Terry Kay stands looking at the students gathered to hear him.  “Writing is the easiest thing in the world.  You just put one word after another.” It’s the last day of a week of activities, lectures, book signings, casual conversations, Q&A sessions, and Kay hides his exhaustion, sipping water and apologizing.  “I have diabetes,” he explains.

He regales the crowd with anecdotes. Erich Segal, author of Love Story, wrote the first chapter twenty-two times until his editor told him to stop and finish the book.  Kay encourages students to take a paragraph from the middle of their writing and re-write it every day for weeks or even months.  “You’ll learn how to take chances and how many ways there are to say a thing.”

“We’re so afraid of looking stupid,” he tells them.  “It’s okay to be stupid.” Writing is not the voice of the muse. Writing is a skill.  It’s work, rewriting and rewriting. He explains to students that his own writing often does not take shape until the third draft.  “The Book of Marie took me twenty years to write.”

“Don’t write about how you feel.  Write about what made you feel,” he tells them.  He builds his own stories around characters, discovering what they feel, exploring what if—the differing choices characters can make that lead to interesting stories.  “Stories are built on contrasts.” He tells students to limit their description of main characters so readers sense them rather than see them and expand their description of minor characters so readers see them rather than sense them.  “Writing isn’t about the writer,” he explains, “but the characters and the reader.” “Writers are a medium for characters.  Characters are not a medium for the writer.” The writer is a wordsmith.  “Readers finish the novel” because their imaginations fill in the details that writers only suggest through verbs and dialogue. “Writing is a collection of fragments,” he tells one group on Wednesday.

Earlier Friday morning, most of our planning committee met with Kay and Dr. Catanzaro, President of Chattanooga State, in the Chattanooga State Foundation boardroom for breakfast.  After we eat, Dr. Catanzaro opens his iPad, showing us pictures he has taken.  Watching him, I am reminded of my father explaining a complicated videotaping setup involving three VCRs, one an RCA, another a Mitsubishi, which he repeatedly calls a “Mitsubibi.” I ask my father again and again to repeat the name until he realizes I am teasing him, and he sets his jaw.

Kay shares a story about a commercial, featuring an old man slicing parsley while his daughter works at the stove.  After a bit, the old man takes his cutting board covered with chopped parsley to the stove, and sweeps it into the cooking pot, revealing his cutting board is an iPad which he then rinses and places in the dishwasher while his daughter stares in stunned silence.  We all laugh.  Dr. Catanzaro takes a picture of us with Kay and then sends me to find someone to take a picture that will include him.  He sits beside Terry Kay, finger jabbing the iPad screen, demonstrating how easy it is to crop a photo.

“People often talk about whether the glass is half full or half empty,” Terry Kay says.  “I think it depends whether you are pouring water in or pouring it out.” He touches Dr. Catanzaro’s shoulder, “Your glass is half full, and you are constantly filling other people’s glasses.”

In several of his meetings with students, Kay explains that writing can be reduced to two tricks: verbs and rhythms.

Understand verbs; connect them from sentence to sentence, he tells students.  He illustrates his point with an example from theater.  Constantin Stanislavski required actors to stand back to back whispering a script until they reached a verb, which they must shout.  Kay suggests that actors trying out for a part skim through any script they are asked to read, identifying the verbs, and then, as they read, to “punch the verbs.” In fiction, he tells students “focus on verbs you can see and verbs you can hear.”  Connect them to the sentence before and the sentence after.

His explanation of rhythms focuses on the horizontal rhythms of sentence lengths and the vertical rhythms of paragraph lengths.  In teaching high school students ways to write better, Kay tells them to track the length of their sentences and vary the lengths.  “70% of good writing is rhythm.”  He teaches students “blueprinting,” marking sentence lengths on tracing paper.  He recommends students think about how the lengths of paragraphs reflect the emotions the paragraphs express.

“What do you do?” one student asks. “I have so many things I want so much to say, and I can’t get them down in words.”

“That’s where we’re different,” Kay says.  “I don’t have anything to say.  Never have.”  He walks back to his bottle of water.  “Here’s what you do. Go down to the pharmacy, and buy some Alka Seltzer. Take it home and drop an Alka Seltzer into a glass of water, and when the fizzing stops, drink it.  You’ll burp.  And then you’ll feel better.  It’s not a burning desire to write that’s bothering you.  It’s heartburn.” Then he leans toward the young man, speaking sotto voce.

Of all of his works, only To Dance with the White Dog was written in a single draft.  “I wrote it in two months,” he says.  “I wrote it in a single draft because I couldn’t bear to read it again.” He often had to stop after writing a scene, overcome with tears.

During the week, he often described To Dance with the White Dog as his signature book even though it was a book he never thought would be published, a book he wrote for his family.  Repeatedly, students asked him if the white dog was real.  “Of course,” he’d answer. One young woman asked if he believed the white dog was his mother. “My father believed,” he said.  “And I believed my father.”

Of all his books, the only one he had read after it was published was Dark Thirty. “I think,” he said, “that it is the most violent book in Southern literature of the last fifty years.”  The book describes the horrific and random murder of a Southern family—wife, children, grandchildren—and the man who must face his loss, his need for justice, his desire for vengeance.

The story, based on an actual event, develops the struggle of the main character.  Kay remembers talking with his two minister brothers about the relationship between justice and vengeance.  “In the end,” Kay says, “I realized the answer is simple.  Vengeance is what you do. Justice is what I do.”

On Thursday night, Kay had read from several of his works, including To Dance with the White Dog, the scene where Sam Peek struggles to make a few biscuits.  “That really happened to my father, and I knew I had to work it into the novel.”

Throughout the week, he had shared stories about his family that had influenced scenes in the book—catching his father searching through a phone book for the name of an old girlfriend; the day his brother came home from Vietnam and surprised his mother; one of the black women on whom Neelie was based, who, rushing into the house after Kay’s mother’s death, is swept up in the arms of his father, both crying, something he had never seen his father do, before or since.

“My favorite character is Lottie,” he said, reading the scene in Taking Lottie Home of the events following her husband, Foster’s death, and her leaving with Ben. Lottie is interesting to me, he explains, because she struggles with her past, where, because of poverty, she had been a prostitute, and with her future and her love for this man.

Kay read several passages from The Book of Marie, which he calls his most important work.  Marie Fitzpatrick, valedictorian of her graduating class, stands before the school to ridicule the education students have received and to warn them a storm is coming, a storm of change. The story explores the struggle of white Southerners, their efforts to overcome the traditions and prejudices of a past—and, for the characters, present—steeped in racism and violence.

Throughout the week, students laughed with Kay, pressed him for details, sought his advice.  This last day each session begins and ends with a line of students asking him to sign their books, sharing a private moment.

The last session ends.  The committee is tired.  Terry Kay is tired.  We are all glad the week is over.  But we don’t want him to go.

As we leave the Humanities Building, the sun is bright, and leaves dance to a light breeze. Another member of the planning committee Allison Fetters, her husband, and Terry Kay are slightly ahead of me on the sidewalk, and Terry Kay says, “It’s a good day to die,” and I know he isn’t thinking so much of dying as of endings.

“A better day to live,” I say, and, after a pause, “Dying’s overrated.  We all come round to it eventually.  I’ve known for some time I’m closer to my death than my birth.”

He turns briefly, startled, then, after a few more steps, says, “I think of dying a lot these days,” and I know he has seen the shadow of the white dog.

We reach the parking lot, and I turn toward my car, Allison wishing me a relaxing weekend, and I, her. Terry Kay turns, hand raised to me. “Goodbye, my friend.”

And my cup is full.

 

 

Terry Kay is Chattanooga State’s first visiting writer in the Humanities and Fine Arts Division’s Writers@Work series. The Writers@Work committee members are Erica Lux (Chair), Joel Henderson, Allison Fetters, De’Lara Stephens, and Bill Stifler. Visit the Chattanooga State Writers@Work Facebook page. For more information on Terry Kay, visit his website.