to realize that people have different viewpoints. I’ve seen people who want to be writers, and some who are going to write once they get time. You know, “Once I get time I’m gonna write a book.” I would ask, who do you like to read and they would say, “Oh, I don’t like to read. I’m not interested in books somebody else wrote, I’m interested in my book.” I really don’t believe a person can be a writer and not like to read. Or at least any writer I would want to read.

DH: Are there newer writers that you like to read. You mentioned Ron Rash.

WG: Ron writes really good. I think Brad Watson is a really good writer. He doesn’t write a lot—he doesn’t have a lot of stuff published— but there was a collection called Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives that has got some really good stories in it. Someone sent me a manuscript for Bloodroot [debut novel by Amy Greene, of Tennessee]. It was a real good book; she is a real good writer. It got good reviews, the lead review one week in Entertainment Weekly, which is a pretty big deal because of the circulation of that magazine—over a million people probably see that. They gave it an A or A-.

DH: Over the past few years, you have some health issues. Has that had any effect on your writing?

WG: I would have to say that probably it did a little. It seems to take more energy to do stuff than it used to since I had that heart trouble. It seems like you wear out. It’s kind of weird talking about having stamina in writing, but writing always took a lot of energy for me. I’m sure there are people, like Stephen King, that can knock out a book before the day is over. I think it’s kind of a hard thing to do. I mean you can
be glib about it and do it, but I never wanted to be that type of writer. I wanted to be a serious writer and get good reviews. I also wanted to satisfy myself. I didn’t want to publish stuff I’d be ashamed to see in print five years later.

DH: How far along is The Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train?

WG: Probably about a third of the way through. I’m not sure how it’s going to wind up. I mean, I know how it’s going to end and pretty much everything about it.

DH: I appreciate you doing this.

WG: I always feel like I should have done more or said some insightful, valuable information.

DH: I thought it was good.

WG: One of the things that is so interesting about writing to me, at least, is that it is so hard to explain. It’s like it’s ephemeral, you can’t really get a grip on it. You can’t really explain why you do it, or how you do it, or where it comes from. I’m always curious about that with other writers, like the idea for a novel—when something germinates and pops in your head.

DH: When you have an idea pop in your head, do you discover it like the reader discovers it—do you discover it as you go?

WG: I think I discover it kind of in a flash. Usually I know if there is something about a character that appeals to me or if there is something I want to write about. I usually know pretty much what is going to happen to him— how things are going to be resolved. Sometimes stuff surprises you. I’m really more interested in the language than anything else. I think it would have been kind of neat to be a poet. Except when I meet poets, I generally don’t like them very well and I hate going to poetry readings.

DH: You said that writing needs to feel like it’s about something bigger than it is. I thought that was really interesting.

WG: I mean that. I probably didn’t put it that well. It sort of has to stand for something —to me, anyway.