All Of Us: The Collected Poems

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Poet, essayist, and short story writer Tess Gallagher was born in 1943 in Port Angeles, Washington, to a logging family. Her early years were marked by the rhythms of seasonal work, as well as the landscape of both the Northwest and the Ozarks, where her grandparents lived. “I don’t know how many children really get to explore vast amounts of territory like that,” she has said in interviews. “It builds something in you.” Gallagher worried that living with Carver might be like stepping into one of his stories, and sure enough, at first there were bill collectors at the door. But she took charge of that, and then she took charge of giving him space to write (in one house they lived in she gave him the study and wrote her own poems in the bathroom; in another she gave him the study and wrote at a picnic table in the park). Finally, she took charge of his fate itself. you call it a poem for your daughter, about the dog getting run over by a van and how you looked after it, took it out into the woods and buried it deep, deep, and that poem turns out so good you're almost glad the little dog was run over, or else you'd never have written that good poem. Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. He published his first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, in 1976. His breakout collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), received immediate acclaim and established Carver as an important figure in the literary world. [1] It was followed by Cathedral (1983), which Carver considered his watershed and is widely regarded as his masterpiece. [2] The definitive collection of his stories, Where I'm Calling From, was published shortly before his death in 1988. In their 1989 nomination of Carver for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the jury concluded, "The revival in recent years of the short story is attributable in great measure to Carver's mastery of the form." [3] Early life [ edit ] I did the drinks, three big glasses of Scotch with a splash of water in each. Then we made ourselves comfortable and talked about Robert's travels. First the long flight from the West Coast to Connecticut, we covered that. Then from Connecticut up here by train. We had another drink concerning that leg of the trip.

I got our drinks and sat down on the sofa with him. Then I rolled us two fat numbers. I lit one and passed it. I brought it to his fingers. He took it and inhaled. I thought, I’ve gone through all those years fighting to keep it all balanced. Here it was, coming at me again, the same thing. I had to get on with my own life. But I never fell out of love with him.” Gallagher’s increasing interest in the possibilities of narrative, and her relationship with Carver, whom she met in 1977, led her to write The Lover of Horses and Other Stories (1986), her first volume of short stories . Frequently depicting small moments of ordinary epiphany, Gallagher’s prose is known for its urgency and emotional honesty. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called Gallagher “a strict, highly disciplined writer, and the tensile quality of her prose often reinforces the sense of danger—emotional, spiritual and physical—that lingers over these stories. Reading them, one begins to fear that something will happen... or even worse, that nothing will occur, leaving the characters to stew, alone, in their disconsolation.” Gallagher’s other collections of short stories include At the Owl Woman Saloon (1997) and The Man from Kinvara (2009). The literary executor of Carver’s estate, Gallagher has staunchly defended his work, seeking to publish the original version of his famed What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, published in 1981 as the product of severe editing on the part of Carver’s editor Gordon Lish. Bringing the book out as Beginners (2009) in the UK, Gallagher also fought to have it included in the Library of America’s Collected Stories of Raymond Carver (2009) . Speaking to Jeff Baker of the Oregonian, Gallagher said, “I think what [ Collected Stories] has done and what I have done in getting it published is... I have pushed the reset button on understanding Ray, what he cared about in his writing, his tone, his care for his characters.” During his years of working at miscellaneous jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver started abusing alcohol. [5] By his own admission, he gave up writing and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a visiting lecturer in the Iowa Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing. With the assistance of Kinder and Kittredge, he attempted to simultaneously commute to Berkeley and maintain his lectureship at Santa Cruz; after missing all but a handful of classes due to the inherent logistical hurdles of this arrangement and various alcohol-related illnesses, Hall gently enjoined Carver to resign his position. The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Carver went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism, but continued drinking for another three years. [5]

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National Book Awards 1977". National Book Foundation. Archived from the original on October 24, 2018 . Retrieved June 3, 2022. The book's publication went ahead, in Lish's form and under Lish's title – What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It was received, in April 1981, to spectacular acclaim. It made Carver's name and remains his most famous book. In his prose Carver mixed the simple clarity of Chekhov with the ominous tones of Franz Kafka. "It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine - the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me." With Josie Gray) Barnacle Soup: And Other Stories from the West of Ireland, Eastern Washington University Press (Cheney, WA), 2008. Carver describes, without a trace of rancor, what finally put her over the edge. In the fall of '78, with a new teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, Ray started seeing Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who would become his muse and wife near the end of his life. "It was like a contretemps. He tried to call me to talk about where we were. I missed the calls. He knew he was about to invite Tess to Thanksgiving." So he wrote a letter instead.

In 1981 appeared WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE, which was marked by deeper humanism and more complex psychological characterization. In these seventeen elliptical stories Carver explored failure, the gap between expression and feeling, alcoholism, infidelity. His works appeared in a number of the volumes of the Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. And I did see it,for a minute or two!) For a minute or twoit crowded out the usual musings onwhat was right, and what was wrong -- duty,tender memories, thoughts of death, how I should treatwith my former wife. The letter is an incredible document, a missive from a man both indebted and imperilled, unsteady, spewing. It's at once a plea and a manifesto – it reveals the extent to which writing was connected to Carver's sense of self, and it reads much more like the characters he originally wrote, who, far from leaving things unspoken, say too much and still manage to scutter around the main point, which is perhaps only anxiety itself. She had referred, earlier in our conversation, to the latter stages of Lish's relationship with Carver as "appropriational". I ask if she feels there is any possessiveness in her own relationship with him.I said, "Coming at you," and I put the number between his fingers. He inhaled, held the smoke, and then let it go. It was like he'd been doing it since he was nine years old. You can't possess a great writer," she replies. "They're out there for us all. Why would I want to possess him? I had him for 10 beautiful, amazing years, and I think he's his own gift, out there to the ages. I do not consider that I formed Ray – Ray formed himself."

Nesset, Kirk (1995). Stories Of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study. Ohio University Press. ISBN 0-8214-1100-4. Carver moved to Paradise, California, with his family in 1958 to be close to his mother-in-law. [6] He became interested in writing while attending Chico State College and enrolled in a creative writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, then a recent doctoral graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career. In 1961, Carver's first published story, "The Furious Seasons", appeared. More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. "Furious Seasons" was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and is part of the collection, No Heroics, Please [7] and Call If You Need Me. [8]His final (incomplete) collection of seven stories, titled Elephant and Other Stories in Britain (included in Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories) was composed in the five years before his death. The nature of these stories, especially "Errand", have led to some speculation that Carver was preparing to write a novel. [ citation needed] Only one piece of this work has survived – the fragment "The Augustine Notebooks", first printed in No Heroics, Please. [ citation needed] Gallagher, who says that she doesn't "necessarily feel that [Lish] is a villain", tells me that her interest is not in comparing the two versions. She just wants to show, as she puts it, "the connective tissue" between Carver's first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and his later one, Cathedral. There was not as much of a leap as readers suppose. In this sense she is offering up Beginners as an item of interest rather than a finished piece of work – a bootleg if you will. She won't say – and she smiles and she recedes from the proposition – whether she thinks one or the other is better. Haslam, Dave (1985). "An indepth interview". Carver talks about his father, his early writing, his characters, and the "dark humour" in some of his stories.