William Gay - Time Done Been Won't Be No More

The record business is so damn fickle. The sorry stuff that is coming out of Nashville now, they ought to go hide their faces or something. The people the record companies are pushing are no good, and the new crop is even worse. Country music, like when Hank Williams was around, country music used to be real; I wasn’t that crazy about it, but it was real anyway. Now it is formulaic, cowboy hats and buffed up shoulders. They have some of the biggest tours in the country. That guy that married Nicole Kidman, his tours are some of the biggest things going.

JMW One last question before we have to go, I’ve noticed your characters aren’t religious; they don’t seem to believe in anything?

WG I’m suspicious of people who say they don’t believe in anything. I’m not religious but I believe in all sorts of things. I was at a reading and someone wanted to ask me what I believed in so I just quoted from a scene at the end of Twilight where Tyler comes up on these people who are digging up a grave of a relative so they can be sure the body wasn’t desecrated and he watches them for a few minutes and then turns to go and the man doing the digging stayed him and said that digging up his relatives was the least he could do for them, that he owed them that much. (He had a copy of the book beside his chair and he picked it up and read.)

I’d hate to meet em up yonder and have to explain why they was done so shoddy. Ain’t that the way you think?

What Tyler really thought was that the dead were so absolutely beyond anything the living might do for them it was almost past comprehension and he had no commitment to meet anyone anywhere. He feared that beyond the quilted gray satin of the undertaker’s keep there was only a world of mystery that bypassed the comprehension of men and did not even take them into consideration. A world of utter darkness and the profoundest of silence.

JMW Well, I guess that about says it. The dark night, the long home.

NOTE: The “Bibliography” does not include all his shorter reviews, liner notes or other miscellaneous prose. Everything in the book, except for the excerpt from Lost Country and the “Interview”, has been previously published. The “Bibliography” indicates the first publication of each of the other pieces included in this book.

The Long Home , MacMurray and Beck, Denver, CO, 1999

The Long Home , Faber and Faber, London, England, 1999

Provinces of Night , Doubleday, New York, NY, 2000

Provinces of Night , Faber and Faber, London, England, 2000

Provinzen der Nacht , Argon Verlag GmbH, Berlin, Germany, 2001

Twilight , MacAdam/Cage, San Francisco, CA, 2006

Twilight , Faber and Faber, London, England, 2007

Lost Country , Forthcoming

NOVELLAS

The Paperhanger, the Doctor’s Wife and the Child Who Went into the Abstract , The Book Source, Hohenwald, TN, 1999

Come Home, Come Home, It’s Suppertime , The Book Source, Hohenwald, TN, 2000

SHORT STORY — COLLECTIONS

I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down , The Free Press, New York, NY, 2002

Wittgenstein’s Lolita and The Iceman , Wild Dog Press, Brush Creek, TN, 2006

SHORT STORY — PUBLICATIONS

‘Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues” Missouri Review , (Fall l998)

“I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down” Georgia Review , (Fall 1998)

“Closure and Roadkill on the Life’s Highway” Atlantic Monthly , (November l999)

“The Paperhanger” Harpers , (February 2000)

“A Death in the Woods” GQ , (November 2000)

“My Hand is Just Fine Where it is” Oxford American , (September October l999)

“The Crimper” Harpers , (October 2000)

“Good Til Now” Oxford American , (January February 2001)

“Charting the Territories of the Red” Southern Review (Spring 2001)

“Wreck on the Highway” Chattahoochee Review , (2005)

“Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?” Tin House , (2007)

ARTICLES

“Sweet Songs Never Last Too Long” Oxford American , Music Issue, (July August l999)

“Queen of the Haunted Dell” Oxford American (October 2000)

“Sitting on Top of the World” Oxford American Music Issue (2000)

“Time Done Been Wont Be No More” Oxford American , (July/August Music Issue, 2001)

“Crossroads Blues” Oxford American (2002, website only)

“Blind Willie McTell” Oxford American , (Summer, 2005)

“Calves Howling at the Moon” Oxford American , (Fall, 2005)

“The Man in the Attic: A Memoir” Paste , (June/July, 2006)

“The Banjo Man” Oxford American , Music Issue, (Summer, 2006)

ANTHOLOGIES

New Stories from The South, The Year’s Best , Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 1998

New Stories from The South, The Year’s Best , Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 1999

New Stories from The South, The Year’s Best , Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 2000

Best New American Voices , Edited by Tobias Wolff, 2000

New Stories from The South, The Year’s Best , Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 2001

O’ Henry Prize Stories , Edited by Larry Dark, 2001

Best Mystery Stories , Edited by Lawrence Block, 2001

Best Music Writing , Edited by Nick Hornby, 2001

New Stories from The South: The Year’s Best , Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 2002

Stories From the Blue Moon Café , Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2002

Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe II , Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2003

They Write Among Us , Edited by Jim Dees, 2003

Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe III , Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2004

Anchor Book of Modern Short Stories , Edited by Ben Marcus, 2004

Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe IV , Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2004

Best of the South: The Best of the Second Decade , Selected by Anne Tyler, 2005

A Cast of Characters and Other Stories , Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2006

Best American Short Stories , Edited by Steven King, 2007

Best American Mystery Stories , Edited by Carl Hiaasen, 2007

The Surreal South , Edited by Pinckney Benedict, 2007

The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction , Edited Joyce Carol Oates and Christopher R. Beha, 2008

EDITOR

With Suzanne Kingsbury, The Alumni Grill, Anthology of Southern Writers , MacAdam Cage, 2004.

INTERVIEWS

“Out of Nowhere: After decades of laboring in complete obscurity, Middle Tennessee author William Gay has finally found literary acclaim,” by Clay Risen, Nashville Scene , (January 16, 2003), p. 23–27.

“A Natural Talent: Author William Gay, snug amid woods of his native Hohenwald, reflects on lifelong love of words.” By Julie Gillen, The Daily Herald , (Sunday, March 7, 2004), 1D, 4D. Columbia, TN.

“An Interview with William Gay,” by Georgia Afton, Water-Stone Review: A Literary Annual , Volume 7, (Fall 2004), p. 42–59.

Bookmark with Don Noble, “Interview with William Gay,” Produced by The Center for Public Television at the University of Alabama (c) 2007 by University of Alabama Center for Public Television (DVD) “Interview William Gay,” Tennessee Literary Project, MTSU, Conducted by MTSU student Kenny Torrella, (April 13, 2008), www.mtsu.edu/tnlitproj