Carver became interested in writing in Paradise, California, where he had moved with his family to be close to his mother-in-law. While attending Chico State College, he enrolled in a creative writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, a recent doctoral graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver’s life and career. Carver’s first published story, “The Furious Seasons”, appeared in 1961. 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 now in the recent collection, No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me. In the mid-1960s, Carver and his family resided in Sacramento, where he briefly worked at a bookstore before taking a position as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. [5] He did all of the janitorial work in the first hour and then wrote through the rest of his shift. He audited classes at what was then Sacramento State College, including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver and Schmitz soon became friends, and Carver wrote and published his first book of poems, Near Klamath, under Schmitz's guidance. [5] More generally, Lish's edits become slices that depend on silence and suggestion, on the reverberations of the barely glimpsed. Carver's original characters did a lot more talking – they told drunken anecdotes, they wept, they felt, they contemplated, confronted, confessed. These differences are not stylistic – unless you consider earnestness and emotion to be a matter of style rather than heart or disposition. In the most changed of these stories, the edited characters simply would not behave the way Carver's original characters do; if they could, if they had the words or the taste to, there would, in a sense, be no story, since so much of Carver as we have known him until now is about what's unspoken. The edited characters well up; the original characters spill over. For her part, Gallagher describes her relationship with Carver as "collaborative". She helped him, and it was reciprocal. She began to write short stories after she met him; he wrote more poems. She believes that had he lived, they would have carried on in that vein, lending each other their native forms, "because we were very stimulating to each other". Since his death, she has built two volumes of poetry around his memory – Moon Crossing Bridge, which was an act of mourning, and Dear Ghosts, published three years ago. If you love me," she said, "you can do this for me. If you don't love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I'd make him feel comfortable." She wiped her hands with the dish towel.

There’s a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want to do. It’s not every novelist that would write a first novel about a successful novelist.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 Carver Chronicles For more on Lish's editing of Carver at Esquire, see Carol Polsgrove, It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties (1995), pp. 241–243. 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. Raymond Carver, (born May 25, 1938, Clatskanie, Oregon, U.S.—died August 2, 1988, Port Angeles, Washington), American short-story writer and poet whose realistic writings about the working poor mirrored his own life. 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]

In December 2006, Gallagher published an essay in The Sun magazine, titled “Instead of Dying”, about alcoholism and Carver’s having maintained his sobriety. The essay is an adaptation of a talk she initially delivered at the Welsh Academy’s Academi Intoxication Conference in 2006. The first lines read: “Instead of dying from alcohol, Raymond Carver chose to live. I would meet him five months after this choice, so I never knew the Ray who drank, except by report and through the characters and actions of his stories and poems.”

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Carver won five O. Henry Awards with "Are These Actual Miles" (originally titled "What Is It?") (1972), "Put Yourself in My Shoes" (1974), "Are You A Doctor?" (1975), "A Small, Good Thing" (1983), and "Errand" (1988). [ citation needed] Dearest Gordon," it began, "I've got to pull out of this one. Please hear me… I've looked at it from every side, I've compared both versions of the manuscripts… until my eyes are nearly to fall out of my head." The trouble was, Lish's version was so far from what Carver had sent him that Carver felt it was unrecognisable. Carver continued his studies under the short story writer Richard Cortez Day (like Gardner, a recent PhD alumnus of the Iowa program) beginning in autumn 1960 at Humboldt State College in Arcata. [5] He chose not to take the foreign language courses required by the English program and received a B.A. in general studies in 1963. During this period he was first published and served as editor for Toyon, the college's literary magazine, in which he published several of his own pieces under his own name as well as the pseudonym John Vale. [9] 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. Maybe I could take him bowling," I said to my wife . She was at the draining board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was using and turned around.

Everything Goes directed by Andrew Kotatko (2004), starring Hugo Weaving, Abbie Cornish and Sullivan Stapleton based on Carver's short story "Why Don't You Dance?" Smith, Dell. "Dell Smith's experiences adapting Carver's story "Why Don't You Dance" into a student film in mid-'80s". Beyond the Margins. Characteristics of minimalism are generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver’s work, although, as reviewer David Wiegand notes: Her novels are Shadow of a Sun(1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sunin 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance(1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale(2000). The novels The Virgin in the Garden(1978), Still Life(1985), and Babel Tower(1996) form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Womanin 2002. Her shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories(1987), Angels and Insects(1992), The Matisse Stories(1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye(1994), and Elementals(1998). All these are much translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the anthology’s modest omission of its editor’s own stories, as she is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE (commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999.Characteristics of minimalism are generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver's work, although, as reviewer David Wiegand notes: [22] Koehne, David (1978). "Echoes of Our Own Lives: An interview with Raymond Carver". Archived from the original on 2005-11-30. 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. 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. 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]

On June 2, 1977 Carver stopped drinking with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. After this 'line of demarcation' his stories became increasingly more expansive. His first marriage ended in 1977 and Carver married his long-term partner, the poet Tess Gallagher (b.1943), whom he had met ten years earlier at a writers' conference in Dallas. The wedding took place in Reno and two months later, on August 2, 1988, the author died of lung cancer.Whoever Was Using This Bed, also directed by Andrew Kotatko (2016), starring Jean-Marc Barr, Radha Mitchell and Jane Birkin, based on Carver’s short story of the same name After being hospitalized three times between June 1976 and February or March 1977, Carver began his "second life" and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. [5] While he continued to regularly smoke cannabis and later experimented with cocaine at the behest of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City, Carver believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of 40 had he not overcome his drinking. [13] Second marriage [ edit ] Carver was an alcoholic from his time at Humboldt State College until ten years before his death. Many of his stories testify to his alcohol addiction. He died of lung cancer in Port Angeles, Washington, at the age of 50. a b Wiegand, David (December 19, 2009). "Serendipitous stay led writer to Raymond Carver". San Francisco Chronicle. But I couldn't. I really wanted to hang in there for the long haul. I thought I could outlast the drinking. I'd do anything it took. I loved Ray, first, last and always."