William Gay Archive
Photo credit: Original photograph by J. M. White. Photographic manipulation by Paul Nitsche.
William Gay’s finely honed prose earned him a reputation as the Dean of Southern writers. He started writing as a teen and completed his first novel, still extant, in 1965, and wrote continuously until his death in 2012.
During this time he published three novels and three collections of short stories and left behind a large body of unpublished manuscripts. The archive of his handwritten notebooks includes numerous short stories and several novel drafts.
My involvement in the archive started in 2012 with a correspondence with author and friend of William’s, J. M. White. Being the editor of Twilight, and having published two collections of short works by William, he is now overseeing the organizing and future publication of the archive. As a long time admirer of William’s writing, it is still sometimes hard to believe that I am on the team proofreading and editing the new works. I’ve helped edit the complete posthumous archive: the novels Little Sister Death, The Lost Country, Stoneburner, Fugitives of the Heart, and the short story and essay collection Stories from the Attic.
The early original plan was for J. M. White to publish a few unknown short stories and excerpts of the unpublished novels in a book entitled This Ride's Not Over Yet, under the imprint Anamolaic Press. The team and I had gotten the manuscript fully edited, laid out in book form, and even a cover was completed by myself. Talks between Dzanc Books then began to materialize, and it was decided that This Ride's Not Over Yet would be shelved. Little Sister Death, and Gay's much anticipated novel, The Lost Country, were acquired by Dzanc Books in July, 2014.
In September 2015, Little Sister Death was released. Stoneburner, the second posthumous novel, was published by the William Gay Archive's imprint, Anomolaic Press, in February 2018. The Lost Country was released by Dzanc Books in July 2018. Fugitives of the Heart was published by The University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press in June 2021. Stories from the Attic, most of which developed out of This Ride’s Not Over Yet, was released by Dzanc Books in July 2022.