A Singular Voice: Wesley Gibson
Wesley Cullen Gibson was born on Sept. 29, 1959 in Mobile, Ala., and raised in Richmond, Va. He died on Dec. 4, 2016, in San Francisco.
He received his MFA from Brown University and was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, a Virginia Commission for the Arts Grant, and fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo. He came to Saint Mary’s College in 2005 as a core faculty member of the MFA Program of Creative Writing, teaching workshops and seminars as well as undergraduate courses in composition, creative writing, Collegiate Seminar, and January Term.
A brilliant writer, his books—the memoir, You Are Here, and the novels, Shelter and Personal Saviors—center on family, the ones we're born into and the ones we create. His short stories appeared in The Village Voice, Mississippi Review, and Blackbird, his art criticism in The New Art Examiner. He was an editor for Bloom, a literary journal that the writer Edmund White described as the “most exciting new queer literary publication to emerge in years.”
Most recently he completed a novella set in the South about people who know that some people have all the luck in the world while most everybody else has none at all. The work is brutal and beautiful and centers on a day in the life of an elderly woman, Ruby. It opens with a cat's death, one that, although Ruby knew was coming, was still a shock. At one point Ruby wishes she could remember “just one thing clean and clear, its simple happiness, instead of everything tangling itself up into sorrow."
A magnificent teacher, Wesley was known for his humor, his intelligence, and his ability to be both frank and supportive. He cared about precision, interiority, and emblematic moments.
So here is one: Two writers, longtime friends, go out after work on a Thursday night. They go to the place they always go to, one whose name they have, in all these years, never managed to learn. He orders a Manhattan, she orders a Diet Coke. They talk about family. About what they are working on or wanting to work on. About classes. He’s teaching one on voice. He isn’t sure voice can be taught. Yet he’s gratified. The graduate students have experimented, worked hard. Their voices are more supple now.
I think I might want to teach this class again, he says. “You know. Make it my thing.”
“That’s a great idea,” she says. “Because voice is definitely your thing.”
Three days later he’s dead.
As I understand it—and I don’t pretend I do—he died sometime around 5 p.m. when there is a trace of milky blue light left in the sky. His death is described as untimely because it was and because what else can you say? And so? We gather in classrooms, in chapels, in living rooms, in bars. We remember him in silence. We remember him by telling stories. Then we open the books. And there he is—that voice, so singular, so clear, so tender and assured—fully present as he was, as if he were still near.