Finding the Lost County: The Life of William Gay

Born in 1939 and raised in the rural south, other than his time in the Navy and a brief sojourn working in the factories in Chicago, he spent his whole life in middle Tennessee. He was raised in a sharecropper's shack with no electricity and no running water. His father never owned a car or a house. Tennessee ranks near the bottom of all the states in the union in terms of education and Lewis County ranks very low among the 92 counties in the state. He graduated from the Lewis County High School but was completely self-educated as both a writer and a painter. He was inspired by the writings of William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy. He studied and wrote until he could match the great writers in the Southern literary tradition in the aesthetic power and intensity of their prose. He passed away at the age of 71 in 2012.

William Gay was born to be a writer. For as long as he could remember he was fascinated by the written word and wanted nothing other than to write. He faced incredible odds but there was simply nothing else that he wanted to do and nothing else that he would do. He lived a hardscrabble earthly life, rugged and simple. He served his art and let his art serve him. He was creating something original, something high energy, cut to the bone, coming out of the dark with an element of danger, exploding on the page. He wrote prose that is heartfelt and melancholy, imbued with beauty and concern for all living things. In a world that didn't seem to care, he was an earth angel singing from some imaginary corner of the universe. His life and the books he created are a master class in the art of writing.

J. M. White did graduate study in Phenomenology at Duquesne University and holds an M.A. in philosophy from Vanderbilt. His poems, interviews, essays and book reviews have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Sewanee Review, Parabola, Janus Head and The Mirror as well as in magazines and journals in Canada, England, Romania, Italy, Japan and India. He has eighteen books in print including biographies of Keith Dowman, Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche and now William Gay. He has a small independent press that specializes in works by William Gay and by himself. He published two books of short stories by William Gay while William was alive and oversaw the publication of five posthumous works from the William Gay Archive. His newest book of poetry is titled The Phenomenology of Nondual Awareness.