Page 2 of 4
Literary success is often a self-fulfilling prophecy, high-profiles generated by publishing marketing budgets at a time when "just to get a book put on a table at the front of the store in one of the chains can cost $10,000," according to a 2000 Authors Guild study on the plight of midlist authors. Midlisters are championed largely by word-of-mouth. Tapping into this grapevine of impassioned readers produced a flow of novels that crowded my nightstand and desktop over the last five months. My travels with today's Southern writers became an all-absorbing journey of captivating stories, unforgettable characters and great writers whose books deliver lasting rewards. Through them I've had the chance to visit nearly every Southern state. Rural Tennessee with William Gay. The coal mines of West Virginia with Denise Giardina. Georgia juke joints with Tina McElroy Ansa. An entire constellation of hardscrabble worlds, whether it was Larry Brown's Mississippi, Tom Franklin's Alabama, Lee Smith's Appalachia or the North Carolina of Kaye Gibbons and Tony Earley. It was a road trip that at its end defied and demolished the stereotypes that surround contemporary Southern fiction, helping me see "the South wasn't all one big theme park full of Andy Griffiths and Waltons," as Laurel Granger, the Piedmont heroine of Pamela Duncan's Plant Life, puts it.
At Main Street Books in Clayton, Kay's fans proved his crowd estimate wrong on this crisp Saturday last December. Nearly 40 customers, mostly middle-aged women -- quadruple the Borders audience from the night before -- kept him signing nonstop for more than two hours. "I've read a lot of Southern authors and I think he's really a good one," says Evelyn Craig Edmondson, who was buying an autographed copy of The Valley of Light as a relative's Christmas gift. "He captures the way we talk and the things we think about and the relationships." But Kay's appeal reaches beyond the provincial, she says. Edmondson's a therapist who prescribes literary medicine for patients who've lost a spouse. "I will tell them, "Treat yourself to To Dance with the White Dog,'" Kay's 1990 novel about a hound that mysteriously appears after an old man's wife dies and helps him through his grief. "It has universal appeal," she explains. "Everybody mourns."A woman in a red sweater hands Kay a book to sign. "I've been reading you since you were in the Atlanta paper," she says.
Writing was an "accidental" career for Terry Kay. In 1959, after graduating from LaGrange College and a stint "as the worst insurance salesman in the world," he answered a blind ad for a $40 a week copyboy job in the Decatur-DeKalb News -- "Wanted: young man to learn interesting profession" -- and soon found his niche in the newsroom. For more than a decade, Terry Kay was a familiar byline in the Atlanta Journal, first in sports, then as film and theater critic. But by 1973, his $250 weekly Journal paycheck wasn't enough to support a wife and four kids, even with freelance gigs; he left the newspaper for the more lucrative world of public relations and the occasional magazine assignment.
His story might have ended there except for Pat Conroy, the South Carolina-born best seller (The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides) who'd become a friend and was urging him to write. After a boozy lunch with Jim Townsend, Kay's editor at Georgia Magazine, Conroy called his editor in New York, raving about a new Southern writer's 150-page manuscript. Since one didn't exist, Kay pounded out the 150 pages in a month, among them a vignette about the late 1940s when electricity came to the northeast Georgia farm country where he was raised. To his amazement, Houghton Mifflin offered a contract and an advance to write what became The Year the Lights Came On. Kay was 35. The Christian Science Monitor called it "a deliciously nostalgic look at the whole experience of growing up," but sales were modest and the $10,000 advance for his next book wasn't enough to live on. He took a part-time public relations job with Oglethorpe Power, the Georgia utility, which quickly became full time. It was five years before his second novel, After Eli, a dark thriller about a charming Irish psychopath in an isolated Appalachian community, appeared. Three years later, he produced Dark Thirty, a violent tale that invited comparisons, but not the sales, of James Dickey's Deliverance. "I was climbing up the corporate ladder," he says, "but I really wanted to write."
In 1981, after cancer claimed his father, who raised 12 children (Kay is No. 11) and thousands of pecan, peach and apple trees on a farm in Vanna, Ga., Kay wrote a moving tribute in the Journal-Constitution's magazine. "I probably should have put something in it about the white dog," he recalls mentioning to his editor after the piece ran. Kay described how this stray dog appeared out of the blue one day after his mother died, how the dog kept his father company, standing on his hind legs, propping his paws on Daddy Kay's walker "like a man-dog dance in a carnival act," how he disappeared after the old man was diagnosed with cancer, and how in their last conversation, Kay's father revealed the dog's identity. "That was your mama."