Arkansas has produced a number of significant artists who are important figures in their chosen field but who also remain stubbornly, indisputably Arkansan to their core. Add or subtract as you wish, but my personal list would include: Johnny Cash, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Levon Helm, Al Green, Pharaoh Sanders and Iris DeMent in music. Frank Stanford and C.D. Wright in poetry. Charles Portis in fiction. Jeff Nichols in film. Mike Disfarmer in photography.

Another name in my Arkansas pantheon is the novelist Donald Hays — known to everyone as Skip — who died Nov. 21 at his home in Fayetteville at the age of 78. Hays was a master storyteller, with a voice that balanced wryly profane humor with a clear-eyed and completely unsentimental understanding of human pain. You might say there was a cosmic yearning lurking in the work as well. Raised in Van Buren, where he was a local legend as an athlete, Hays embedded his stories in the persons and vernacular of Arkansas without ever resorting to regional minstrelsy.

“The Dixie Association” by Donald Hays

His first and best-known book, “The Dixie Association,” is said to be Bill Clinton’s favorite novel. It was also a finalist for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The Irish writer Colum McCann described it as a life-changing book, “a forgotten American classic by a great southern writer.” Richard Price called it “classic all-American outlaw literature.” Loosely, it’s the story of Hog Durham, a convicted felon who is granted early release to play baseball for the Arkansas Reds of the semipro Dixie Association, managed by a one-armed Marxist named Lefty. What unfolds is an audacious, relentlessly hilarious tale of a very Arkansan counter-culture insurgency that’s also a love letter to the great American pastime. I think it took me all of two days to devour the entire thing.

Hays’ next novel was “The Hangman’s Children,” a darkly comedic road epic examining the failed hippie experiment of doper peace and easy love, set in 1968 when, per the novel’s opening, “God was in the process of delivering his punch line to America.” A shambling tour of a soured dream, it was a Los Angeles Times Critics Choice selection in 1990 and contains some of Hays’ finest writing.

“The Hangman’s Children” by Donald Hays

Deep into the novel, the protagonist Samuel Langhorne Maledon — a con artist who tours with a roadshow carnival reenacting the historical Wild West crimes of Fort Smith’s notorious hanging judge Isaac Charles Parker, all while trying to protect his self-martyring son from the war in Vietnam — describes in passing one of his performer cohorts. In Maledon’s casual description, Hays mixes observational clarity while evoking blood-soaked histories and generational longing, all with a seeming shrug:

“He sat in a rocking chair, a drugged dump mongrel at his feet, drank from a pint Mason jar of pure shine, sponged up every few drinks with a Vienna sausage he’d eat from the can he’d lift off the floor to his side, and had his say. The more he drank, the clearer his voice got, until at the end it was all anger wrapped in sadness for the lost world of the lone rider. By the time he was done with them, I could’ve sold many a man in the crowd before us a sway-backed gelding and a man-sized stretch of Mexican desert. There’s still a whole lot of folks that, now and again, want to be free. Of course, it ordinarily doesn’t take them more than a ride home and a cup of black coffee to get over it.”

The book is full of these sentences, simple and direct on the surface, but which unfold and combine to create both a tangibly human world and an entire lived philosophy regarding it. It’s a sprawling book of quiet brilliance.

After this opening one-two punch, Hays’ next book wouldn’t arrive for nearly two decades. In 2005, his short story collection “Dying Light” was published. At this point, the American publishing and critical apparatus — especially in its coastal venues — had shifted inexorably away from the unfashionable draw of merely great writing and toward a self-saluting celebration of trendy politics. So, despite containing a handful of masterpieces of the short story form, “Dying Light” arrived without much official fanfare.

“Dying Light” by Donald Hays

When Hays died, I reopened “Dying Light” and sought out my favorite story in the collection: “Why He Did It.” If I were to put together a list of my 10 favorite short stories ever written, this would be on it. The premise is disturbing, surely immoral: A middle-aged man named Wilder is worried that his teenage biological son is being seduced by his teenage stepdaughter. In order to “save” his son from her supposed advances, Wilder exposes himself to her, destroying his family and eventually his career as well. As the decades unspool, Wilder sinks deeper into himself, assured that — as always — he had done the right thing.

When I first read the story in my 20s, I thought it was uproarious, fearless and outrageous in its depiction of a deranged man. A defiant middle finger to political correctness and moral piety, perhaps. Nearly 20 years later, rereading it as a middle-aged father myself, I was glad to find that the story had lost none of its darkly comic bite. But now, I was also a bit overwhelmed by how — under the outrageousness — Hays tenderly eviscerates the center-of-the-universe vanity of the typical male psyche. He weaponizes the tabloid outrageousness of his conceit to uncover something wise and knowing about a man’s inability to change much of anything, as well as his superhuman capacity to journey through decades of heartbreak without ever truly understanding himself.

After “Dying Light,” no other book under Hays’ name would be published in his lifetime. There’s a good reason for this — while Donald Hays was indeed a major Arkansas fiction writer, Skip Hays was just about the greatest teacher of writing and literature anyone ever encountered. When I attended the University of Arkansas’s MFA in Creative Writing program, Skip was its director and its beating heart. He taught fiction and I was a poet, so I only took two classes with him. But along with the novelist Donald Harington’s class on American art history, those were the two greatest classes I ever took.

The key course for me was Skip’s Form and Theory of Fiction. It was nothing experimental or flashy, just a nuts and bolts examination of how storytelling actually works. We discussed the banalities of structure and the grand philosophies of art and life. We did imitations and methodically interrogated the question of point of view. I found the whole thing to be transcendent. Skip changed the syllabus every time he taught the course, never repeating the same reading list. This meant the class was not only a chance to join a master as he peeked under the hood of the storytelling craft, but also to expose oneself to books that Skip found worthy of deeper study. Thus, my introduction to writers such as James Salter, Joan Didion, V.S. Naipaul and Marilynne Robinson.

The Arkansas MFA program is a four-year affair and many students would retake Skip’s classes a second or third time as an independent study. Others would simply just sit in on them to soak in further instruction. It was not unusual for the true devotees to take six or seven Skip classes while in Fayetteville. One former student, the novelist Michael Downs, refers to himself as a proud graduate of “the University of Skip.”

And yet, time spent in the classroom was relatively minor Skip pedagogy compared to time spent outside of it. I attended the MFA program in the late ’90s and early ’00s and — when contrasted to the current antiseptic bureaucratic academic experience — it might as well have been the Wild West.

The cornerstone of the MFA experience is the workshop, a three-hour class where students’ stories and poems are read and critiqued by their fellow students, with the professor overseeing and leading what usually amounts to a collective prosecution of one’s juvenile literary misdemeanors. The workshops were intense, often painful and combative. (Program co-founder William Harrison would advise MFA students to find a hobby to shore up their self-esteem because the program itself would inevitably wear it down.) After workshop, most MFA students would hit a Fayetteville bar — Roger’s Rec or Maxine’s or JR’s Lightbulb Club — to decompress. And here is where you’d really get to learn what made Skip tick. It was never couched in something as corny as wisdom or advice. It was always just simply conversation.

Skip had read everything — not just fiction but also poetry and philosophy and history — a fact he kept somewhat hidden until the conversation drifted into some niche corner of the literary world. If it wasn’t so authentic, Skip’s erudition could’ve been a parlor trick. One former student recalled teaching for several years in Turkey and returning to the states with a stack of Turkish novels for Skip, only to discover that he had already read them and could discuss their flaws and virtues in detail. In the days after Skip died, his wife, Patty, said that new books were still arriving at their house. Even in hospice care, his appetite for a worthy read never abated.

I recall a very specific detailed conversation over beers with Skip about the great but fairly obscure Kentucky writer Guy Davenport, whose work I’d just become infatuated with. Davenport was not just a writer’s writer, but a writer’s writer’s writer. I hadn’t met anyone who’d heard of him, let alone read him. When I brought up his name to Skip, we immediately began to debate whether Davenport’s greatest strength was as an essayist, a fiction writer or a translator. Just as we were both agreeing that Davenport’s genius lay in his essays (read “The Geography of the Imagination” if you haven’t), “Seven Spanish Angels” by Ray Charles and Willie Nelson came on the bar’s jukebox. Skip nudged me to listen. “Willie’s trying his best to keep up,” Skip said as Nelson and Charles alternated verses. “But the son of bitch is barely hanging on for dear life.”

Yes, books mattered. But so did songs and sports and misadventure. No one could tell a better anecdote than Skip, whether the subject was an early encounter with Charles Portis, or a bar fight with a rodeo champion, or a weeklong house party in the ’70s where locals would gather at MFA founder Jim Whitehead’s place each night to hear the newest chapter of a pornographic novel called “Houseboat Hookers” that was being ghost-written by Jim’s literary friend for quick cash, with the growing party loudly cheering each salacious plot turn as the writer sheepishly read aloud that day’s honest but horny work.

There were unofficial MFA weekend trips to Hot Springs for the horse races where we’d meet up with alums such as Barry Hannah or Tom Franklin. Or trips to St. Louis for a ballgame, or to Kansas City for the art museum. Sometimes these trips would happen in groups of 20 or more, sometimes just a handful of us. Always full of too much drinking and dumb macho gamesmanship. I truly loved it. And as a trailer park guy who never knew his biological father and was desperate for a decent male role model, in Skip I saw a rough-hewn blue-collar man’s man who was well-read without being precious, opinionated without being a bully, and tough without being cruel. His combination of erudition, integrity and rowdiness was something I aspired to. For me, he was an important teacher and later a casual friend. For other students, he was much more — a mentor, a protector, a life-changer or life-saver. Skip and Patty’s house and phone line was often a safe haven for those whom everyone else had abandoned.

Skip also had a strong connection to Ireland and would teach there as well. On one of these teaching trips, the Irish writer John McGahern asked him for overlooked American writers worthy of rediscovery. Among the books Skip sent to McGahern was John Williams’ great novel “Stoner.” Williams had moved to Fayetteville after his retirement as a professor, and although his novel “Augustus” had won the National Book Award in 1973, by the early 2000s Williams had been all but forgotten. But then the New York Review Books Classics reprinted “Stoner” in 2006 with McGahern’s introduction. In the decades since, Williams has gradually and rightfully reemerged as a major American novelist, with his novels being published in the canonical Library of America series in 2021.

As told in miniature, the life of Donald Hays has a familiar symmetry — early glory and renown as a novelist which gradually drifts away as he devotes himself to teaching a new generation of young writers, a number of whom would go on to real accomplishment in the fields of fiction, poetry and screenwriting.

But thankfully, life rarely falls into easy symmetries. Throughout his tenure as a creative writing professor, Skip continued writing. He composed multiple novels from 2004 to 2020, each turned down by publishers. He continued writing anyway, even when diagnosed with advanced cancer. In the final four years of his life, he pushed through illness and age and even a stroke to write “The Great Awakening,” his third novel, forthcoming from Regal House in July. The advanced praise is rapturous, with comparisons ranging from Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon to Barry Hannah and Flannery O’Connor. I particularly like the Hannah comparison, for like the best of Hannah’s work, “The Great Awakening” takes an absolutely deranged point of view and applies it with methodical, poker-faced sincerity.

“The Great Awakening” by Donald Hays

Ostensibly, the novel is the story of Reo Wilde, a high school football coach and former Marines sniper, who experiences a major mental health crisis but mistakes it for a religious awakening. In some ways, Wilde is an expansion on the Wilder character from Hays’ “Why He Did It” short story, a man who embraces his personal grievances to such a degree that they become an all-encompassing worldview. (There’s also a deranged poet in the novel, Sol Ackerman, who is an echo of another Hays character from “Dying Light”’s “Ackerman in Eden.”)

After Wilde gets himself fired from his high school job by propositioning various co-workers, he sets out on a journey that connects him with Colonel Bedford Stuart Jackson, an aging avatar of the Old South who aims to save Arkansas from modernity by running for governor. What unfolds is a political farce that doubles as a psychological exposé of the psychic underbelly of the respectable modern South, where ancient conflicts over race, sex, class and religion rage on in newly disturbed forms. It’s a heavy, blistering book that happens to also be hilarious on a sentence-by-sentence level.

If there’s such a thing as literary justice, the posthumous publication of “The Great Awakening” will lead to a deeper recognition of Hays as an important American novelist (not unlike how the republication of “Stoner” led to a gradual realization that John Williams was a major writer unfashionably toiling away in semi-secrecy). If you’re an Arkansan who loves great writing, or laughing-while-flinching, “The Great Awakening” is a must-read. The story of Arkansas literature can’t be told without taking a full account of Hays as both a writer and teacher. For many folks, his passing in November was a seismic event. As his readership and reputation inevitably flourish in the coming years, I have a sense that this seismic feeling will only spread.

Tony Tost is the writer and director of the feature film “Americana,” starring Sydney Sweeney and Paul Walter Hauser. He’s also worked as a writer and producer for numerous television programs, including “Longmire,” “Poker Face,” “The Terror” and “Damnation,” the latter of which he also created. He’s the author of two books of poetry, including “Invisible Bride,” winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award, as well as a book about Johnny Cash. He’s a 2003 graduate of the University of Arkansas MFA program and splits his time between Los Angeles and Fayetteville with his wife and two sons.