I am not sure where to begin when it comes to writing about William Gay. His books do not need my praise, as they were lauded by great artists and reviewers alike long before I ever knew his name. In the past I’ve upheld and celebrated Gay’s work as some of the finest I had ever come across, but that alone won’t do anymore. I can no longer just recommend him; I must lay emphasis upon the need read to him, and more than ever now that he is gone.

Certainly his absence is painful because we won’t have a new pile of books from him. One of the tragedies of the loss of Gay is that he simply was not done. As long as there was a breath in the man there was indeed a story. I am sure of that. If we’re fortunate, his The Lost Country will finally be published posthumously, though from what I understand it may be incomplete. My hope is that The Lost Country is given the same treatment as Larry Brown’s The Miracle of Catfish—a novel that while unfinished was still published and included Brown’s notes on the story’s conclusion. Surely someone out there is at work on this as I write. Gay’s death without one more publication makes his loss all the more heartrending.

However, his loss is painful for me in another way: I never got to meet him. Of all the living authors whom I discovered and wanted to speak to, William Gay was probably number one. Of course I wanted to tell him how much I loved his sentences, how his stories were luminous webs so real that they tossed and shimmered in the sunlight, that they caught me, and caught anyone who gave them a second’s chance. He made it look so easy: “…he studied Karen’s face intently as if it were a gift that had been handed to him unexpectedly, and images of her and words she had said assailed him in a surrealistic collage so that he could feel her hand in his, a little girl’s hand, see white patent-leather shoes climbing concrete steps into a church, one foot, the other, the sun caught like something alive in her auburn hair” (“Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues”). Stunning, right? And even more so within the context of the whole story.

I remember where I was when I read that sentence: alone in a dorm room at Mississippi College, a single lamp on beside my bed with I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down open on my chest. I kept having to lay the book down, to close my eyes and run Gay’s words over in my mind. They were like water surging over stones, moving and powerful. I had bought the book from Lemuria, before I worked here, and had discovered Gay while browsing through Barry Hannah’s books. In Barry’s section was a DVD, a conversation between him, Ron Rash, and William Gay: the latter two being authors I’d never heard of before, and had certainly never come across in the big box bookstores I’d been frequenting. Gay spoke calmly and seemed so gentle and easygoing that one struggled to understand how a story as thrilling and horrifying as “The Paperhanger” emerged from someone so meek. I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down was pivotal for me, and pulled me to the other side of the river in terms of reading and writing.

In interviews with Gay, he often says that it was Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel that made him want to be a writer. For me, Gay’s I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down did the same. I’d been reading before I came across his books, but it was his heartbreaking style, his assaultive approach, that made me stop and say, “I wish I could do this for a reader.” His fiction forced me to leave literary theory behind, to forget saying anything on behalf of an author and finally, to know that the story says it all. I sought out graduate programs in fiction writing instead of literary criticism. I stopped going to the big box stores; they no longer had anything on their shelves for me to read. I started frequenting Lemuria, and eventually they gave me a job. My life was changed.

For those not familiar with his work, Gay did a fine job of writing in a literary style while keeping the story thrilling and urgent. Anyone who frequents Lemuria’s crime and mystery section should most definitely step over into Southern Fiction and pick up one of Gay’s books. Each book provides a texture of the noir genre, while maintaining the southern literary lifeblood at its heart. William Faulkner once said that there was nothing worth writing about outside of love, money, and death, and Gay certainly knew the power these themes had over the human heart when woven through a gripping narrative. Still, literary and poetic language is never sacrificed in Gay’s work for the attempt to thrill a reader. One who sticks with Gay’s work will be rewarded with memorable and heartbreaking lines. I pray there are more of them to read.

I won’t meet William Gay. Not in person, anyway. He has, however, left his books to continue thrilling and educating me with and on storytelling. As Steve Yarbrough said on Facebook recently, his work will outlive him by many decades. I know that this is true for me, but it will only be true of others if his books continue to be bought and read and treasured like they deserve. And so, if I could, I’d tell William Gay how much he meant to me all those nights alone in my dorm room. How he helped me leave one realm of reading and thinking about literature and guided me into another, better one. I’d tell him how much his work resonated with me then and how it speaks to me now, how I saw and see the fingerprint of God in his stories. I’d tell him how much he means to me when I’m awake before the sun rises, his stack of hard work not far from my desk, as I am writing and trying to write.  -Ellis

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