Tommy Hays

2005 Season

Tommy Hays' ( www.tommyhays.com ) latest novel is The Pleasure Was Mine, which was published in March by St. Martin's Press. He has written two other novels- Sam's Crossing and In the Family Way, a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. Hays is Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and Director of Creative Writing for the Academy at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. He is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle and is a contributor to Our State magazine. Hays received his BA in English from Furman University and his MFA in Creative Writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Asheville, NC with his wife and two children.

Bibliography

Sam's Crossing (1992)
In the Family Way, Random House (1999)
The Pleasure Was Mine (2005)

Excerpt

The day before I was to meet Jackson and Newell up at Jones Gap I took Irene on our regular afternoon ride. We were driving through the north Greenville countryside or what was left of it. What hadn't been eaten up by the strip malls, the Wal-Marts and the Home Depots. Then we got into fancy developments--developments with big brick entrances and names like Millard's Farm or Swire's Creek or Wykle's Woods that had sprung up. They had kept the names, but they had lost the places. Probably a lot of the old timers had been forced to sell their land to pay off the nursing homes. Rolling Hills my ass. More like Rolling Bills.

The quality of the scenery didn't seem to matter to Irene, as long as there was some. I could have ridden her around the same block for an hour, and she would have been as entertained as if I drove her to California. She enjoyed going to ride, even though she wasn't always real clear who this ugly old coot was who took her.

"Newell and Jackson are coming tomorrow," I said. "Jackson's spending the summer." I had been telling her this ever since Newell had called. Some days she heard me. One day she even said, "Put clean sheets on the beds." Today she just sucked on the straw to her iced tea and looked out the window.