Remarkable People: Making a Difference in the Northwest; Richard Day Interview on Raymond Carver, tape 50

ms ba ph just a song or silence on on sanity locked into writing short stories about this that you say that the real in paris as compared to the mythological ray carver was always an omnivorous reader re read everything for things he liked a lot better than others and he like fiction he liked

hemingway as a craftsman and hemingway as one who maintained absolute control of tom and his work and who want andrew who's writing had no fat in it if you see what i mean and the way stories are lean and hemingway the writer's a tough minded writer but ray also liked kafka for the for what might be called kafka's super real as an intensity way like that very much of course he liked checkoff as as everyone nonce we also like some of the big book novelists such as dostoevsky tolstoy he liked her again if all i re read and read and read but he didn't simply spring and read into the

business of writing stories he would read these writers that he loved and think to himself i can do that i can do that differently and then he would just go to work very very hard you know you can't really yeah answer a question like that until maybe fifty years after the writer dies we know that paul for example faulkner was a wonderful short story writer who has a place in literary history of america hemingway as well three women writers flannery o'connor katherine anne porter and eudora welty are also moving into that same mine that same level historically as we look at american literature course eudora welty is still alive

i it's hard to say where ray will fit in i think that it's safe to say though that if gray had had his fifties we say in an inn and dostoevsky's fifties was when he wrote his big works if ray had had his fifties to produce he would have been a major figure in american literature art as for now i think we can say he's very influential there are short story writers and the short story writers all over america who are trying to write with the same depth of imagination intensity and concession and as ray carver was able to write in a white is less taxes on her

way he fell into this is sixteen options course nobody can ever answer a question that begins with why all we can say is that it did happen now i wouldn't trust us psychologists to try to pinpoint the cause is for that effect on we can say that ray in some deep sense lacked confidence not himself as a writer exactly but as himself as a person alive law we can also say that he loved to enjoy himself may be a bit too much and i mentioned before something about celebration ray loved to celebrate and i'm i

think it's george gobel said about something that happened on a previous night again over dreck but i was over served and i think that very often ray was over served as the fbi and secret that you don't feel that that perhaps in the relationship with his wife and in the sentence there it's saying that the leak of it well of course his wife mariane drank too and done in a household where out both now i drink heavily there's not bound to be much shorter there's not going to be a whole lot of tranquility and peace so

everything that was a part of ray's life contributed of course to his son to his situation i would describe the family situation when both of them were drinking as something that dostoyevsky and then in a nightmare white have described it was really not very pretty was not very nice and sometimes it exploded in violence and it always ended with the misunderstandings the deep rift between them and yet at the same time they were so tied together that they couldn't fully escape one another this one on for years and years and years those were the alcohol times the battles times that is an interesting he keeps going back to those times in his writing in the fifteen years since

then test it owns jerry's been a writer the writer what can read or write out of only his biography and that was so raise biography for a large number of years in his life nine to find him to writing about things before that a ball boys fishing fishing fishing having side how divided for example hunting the semifinals boyhood stories in race collections but the traumatic drunken times made up a large part of ray's biography and he did his best to yeah i realize those that life in fiction each time he did it the story transcended the life but in some way

maybe and certainly in some stories he was taunting for the life that he led oh another way to put it is that he was maybe giving back a little bit to the earth that spawned him so you think even the scariest eating any sense that they're seeking forgiveness or regret for the way they are going in that's a very difficult question who's who can regret the life that gave rise to the work you say on the other hand ask forgiveness from all those people one has offended by living a life once led now he's certainly in some ways ask forgiveness of mariam like

treating her truly if you like in the stories and i think that you know in a story like there and where his writing about chekhov's death in a way he is a tonic for the life that he's led by having chekhov's drink one glass glass of champagne before he dies and then focusing the matter that is not on the champagne on the court and intimacy is a piece of fiction and it is a plea a prayer for forgiveness at recess the way i read that story now did those events actually happened in ray's life the man kneeling before his

wife and then the wind just to kiss the hand of her dress i don't know my guess is not but think should've happened the way they happened in that story and in that sense the story is a pray for forgiveness marilyn yes yes but what party years since her feel the test ahead in the actual writing of raymond carver story as well i think that tess the nra's i said before they spoke the same language when it came to i came to literature and i think that

tess was able to to point out things for jacqueline race poems that were less land now less than less than rightly turned let's say a poet and tess is a poet and she's a good point a poet who knows things that a prose writer doesn't and i think that she was able to put her finger on things that way with them go ahead and improve and she might've suggested alternative lines and so forth to some of ray's so in some ways pawns of course ray wrote a lot of his palms rise by itself i was with tears she was teaching in syracuse who he was back out in port port angeles world will coupons there the sand though when it comes to fiction and one when it comes to two who actually did

the prose and re stories and the lines and re spawns raise the one and if tests made suggestions i'm surprised that i would be surprised if she didn't look at race solutions to those problems as unique are i like test sides like i want to put things gently i want to be fair in your room at a huge amount to do because you know there's no doubt about that no doubt about it without tests i don't know what would have become re she supported him in his son confectionery couldn't drink alcohol she support him that

way enormously and she encouraged him daily and see encouraged her as a writer writing was their life and they both worked in different parts of their different houses all the time that was what they live for them for each other in the ending is as well i'm like i would like to say that ray was one of the most generous people in the room at my life people talk about and talk about his size and his generosity but you know what they always went further than that ray was levels where people in the world who actually listen to and whose intelligence as he looks at you

you don't quite see at first because he wore glasses and i you have to focus your eyes behind the lenses of his glasses to see that kenyan intelligence in those guys and you watch and he listened and it was out of that sort of intelligence that both his wit cain and his generosity towards human beings he was a remarkable man i know right he's lost it you see here i drove up to port angeles from her estimates that there's three very beginning of mr baker i drove up got to port angeles to see ray about five

weeks i guess it was before he died i had heard that he was dying and so i called and said i'm coming up to see you i spent a night with him and terse and i spent two days talking to weigh and we did what we always had done we got together we sat out on his deck and i'm told tall tales stories of a fire mishaps strange meetings the things that are unusual that always happen in a world that's a very rails and realistic world there's always lots of laughter ray was a kind of innocent he would walk into a situation and then something would happen that we just astonishing saw more usual things in the world a man would do what does it say something fairly intimate to ray as

if it normally we would say imagine that this in effect he had that same sort of innocence when i went to see him after i left he told to us and as in that he drove all that distance well hell i would have driven novel lot farther than that to say goodbye to ray gorgeous justices both here is this case that's right

and ray what does look at you like this slight lean forward and he would watch and listen to everything you said he didn't say he didn't really think he was really interested in finding out and those things are going to go absolutely absolutely in his story viewfinder for example we have a man who's staying at home and the story was set in chef's house right near here man staying at home in trouble with his wife his wife is gone and who comes to lure a traveling photographer

wanting to take pictures of the house and a man has no hands he has his camera strapped on so he can focus it with his stones alarms are strapped onto his chest and then to the character in the story of course the city imagine that he's got a camera and he has seen tiny humans no criminal defense official is by the way a one killed right as use the day today yeah

i was season ticket vendor in a video news on a piano well you know i derose many years before that actually went days was going to the university of washington and i was that is that the farm and then and then i graduated from there the city and i was the king holiday as a moral life class old and one of a community in their queen and recreation center attacks and they needed a mile and asked hansen says she actually became my model and it was really strange to have all these teenagers climate for all these electrical wires to try to peek at austin biting our classes that day we became very good friends with dates and she would leave and come back and we'll see

after a few years see appear with ray carver amount i was there i'm drinking then and he had quit drinking and that he and i get barrel through affairs because she was a good listener and i like to tell stories so i didn't know who he was and always there was very spontaneous i wasn't trying to impress these main that he was such a good listener that i could tell the stories and he was fascinated by all my stories and we stare at the laugh and have a good time he was the perfect time to because i was succeeding with a lot of with my art an exhibition so and everything like that and also he was being recognize some famous writer of course he was going real fast enough the time that he blogged that mercedes benz and that's wonderful

story paying cash for it and thats it was really a wonderful friendship ms be cost when his story gained fame as you lose a lot of friends and there's a lot of jealousy involved in stuff like that and so that estimate doesn't we'll close with each other you know because he could tell me all these stories there was eager to listen about all these experiences when she was invited to england and all around the world and i was still in a moment the stars the new law he said i may seem afraid i always has achieved such a terrible childhood but now is a wonderful life is so great is senate and i was a yeah it really is great well you know

it we i found out that he had quit drinking and i was still drinking and of course when you get to how you love to tell stories singing i'm mad so i was so i'm i'm stars in and he would tell me stories and i think that even though he wasn't drinking he was really participating with me in these euphoria that i hadn't lived excitement of time his stores that have happened that you know in my view in my drinking they switch someone were really have rages they'll most warlike fiction an assault on the next and he will write me from being from the year when he will go back to european music you don't have yet during in a lot of literary works to solve my flies settle for all the stories you told me now and then it was this is the matter of talking about stories in the past but the excitement of all that changes he was going through night when he went to

england he i remember the story he left the notice about his press conference was gonna take place from twelve to one o'clock in the afternoon and he thought there were going to be a lot of reporters and always show wraps up ten minutes the wind he was ready to leave and he saw the shadow of these men coming in and he had these big boots and you look like a military guy with a mohawk and he was only one interested for one of these kinds of my guest is that we're really interested in these work so they interview he'd get published in the local news that of ms letter a letter that things like that that were really neat and another ritual was that we both really enjoyed food by the end of air i'll also quit drinking and now i'm hyperactive him that i was the man who not only quit drinking that i was gonna quit

smoking and he said ah that's the one that i can never stop smoking and the eu than it will matzke is legal and then of course he left alive one of poems that i were already won one week with that any drinking or smoking but one night i get drunk and eyes at a small all my twenty packs of cigarettes for although one said ms there in the weekend so he laughs than any other that i eventually when the cloth you not that time and it was really wonderful because then we we replace all that with food we love food you know so every time he will come here he will call me happened will either about the restaurant where have all the seats and will get involved with his suv up to the public market and it always food and as well we did and he also of chuckle tsunami there were like little chance of jewels and

that that's how our friendship ms started because he was willing to share his box of chocolates that fueled by hear in a german starring there were very special forces and i thought he was going to show me one of these books by the game with these little treasure and he was very suspicious about maybe how many i was gonna take in on european about then i notice all these data sources to one month he was great to put the lid on and does this re command knew there'd be more generous view one another one maybe another was and i may not otherwise fine great thing he in and he will approve the linen runaway with its sakhalin so then i also so we get to be real close friends because he was routine you mind he wasn't a person that would put any errors semi he just really enjoy

having a conversation have nothing they're willing to hit it as because we weren't trying to show off to each other in any way it became that i realize how important he was later on and i had a little bit of operations unit that maybe eminem lose these guys because you the more you know it comes back from me to leave tell me he get invited to that list skyline almost lang syne it's like a fairy tale in on them living in these salmon join always with this person that it's all i feel now that is so wonderful and that's salt me this is the same and that's one part of that is gun out of my life but you became fascinating one family wishes very wonderful experience to get to it