The Legendary Terry Kay by Renea Winchester

His accolades are numerous: Lifetime Achievement Award; recipient of the Governor's Award in Humanities; Georgia Writers Hall of Fame; recipient of the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for outstanding contribution to the literary heritage of Georgia; Townsend Award; Brooke Baker Award; Appalachian Heritage; Four time Author of the Year (Georgia Writers Association). He received a Southern Emmy Award for his teleplay, Run Down the Rabbit. Three of his seventeen works have been adapted to film including his signature novel, To Dance with the White Dog. But for those who were fortunate to call him friend, that category meant everything.

To be Terry Kay’s friend was to receive an anointing akin to royalty.

Terry Kay who was the keynote of the Blue Ridge Writing Festival two decades ago. Valley of Light had just released and I listened as this master of the literary language caused the audience to fall into a trance with a voice thick and smooth as molasses. He spoke of craft, of listening to characters, of trying-failing-and trying again.

In that moment, I wanted to be like Terry Kay.

A book signing followed. I held back, wanting to be the last in line. I had purchased two copies of Valley – one for my brother, the other my dad, who are both fishermen. Terry had read a passage from Valley, an intimate moment where the character touches the water, calling fish to him. My breath caught. I had witnessed my father do the same. In that moment, I knew I could trust Terry Kay.

After personalizing the books, he looked at me with those piercing blue eyes and said, “You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

I turned and looked behind me. To whom he was speaking? Surely someone else was in line. I hadn’t breathed a word about my dreams.

His eyes met mine. “You. Are. A. Writer.” His tone was firm, serious, fatherly. “Go home and do exactly what I said.”

In that moment my friendship with Terry Kay began.

Over the years, I rarely missed an opportunity to hear him speak or take one of the classes he generously taught. Terry Kay had a reputation of mentoring authors as if he had all the time in the world. We exchanged hundreds of emails. We met for lunch. He mentored me and it was only after his death that I realized he only invested this precious time in those whom he believed had a gift.

His motto: If someone believes in you, you owe it to them to try.

He is known for saying, “There is only one magic in writing, the rest is work. The magic is when you let characters talk to you. If you are patient enough and let them trust you. They will come.” He was a rare breed of southern writer who didn't force characters to conform to a rigid outline of his own design. Instead, Kay wrote to discover a story. With patience and curiosity, he observed characters, listened and recorded their actions. Terry once told me he spoke to the characters as one would a friend. In turn, these unforgettable characters trusted him. When they fell silent, he prayed for the characters to reveal themselves in his dreams.

And came to him they did, like a lover in the night, whispering their secrets, speaking in a cadence only Terry Kay could hear. Be it an intelligent young woman named Marie transplanted into the South when racial tensions were their highest, a football player from rural southern Georgia talking trash before the big game, or Newell Proudfoot teaching two brothers a lesson about respecting their elder, these story-telling characters trusted Terry Kay.

Trust, you see, is everything in the life of a successful author. A reader must trust the author to take them places they would never visit. Readers want to fall headlong into a book and discover things about themselves never before possible.

Terry Kay knew inherently the impact novels can have in the life of a young boy growing up. Born the eleventh of twelve children in a home without electricity, Kay grew up running barefoot on the 44-acre farm his parents owned in Hart County, Georgia. Come planting time, he followed mules across a field. When the harvest moon hung in the night sky, he picked cotton and beneath a blazing southern sun, put up hay as was expected for a young boy born to the land. It was this connection to rural landscapes that kept Kay a humble man, even after the city lured him away from home with the promise of more money than Momma and Poppa’s patch of red clay could ever yield.

After earning a degree in Social Science, where Terry also studied theatre – which he attributed to teaching him dialect and inflection – he married and took a job selling insurance. His wife worked days as a teacher while Terry worked nights. One morning before leaving for school, she woke him by shaking his foot. She gave Terry a harsh glare and said in a voice he had never heard before, “When I come home today you will have another job.” She slammed the door as she left.

It was 1959 and at age 21, Terry felt like he was a failure. Suddenly there was a thump at the front door, as the morning edition of the Decatur/Dekalb News landed on the steps. Inside he found a job listing which read: Wanted: Young Man to Learn Interesting Profession. He later discovered the newspaper was looking for an errand boy.

“I took the job so I could tell my wife I had a new job.”

That one job changed everything. Lured by the energy of staff writers, he asked them if he could one day write something for the paper. There was a column called, Dekalb After Dark by Detolyn Shredlou. He approached the editor and said, “I don’t know who writes this column, but Detolyn Shredlou can’t write a lick. I could write better than that when I was in the 10th grade.”

The editor said, “Why don’t you write next week’s column.”

It was only after publishing three columns that Terry discovered his boss was writing under the name Detolyn Shredlou.

“Only after you make a fool out of yourself can you learn how to write,” Terry said.

Because of the connections with the newspaper, Kay formed relationships with Jim Townsend and Pat Conroy. Townsend and Conroy pushed Kay to become a novelist, but screenplays remained Kay’s passion. Then one day Jim and Pat were talking about Terry’s underutilized talent and strategizing how they could force Terry into realize his full potential.

“Leave this to me,” Pat Conroy said. “I know how I can make him do it.”

Pat called his editor, Anne Barrett, at Houghton Mifflin to tell her he had read a 150 page manuscript that his good friend was working on. “It’s wonderful and you should read it,” Conroy added using a tone that shouldn’t be disputed.

Terry Kay hadn’t written a single word.

Terry received a letter from Anne asking for the manuscript immediately. “When I received her letter, I was furious. I yelled at Conroy. I cursed him. Conroy sat calmly and eventually said, ‘You can tell Anne I lied, or you can write 150 pages.’”

Using a typewriter, in one month Kay wrote 150 pages and The Year the Lights Came On was born. It wasn’t his favorite book, but it was his favorite experience because it allowed him to retell his childhood. Terry retained his day job, while working on his second and third novels After Eli, and Dark Thirty. Keeping long hours at the paying job, while dreaming of his characters, eventually To Dance with the White Dog, the book he would become famous for writing, came to him.

While working for the Atlanta Journal, Kay wrote a column about his father. After reading the article, editor, Lee Walburn, mentioned how much he enjoyed the segment. Kay said, ‘You know, Lee, I should have put something in there about the white dog. While my father was on his deathbed he had asked, ‘Son, have you seen my white dog?’ That was your mother. She was the white dog. When you moved in to take care of me it left because she wasn’t needed anymore.”

Waldrum responded, “Terry, you idiot! That is the story. Now you’ve got to write another one.”

Lee wasn’t the only person who believed the white dog mattered. Upon the column’s release a friend told him, “It’s a wonderful story, but you’ve made a huge mistake. This is a novel.”

At their insistence, Terry took another look at the story and knew his friends were right. He went into his office and wrote the first line: He understood what they were thinking and saying: Old man that he is, what’s to become of him?

“When I wrote those first words I knew exactly what would happen with the rest of the novel. I wrote the novel in two months.”

In 1989, Terry Kay left the corporate world to write full time.

To Dance with the White Dog released in 1990 and became his signature novel. It was also the book that provided a financial cushion for Terry Kay to become one of only 300 authors in the US at the time to make a living solely from writing. White Dog became a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie starring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. White Dog drew 33 million viewers upon release.

In a world where publishers place authors in a genre and keep them there, Kay emphatically defended that he was a character driven writer, not a genre writer. He believed if you place the characters in a situation, the plot will take care of itself. His agent, Harvey Klingler agreed. “A lot of publishers didn’t know what to do with him because from one book to the next he could do a 180 from something like White Dog to like Dark Thirty, which was among my favorites, but it is really a suspense novel.”

Authors who have written multiple novels, rarely admit they have a “favorite.” Terry Kay was no different, but he was known to say The Book of Marie was his most important work.

In an interview Kay said, “New York Publishers wouldn’t touch the book. They do not trust southern authors to write about sensitive southern topics. I grew up during the civil rights movement and am old enough to write about it. I wrote about the human condition.”

Written decades before many were ready to discuss race relations in the south, The Book of Marie (Mercer University Press, 2007) would have been an instant bestseller had it released in today’s market. Unafraid of bringing attention to social and moral injustices, Kay wrote about race relations decades before anyone would acknowledge the need for change. Kay’s prophetic utterances – spoken through the character Marie, who came to Overton, Georgia in 1962 from a “progressive” area of DC – sets the stage.

“Progressives,” especially those from Northern states, weren't exactly welcomed in rural small towns across the south. Upon arriving, Marie wasted no time stirring things up in Overton. She began teaching four small black children.

As valedictorian, she delivers a prophetic speech to the “good white people” of Overton County:

In twenty years, nothing will be the same.

You will not work at the same jobs in the same way.

You will be invaded by people from other nations, looking for jobs, for a chance to be free, and they will teach you things you have never imagined.”

Your children will sit in classrooms with red children, yellow children, black children, and you will cry in anguish because you won’t understand what is happening.

And the answer is so simple: you cannot exist without change.

Even when readers are afraid of change, Kay leads us down the path in a way that causes us to take a hard look into our own hearts. We following Terry Kay willingly, because his deep affection for the reader is evident in his masterful command of the English language. We trust this master wordsmith who pens novels without pride or pontification. You see, words are Kay's superpower, and there has never existed a reader who personally met Terry Kay who didn’t fall under his spell and become putty in his powerful hands. Kay molds us into the naive and vulnerable Cole Bishop and teaches us the power of opening our hearts to those who aren't like us because we can be taught a better way; then he breathes the life of bravery into our lungs as we become Marie, insisting upon changing this world for the better.

Fifty years later, we are still Cole Bishop when he returns for his high school reunion. Marie’s prophesies have all come true. As with our flawed human nature, some people change, and some folk never do. Cole and Marie are forever connected; just as readers are to Terry Kay. Connected through eternity with the words he penned just for us.

No one has ever wowed a reader, held them in the palm of their hands like Terry Kay did. He brought us to rural Georgia where he revealed the best and the worst of the human condition. His words honored his family. His words made us laugh. His words made us cry. We adored him. We trusted him. We miss him.

The Georgia Writers Museum located in Eatonton, has honored Terry Kay with a heartfelt exhibit that is open to the public at no charge. You can see memorabilia from his youth to his many writing awards, and learn about his impact on the Georgia literary community.