Michael Loyd Gray is the author of ten published books of fiction and more than sixty published short stories. His story collection, The Space Between Now and Then, was released in May 2026 by Silent Clamor. His novel The Writer in Residence was released in April 2026. Regal House will release his novel Emperor of the Mundane in 2027. Gray is the winner of the 2008 Sol Books Prose Series Prize, the 2005 Alligator Juniper Fiction Prize, the 2005 Writers Place Award for Fiction, and a fiction support grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. He earned a MFA from Western Michigan University, where he was a Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society Scholar, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois. Gray lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with three cats and a lot of electric guitars.
Who are your literary influences or inspiration, Michael?
For me it began with Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway, at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School in Champaign, Illinois. I read The Old Man and the Sea and A Tale of Two Cities in an English class. Those were the first serious books I’d read (The Hardy Boys don’t count!) and they opened my eyes to what fiction can do. From the Dickens novel I learned the value of a great opening and a great ending and from Hemingway’s saga about solitariness, how clear language can nonetheless be elegant and convey complexity.
From there, when I’d grown up to become a newspaper writer after graduating with a journalism degree from the University of Illinois, I kept reading. I learned how to craft fiction from Bobbie Ann Mason, Ellen Gilchrist, Raymond Carver, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Stuart Dybek, Daniel Curley and others. Each book was a new lesson. I learned the importance of voice and developed my own, honed by practice over time.
Stuart Dybek was my mentor in the MFA program at Western Michigan University, and I owe him much thanks for my successful conversion from journalism to fiction. At Illinois, I took a fiction class with the late Daniel Curley. He was the first real writer to tell me I had what it takes. Finally, the late Monique Raphel High, a cherished friend and California writer, encouraged me to keep writing in the lean years before I was published anywhere.
Here’s one of those questions that most writers get asked: Why do you write?
Writing is a need, an obsession, a requirement, a deal-breaker, a demand, a passion, a job, a benevolent disease, a fervent cause, (I’m trying to get in the rhythm of that great opening to A Tale of Two Cities!), an identity, perpetual solace, a warm refuge, sharp perspective, and as essential as blood coursing through my veins and the air in my lungs. Writing is my voice. I’m being heard.
Where do your characters come from?
I see them standing alone at a corner, hands thrust deep into pockets, a red scarf tied snug around a neck to ward off the cold, as I drive by. We brush shoulders along a crowded street and make eye contact for the briefest of moments. I notice them in a grocery store, in the frozen foods section, indecision dominating their faces as they open the cooler door and lean in on a hot day. I hear snippets of their animated conversation – the anger as well as the joy, the arrogance as well as humility — at the next table in a café or bar.
I’ve mentioned Hemingway. He was a good listener, a good observer. I am, too. I notice the little things in any scene. I hear how people speak and what that says about them. It’s the little things you overhear, seemingly irrelevant, inconsequential, that can germinate and grow into something big – a story, a novel. The first successful story I wrote and published, “Little Man,” was fueled by a remark I overheard from my grandmother, out of context, that somehow rattled into my head for a few years before it tumbled out and I created a story about a dormant marriage two people desperately tried to jump start.
At what moment did you decide you were a writer?
There wasn’t a precise moment. No Joycean epiphany like Gabriel Conroy’s in “The Dead.” But I got inklings of the power of stories in Lincoln McGurk’s English class at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School. In those days, I was mostly interested in running for the track team, chasing girls, and rocking out to The Beatles and Rolling Stones, but I kept reading, too, on into high school and then college at the University of Illinois. At Illinois, training to be a journalist, I had that secret desire to write fiction but not yet the confidence.
Hemingway, right out of high school, spent about a year as a writer for the Kansas City Star. He later said that newspaper writing was good at teaching someone to write declarative sentences, but that a real writer must leave journalism behind before it ruins them. Or words to that effect. Well, it took me ten years of newspaper writing in Arizona and Illinois before I’d had enough journalism and was ready to tackle fiction. I quit my newspaper job, sold my house, and was accepted into the MFA program at Western Michigan University. It was a life-changing decision and the best one I’ve ever made.
What does your writing space look like?… like do you have a crazy mess of a desk full of notes and post its? Or is it a quaint chair at a coffee shop?
It’s a comfy sofa in the back room of a café, Water Street Coffee Joint, near my house. I’ve been back in Kalamazoo for five years now after five years teaching at a college in sweaty Aiken, South Carolina. The back
room is quieter than the rest of the café and once I start writing, I can tune out the noise and people until I’m done and it’s time to come up for air. I’ve written a few books and many stories while sipping decaf in this refuge. Recently, a woman sat down with me and said she was a student in a class I taught when I was a teaching associate in the MFA program at WMU. A blast from the past.
I’ve never done much writing at home. I get distracted by the cats and many guitars. I treat writing as a privilege and a pleasure but a job, too. So, I get up early on days when I don’t teach and I go to the cafe and write. When I get home, I feel the satisfaction of having done the work. The secret to writing, to me, anyway, is consistency. The more you do it, the easier it gets and the better it sounds – like learning to play guitar.
What genres do you work in?
I’m a literary realist. I write about people who could be your neighbors or somebody you work with, someone you once loved but lost. My stories in The Space Between Now and Then, released this May by Silent Clamor, are often men, for example, struggling to find an authentic identity. Probably Hemingway more than anyone set me on the course of literary realism.
I’ve written fiction with absurdist elements. My novel Emperor of the Mundane, scheduled for a 2027 release by Regal House, is moderately absurdist. It’s about a man who works for a company that makes money by promoting vanity projects that never get built but that satisfy the egos of rich people. My 2019 novel The Armageddon Two-Step qualifies as magical-realist, I suppose, because it’s the odyssey of a young man who somehow manages to save the world. It’s being re-released in 2027 by a new publisher, Flat Sole Studio.
If you didn’t write, what would you do with that time? Do you feel compelled to write or choose to?
I’m absolutely compelled to write. I must. My life depends on it! But I choose it, too. I want it. It’s a lover that can never be refused. It’s a marriage with no possibility of divorce. Just interludes away from each other to re-charge, to replenish the passion and imagination.
I also teach and have taught at universities and colleges in Texas, New York, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Teaching and writing are compatible with each other. Teaching helps keep the mind sharp and that probably is a benefit to the side of me that writes fiction. I also play guitar and collect them. I have a dozen electrics. Music and writing are powered by the same things – tone, pace, rhythm.
What’s the hardest part of writing or publishing?
The hardest part of writing is getting published. At the start, anyway. It’s rare for a writer to have overnight success. I like to say that my overnight success has taken twenty-five years. Famous writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were rejected for stories that later became regarded as classics. J.K. Rowling was rejected by big publishers until a small one took a chance and the rest is history.
Writing is now easy for me. I don’t get writer’s block. That’s because I’ve been doing it long enough that it’s a skill I can call on and control — very much like the years of practice to learn how to play guitar chords, for example. My best advice to a young writer is just write, write, write because it really does get easier and sounds better the more you do it. Consistent writing can become successful writing. Novelist Norman Mailer once said the mark of a professional writer is being able to write on a bad day. I’ve done that.
Who has supported you along the way?
I mentioned three writers above – Stuart Dybek, Daniel Curley, and Monique Raphel High – who helped me, who encouraged me when I was starting out with fiction. My mother, the late Dorothy Gray, supported my disreputable desire to be a writer. She was the only one in an otherwise conservative family that otherwise saw little value in such things. I also want to mention my best friend, Anthony Squiers, a well-known Berthold Brecht scholar in Germany. Tony is like a brother to me, and he has always been supportive of my work.
But I must say that the best support a writer can have probably comes from within. Writing is not a team sport. It is, as Hemingway once said, lonely at best. It’s great to have your mother and friends on your side, and to have writing teachers who help you develop, but your biggest ally is that unyielding person inside you, that constant voice that says do not ever give up.
We’ve all heard the advice that authors should “write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?
I used to hear people say write what you know and at first that seemed wise. It made sense. There was a certain logic to it. But now, I tell writers – write what you can know and don’t worry about writing only what you do know. I published a novella last year, Donovan’s Revolution (Oprelle Publications), which was set during the revolution in Haiti during the 1980s. I’ve never been to Haiti, but I did my homework and rendered it as an authentic setting. I found the right words to accomplish that. I’ve also never been in a revolution, but I researched the one in Haiti and got my facts straight and made it real for readers.
You can write about what you know – yes. But also, what you can know. There’s no tension between the two for me. I know the difference between them and use them as each one may apply to a story.
—Michael Loyd Gray, Kalamazoo, Michigan