The Pat Conroy Literary Center’s May Virtual Open Mic Night offered more than a reading, becoming a thoughtful conversation about memory, place, and the quiet lives that shape small towns. Presented as a virtual event and livestreamed to the Center’s Facebook page, the evening featured fiction writer James Alan Gill, who read from his short story collection Not Dark Yet, published by Castoff Press.
Gill opened by thanking the Pat Conroy Literary Center and Executive Director Jonathan Haupt for the invitation, situating the evening within the Center’s broader mission: cultivating an inclusive literary community in honor of Pat Conroy, whose work gave enduring voice to place, family, and moral reckoning. That lineage felt particularly apt for a reading drawn from Not Dark Yet, a collection rooted in a Midwestern town so small, Gill joked, that it didn’t even have stoplights.
The stories in Not Dark Yet were written over a decade, with the earliest dating back to 2002 and the most recent in 2012. While not formally interconnected, they share a common geography and time period, unfolding across roughly a decade in the same fictionalized town. Gill credited his mentor, novelist Kent Haruf, with steering him toward this approach early on, invoking Faulkner’s advice to “carve out your postage stamp of land” and return to it again and again. For Gill, that meant writing about the place he knew best, a town where everyone knew one another’s business, yet where many stories went conspicuously untold.
“I felt like there were all these stories lying under the surface,” Gill said. “People had to know them. They were there. But nobody talked about them.”
The reading focused on “The Truth of Matin County, Illinois,” which serves as both the final story in the collection and its narrative frame. The story centers on Clarencey, an unhoused man known to everyone in town and yet largely ignored, who, Gill noted, would once have been casually labeled “the town bum.” Clarencey appears on the margins of several stories throughout the book, drifting in and out of other characters’ lives, before finally stepping into the foreground in the closing piece.
Gill explained that Clarencey was inspired by real figures he encountered growing up, men who were omnipresent and invisible at the same time. While specific details were drawn from observation, the character’s inner life and circumstances were imagined. “I could probably point to a real detail in every story,” Gill said, “but the stories are fashioned into their own thing.”
That balance between factual detail and imaginative reconstruction prompted an early question from the audience about how much of the collection was “true.” Gill described his work as grounded in what he called “fictional realism,” built from concrete details—a 1940s road map the author discovered in a junk pile while working one summer on a farm, for example—but reshaped into narrative meaning. In the case of that map, the absence of interstates and the prominence of forgotten towns mirrored the story’s larger concern with places and people bypassed by modern life.
Much of the discussion returned to symbolism and how it emerges organically rather than by design. Audience members pointed to the story’s mausoleum, a place where Clarencey finds shelter, as a powerful image of refuge, isolation, and communion with the dead. Gill said the symbol grew naturally from his familiarity with neglected small-town cemeteries and their forgotten monuments. Once Clarencey was placed there, the metaphor deepened: ignored by the living, he quite literally takes up residence among the dead.
The story’s ending drew particular attention. Clarencey’s discovery of a pristine roll of copper tubing, which is valuable scrap metal, was widely read as a symbol of hope. Gill embraced that interpretation, describing it as a “consolation miracle,” borrowing a term from Gabriel García Márquez. Rather than a dramatic transformation, the moment offers something smaller but tangible: enough money to get through another stretch of life, enough relief to keep going.
“For some people,” Gill said, “finding a roll of copper tube and three cold beers is a windfall. It might be the best day he’s had in a long time.”
That emphasis on modest hope runs throughout Not Dark Yet. While many of the characters are struggling, Gill said he always tries to leave room for a sliver of light, not redemption or escape, but endurance. “That’s more honest,” he noted. “That’s how life works.”
Later in the evening, Jonathan Haupt drew a direct connection between Clarencey and figures familiar to Beaufort, South Carolina, where the Pat Conroy Literary Center is located. He referenced Wilson “Tootie Fruity” Burke, an unhoused man immortalized as Mr. Fruit in Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, suggesting that such figures often carry the emotional history of a town. Gill agreed, describing Clarencey as someone who “carries the weight of the town,” because he sees all the untold stories from its margins.
The conversation also turned to publishing, where Gill described how Not Dark Yet ultimately found its home at Castoff Press. After years of publishing individual stories in literary journals and encountering repeated resistance from the publishing industry to short story collections, Gill briefly secured representation with a major New York agency for a completed novel. When that manuscript failed to generate an immediate deal, the agent “ghosted,” even after repeated attempts by Gill to discuss next steps. This experience left Gill disenchanted and prompted a broader reconsideration of the traditional publishing path.
“I decided to break the rules,” Gill said.
It was at that point, after conversations with Britt Lang—a talented designer, typesetter, and editor—that she founded Castoff Press, with Not Dark Yet as its inaugural title. Lang oversaw every aspect of the book’s production, from editorial refinement to layout and design, with a clear aim of producing literary books that meet the highest aesthetic and editorial standards. The result, Gill noted, was not only a beautifully made book but a publishing model that prioritizes craft, quality, and authorial intent over market expediency.
Gill framed that decision as a response to the increasingly narrow gatekeeping mechanisms that shape contemporary literary publishing, particularly the overlap between academic credentials, agent access, and institutional validation. While those systems can produce important work, he argued they also exclude many voices that have already demonstrated rigor, discipline, and audience through years of publication. “Unlike other creative endeavors, like music for example, with writing, there’s an assumption that legitimacy has to flow through a very small number of channels and be profitable,” Gill said, “and if it doesn’t, the work somehow doesn’t count.”
Having spent years teaching in academia and editing literary journals, Gill said he had seen how often strong manuscripts were passed over, not because of quality, but because they didn’t align with current market logic or institutional priorities. Short story collections, in particular, have become difficult to place, even when individual stories are widely published and well regarded. The result, he noted, is a system that often privileges career signaling over sustained artistic practice.
Castoff Press, by contrast, was founded on a simpler premise: that the most important work of publishing is getting meaningful stories into the hands of the right readers, even if the audience is small or niche. For Gill, the response to Not Dark Yet has affirmed that goal. Readers from small towns have recognized their own experiences in the book, while readers far removed from that world have connected to its emotional truths. That exchange, he said, mattered more than institutional approval. “At the end of the day,” Gill said, “the only real measure is whether the work reaches people and stays with them on an emotional level. Everything else is secondary.”
Once that decision was made, Gill said, his desire to write surged. Freed from questions of marketability, he returned to the joy that first drew him to storytelling. “I just want to create and tell stories and see if I can get them out there,” he said.
The evening closed with thanks from the Center’s staff and audience, underscoring the shared sense that the event had done more than showcase a book. Like Pat Conroy’s own work, Not Dark Yet insists that overlooked lives matter and that telling their stories is both an artistic and communal act.
Castoff Press 