To Write and Keep Kind

this program was made possible in part by a grant from the national endowment for the arts i see an empty place at the taping these losses when my kidding folks who am no need for hours or when remember me and all we did together now hold me tight the kiss me hard on the lips and they're now let me go find areas that we go you sound it again in this light to soak is needed by me again what's more they're better know now my dearest

let me go it's time to be on the way whether that's iran to know how this one because he was actually practicing who's getting ready he was trying to let it go along you want to use two young he knew he was too young to be leaving and leaving at such a high pitch well into his life and in fact this is what did happen in the final night we kissed each other exactly three times i had i wasn't remembering the pun that all i wanted to tell him that i loved him and those were the last two major american modernist as dowager and raymond carver spent the last ten years of carver's life together as companions lovers and literary confidence until his death from cancer in nineteen eighty to sustain this

relationship raymond carver was more polluted than it ever did before there's no disputing the fact that he's really one major american writers of the century i think that anyone who doesn't listen to poetry with every story there comes a point that i would not have anticipated certainly not even as a writer let alone as a reader he you do this with great sensitivity tact imagination with her modesty means an ambition that to get up to something just absolutely right just the sheer naked power truth of history you know you'd like to get all worth i listen to a day until the stories were there his dad though he and it just listens to stay in the senate may be end of one i first married raymond my has been

leading all this time it outsells wine you made all the time i'm tired of it you know and i just really like three his family's buying the books as one thing he always was good to his boys and he had taken fishing out and in hiding when he didn't name for good things says simply just sent their nerve to know did the dry country of the interior northwest is where raymond carver and his younger brother james ray's parents at raymond carver we're from arkansas part of the dust bowl migration to the west soon after raymond carver's birth in nineteen thirty eight and clots can i order the family moved to yakima wash and it was he became intimate with the economic family story

and by his own account the aspirations here in this dank unfamiliar kitchen i study my father's embarrassed young men face sheepish grin heels in one hand a string of spiny yellow perch in the other a bottle of cars that beer he would like to pose bluff an id for his posterity where as old hat cocked over a year all my life my father wanted to be bold but the eyes getting away and the hands of limply offers a string of dead birch and a bottle of beer father i love you yeah and i say thank you i owe can hold my liquor either and don't even know the

places to fish my husband to go to the bars and there if he wasn't there for dinner and i'll go where do so i would get through oh please father worked as a saw fire and some of carver's stories involve people not often heard the stories tall the divorce and beyond fascination struggling to hold their life in the usual so intimately for very large and profound depression very much like going back to that

the people who are better than us are comfortable they lived and painted houses flush toilets croft cars whose year and make recognizable ones were software sorry and they were estranged car seven blocks and dusty art years go by and everything and everyone gets replaced but this much is still true i never liked were my goal was always to be shifts some american that i liked the idea of sitting in a chair in front of your house for hours doing nothing but wearing a hat and they control the situation spitting making things out of wood with a knife burst the hammer down and calling the dogs to trade some time once in awhile healing effect on kids like me and staying on i know you not what you're going to be when you grow up it and one

in june we're something grounding in the real world some with richard but the tone of your writing is in it really had to do with them in such stories as boxes and elephants the searing honesty sometimes hurt those close to re some of those star the third one i mean some of them i knew who they were elegant man said do you know that that is cut out for me now i do nine boxes and things like that i just threw it in the river maybe

not you were writing there was an artist a consummate artist and he knew what was dramatic and what was literature and and he would take imagination and i didn't even really have refrigeration happened on ninety seven at the age of nineteen rave married really risky was born later that year almost immediately then to california where carver energy goes stayed and studied with the late john gardner carrick their second child fans was born and copper transfer to humboldt state where richard daley begins writing teacher and close friend what followed for the couple was a hardscrabble life

passed on the fringes of financial security with carter always trying to write if we work hard and interesting things that happen or that we didn't that we did and things i've never not funny that have effort to arrest them my wife is in the other half of the small real home making a case against me i can hear her pen scratch scratch now and then we go and scratch scratch the fraudsters going out with the man owns this unit

tells me don't really get it my wife goes on writing and weeping weeping in writing in an aging happiness was never something that really figured in to the covers relationship that they were either absolutely joyful and ecstatic are they were pretty much depressed and was very hectic well marianne was a student jobs in restaurants cocktail lounges and so on and they had the two small children racing to she supported him like crazy she said i'm married to a genius the world doesn't know that i'm going to have the world in the late sixties carver began to gain recognition as a writer his own piece together life and struggles became the

source for much of what we would write christmas ya neck it might all are the notoriety i thought it was fun to show up at a party and have people or gut fish around and say did that really happen not get in early and a half clover way and then once your summary we just overtly say well did you know and i never went in and ray enjoy that is he didn't care whether our story correspondent precisely to the facts of the case he was much more interested in whether after he had written something that was a good story ray also i think felt strong moral sense about getting it right and i think if you won a moral dimension raise work that's where was honestly getting getting the facts right and even more important getting the emotional truth right race stories never ring phony their stores about for that

about the attempt to transcendent the factory murders that the limitation of the characters as they can only conceive of transcendence in a cultural sense into him in a material sense suddenly i'm dreaming of that red convertible out of the driveway i mean that's that's his ticket to have that leo a character in our these actual miles sends his wife to me out to sell their car as he's bankrupt its a story about a dream it's called road it seemed to me very very like his work and then there's a kind of grotesque and yet very ordinary calming effect that always happens so yeah

that time we did have his pontiac convertible with was caught my eye was my phone or forget how many mornings when i wake up in our bedroom without the window and what powers sacramento say scientists say are going to be sold when the carters declared bankruptcy his earlier work the scare of its it's got a terrifying exactitude and detachment and a kind of hands off feeling as the writer watches these people go to their fates if you reach but the paltry if you read about divorce if you read about drinking and if you read the poverty and the way you read about when you read carver that's depressing on nevertheless i think what

you come away with at the very end is a sense of the medium the love with which he wrote about these people that he wanted to point out to tragedies that he wanted to say look these people are worth our very attention it's not at all you know mere sociology about a class of people that we don't know or you know you name it humorous eccentric saracino be funneled intellectuals or whatever it is he's writing about that the bottom line with him always is that he really genuinely wants to move you you never really thought of his characters for example as working class particular sermons were some stores that it that is the case but aren't that isn't really the way he conceived of them i think he thought of them as living you know are at the kind of the wilting technological edge of the california society that you see behind the

sound barriers on the freeways you know ray i think was able to write about people who were unable to articulate completely their own suffering as their own problems and he was able to articulate it for them and for us because in many ways these people on ourselves to finally after thirteen years as students marianne and ray saw his publications and awards increase and through the seventies his reputation grew dramatically he received a stanford university stegner fellowship a guggenheim fellowship and part sometimes simultaneously him through a transcontinental commute at the university of california santa cruz berkeley santa barbara and at the iowa writers' workshop he had all these awards they rented vehicle in a big house to incomes but there was trying to sense to visit solar is seeing now that getting their aid getting here is banal fun when things changed was when ray began teaching at uc santa cruz at santa cruz for the

first time began to drink before you went to class and then he would stop a farm house after evan at the moment and actually that change in drinking joined later to socialize with them and that they were wronged entertainer more people caught on the house and other writers in hell you sign a break into the writer's world and of those people were i think they cut employees my dad would charge in there and they had nicknames my dad and running dog or next and they pointed him go and now i can see that he didn't drink as on the lives of the dead but still he got on top of those people would go to montana and fallacious time with them or some cisco it as the consensus growing or they were harmful days in some winners will also but they're also one would just

northeast of the triggers for lieutenant family a nice froth that's right energy system i would not have traded for and a referee because you know it's the province of the married to probst is writing the alcohol is getting to be a problem in that that when i think we get a lot of things that he did not i think a couple occasions so i separate my dad my mom from formal fight isis on my moms had one time until your head with their final goodbyes to my mom had met somebody asked richardson somebody else my father to have a fairer to montana i did not know lady is really interesting to see nature i might use it here in second place when it

that you just living elsewhere so we just heard a spell in there where he was kind of out of control and that's a payment coincided with a period of time when i was it was i was going through that were so it was present for the supreme court we had a crisis that lasted for six years and then an emergency that lasted for six years we had the equivalent of the vietnam war in our home for six years skin he wasn't working on it for five years where he just couldn't grasp a referee working anymore things are scott really a really at a very chaotic and there was an order for for me my sister which we needed a house rocked then shouted a long way toward morning group why the children looking for something to eat make their way through the crazy living in order to get to the prairie kitchen

their father so those shots what makes the risk there is that the christmas tree and turnover it lies on its side in front of the fireplace the prevailing decorate it right now i suppose and candy canes later the right how the thing like this happen anyway meanwhile this serial in the cupboard milk in the fridge even find their show pleasantly get above and this every year and father that connects the moon so who fortune doing this morning during nineteen seventy six and nineteen seventy seven carver was hospitalized

four times for alcoholism at the same time his first major collection of stories will you please be quiet please was released he and maryann often lived separately but they tried to get together again when they were sober certain way and mariam had decided to get together again after what might be called nightmare scenes on both sides and since way wasn't drinking did make a new start here with this is this very the setting for the store shelves house gray lived here the house belonged to the chef at all of this an odd way and mariam relevant for a few months that summer waves rented a furnished house north of eureka from recovered alcoholic then he called ask me to forget what i had going in and work there and live with him he said he was

on the wagon i knew about that he would later he called again and said are you coming i said he said was startled i think if i come up there i want to do something funny name and i said i want the kind of the the website the us began i took it as a sign of good intentions so i said after month offended that they could call affection i think it still does is quite an absolute non fiction account of what happened there were about we learnt indiana and connoisseurs <unk> yorker about that in fact there are some changes to the two people become

not exactly ray and maryann the story takes on a life of its own and really transcends with the situation that it began for credit history for like a minute and i don't identify with all of the ladies he neared a hundred percent you know if the shoe fits i'm glad you're wearing if it does and i think that was my you know that doesn't belong to me in nineteen seventy seven raymond carver and mariam separated in nineteen eighty two they were divorced although by her account they remained in love dearly and but that changed with coffee each morning hang a sign out to lunch once my son mat best slipped in and left me a comedy egg and walking stick i think he drank some of my third and last week my wife up i want a canopy so unattractive two years she writes i'm about to play then literally in a strange power the man i've never seen before they don't

understand i'm fine just fine where i need a knife we land and they take a lot of time on this world consider everything even merit yet remain un guard ever more careful more watch vote against those who would sin against me against those who would steal vodka against those who would do me harm try to direct and he really did try to be really well loved plagues he is in hospital he had what they called a wet brain and he knew that he was in desperate trouble and finely ground and it was simply passing out that gave kansas confinement and thereafter aa so effective the

writer and the financial system is not the current state to stop building is seeking an amazing act and then do you think that he found that he did that he had not for his personality of volatile that it doesn't exist only for him the nominee's personality but that is sort of his talent that was an inmate that was in the bottle and i'm leery of this kind of romantic view of the riot that you have to suffer and very leery of this for me interview of alcoholism in american fiction that somehow alcohol or something like that sure fights the writer any size matters that's on opposite sentiment that truth is our halls meza job season as a terrible human cost rabid and that one gathers to people around nissen was one reason that recovery in court but are it was there

he he have that that kind of the performance of someone taking it one day and also that carefulness that comes from the kind of attention that one is the other is that there's expense ms conlin just sort of delicate and i think that i'll refer to was maybe this was good to see you tom wicker of the minister of small towns in nineteen seventy seven four months after he stopped drinking raymond carver met tess gallagher and in two years they were living together they divided their time between syracuse university where they both taught at gallagher's hometown of port angeles washington again but kept going back to those earlier days for stories

i think that so much of his work went back towards that life he had left on before he meant me because he was making a kind of atonement a kind of spiritual atonement is maybe a kind of fun lofty way of looking and i could you know maybe feel as those saying how ap test that climb that ladder well i you know i think the thomases is a pretty good word for what he was doing carver have a strange obsession to revisit his former life and and repeatedly revisit his former life a y because he was puzzled why it happened what had happened happened why did he make choices that you have to make choices might there be a sense in which he would have to be responsible for the things that had happened and he was seeking out those answers and there was guilt i

think well i was until roosevelt really still to person from the wonderful things about where he year you know do with some odd characters he went back there because he was a an artist and he saw this with good stories for good stories thrive and difficulty they thrive on the chaotic elements and me and challenges that his earlier life that presented him with tom and he you can hear how the kind of fervor that came from realizing he had lost a lot of time to the drinking yet wasted literally years on so that he he wanted to arm to use every minute of the day a family got us thinking how the news this day when we

find a competition we would compare notes at the end of the day would you do well i do this that smell good good to dig and that i love that when i would be working on his store you just say yeah oh yeah let's right good now are getting it in doing just this excitement only thing that i'm getting shaped in coming alive and shedding now all it's false the trident and the relationship to shed the false it's just all those gestures which were away from closest just as to banish their murderous lovers any day and that wasn't just this is going to be stimulated the writing is as intimate and uncertainty what i've heard described

as a can relate to qualify at night where there's a basic trust enough trust it really can be adventurous long relationship and she deepened and sustained confirmed or he talks to us has as a poet hadn't occurred special access to a sense of i guess that when she spoke the same language raided planned shoot to slash ray wants and she helped him to become what he finally became i think he knew he needed help i need to tell somebody steady i was terry ryan's

day and i did help and we found a lot of other ways to celebrate the happy things and i lived in there were a lot of them as the year began to grow closer and as the work began to come out so that you know he wrote something like eleven books while we were together right past twelve to kansas this last week my mother loves its offer earlier a lot the test was more violence the sequoia less interference and that's really what tunisia is like his career were in a how how i know how now

well i think it helped that i went on living very far only my own life and i think that that helps the relationship i'd lost i was determined to do that but i didn't just caving in art everything that he needed that i didn't become his secretary when ray and i got together he did begin to write once again as well as stories and he had at one downed wonderful period out here at my sky house where i just told them to leave syracuse hasn't there were too many distractions there so he did and he wrote two hundred homes with them it's your form one month period of groupon and i haven't been hearing it now to visit can act

thanksgiving and everything turned to poems for both of us i started writing to his of his downstairs right now is upstairs for it a few minutes ago i stepped out of the deck of the house and where i could see and hear the water and everything that's happened to me you know it was hot and still the tide was out of nowhere in the senate and then against a railing a couple of touch my fourth record in my head no one can blame me that i turned i went inside there was no wind to see was dead calm i hung the cobwebs a lampshade when i watch it shudder now and then when my breath touches a fine friend intricate before long before anyone realizes how big on coming here he loves his speaking voice to come to the fore a little more jazz portraits of course much warmer much more immediate but they are

very artfully what those poems that he needed to write poems he thought of himself as much of that as a poem every bit as much as it is a short story and i think that he was terribly important for him to regain his poetry because in it he could square off more ahead on in one head on fashion with his life and i know there has been this some kind of a feeling amongst some of his fiction writers who never met test out reminders are a lot more stories in home that israel how wrong turn well i love the music they make and religious beliefs in meadows before they have a chance to become critics and even love them first of all this secrecy and i almost forgot to say something about the

source said anything from a wonderful play the big strings of my heart to the place of streams flow into rivers rivers where they going to see the places where water come together with other places and this is forty five years old today anyone believe that if i suddenly plunged thirty five mile hike and you can see five lawyers have to pay for the data flowing before it leaves me loving grace loving everything that increases

remain not very much attached to the idea of being outdoors and being in nature more than he had he had been a creature of rome's up until that point i think he knew that this united him to life with northwest united with his childhood when he had gone out fishing with his father general source of industry also signs in that was down there in the darkness of the river by way too deeply into dark winter evenings and the portions of the river are closed around my legs and gravel turned over my boots but it was rather furious lives of king salman who live there feel they're less controversial

provisions from the hair right refining capacity everything from my eyes but i sure have this was a fishing again and one of the comfort the great hope from being aware of water something that survey was genuine enjoyed if he enjoyed doing a day to go fishing with other people i'd never seen a happier than when he was out was pope and even when other people catch fish in on him we were really the hands of voters i reserve a special place for the marina on everyone for all my friends richard bill choctaw week tim hagan gary george

karl jon scott jeffrey jack paul morris and alfredo my friends they know who they are that's of course i would want a taste of other women normally nothing dangerous the idea simply to enjoy ourselves here as a model i've always like this with my friends and my vote you'd funny and fishermen he drank anything that they didn't like him like las vegas and we see him out there in finland's struggle will resist long morning we are in one day ray efficient wrong way dish with the tight you know not i guess you know that that's not my mother thirty pound of medical climate boatmen it warms up unconscious vision

so who he was used to make me laugh for almost nobody else could that if he was in person at least as funny as it was and the story is that the human stories is something that i think people people not sufficiently remarked well they tend to treat immigrants and treated very sombre i'm quite surprising people don't realize that it's funny i think that no one ever left reading the carver gave without really realizing that he was funny but on some level i think often because he was dealing with very emotional and very serious subject matter people were reluctant to laugh until they knew they might laugh and he was a great he was a great listener were sympathetic and nickels couple lady noises when he listened and shakers hansen not to leave it in and said matt and i mean all

that stuff people say over the back fence you know and it and he did he wasn't putting honestly talked endlessly was but my cut people which is its spill their guts two immovable it will then later he was actually repulsed by getting rid of all the awful carefully around and we had just a natural ally and then they began three says shores during those cathedral yeah that would your story via that supervised accusing theater stuff my life my view of the write about it can attack i did write my own story that the country screwed me in the cathedral a wife has an old friend who was blind over to dinner her husband was never known a blind person and do is edgy over the visitor from his wife's past he's rude and inhospitable inspired by a tv show about the husband helps the line

as they draw the husband closes his eyes so we can feel what it was like to see from the dark our country that story and when i came to the end of the day i actually have a suspicion of levitating i was so drawn up by that story in that that i felt physically violent that the nfl like that was i was in some strange way floating the rules about one person ultimately be and would show someone else something about human existence it's great i sing spiritual story it right now don't know how i ever taught before my life without carver robert calls a social psychologist and a respected offer users carver's short stories and poetry and teaching medical students at harvard university when working with teenagers and ghetto schools he also find

students very responsive to carver's short stories in conjunction with this week a jury stop edward hopper paintings and my feeling is that between carver's evocation of working class american hopkins picture is vying for martyrs and he said listen so let's set desolation center harris had a chance to make it as he sets this peace in regions from darkness this

this this way to confirm that his wife we know obviously had a lot to do with the love that confirmed with tess gallagher and you know he had to have the strength and determination to find their life and love and be really have that life and love i have to say i feel it was a participation a quite extraordinary on nature own in that target his of his work has expanded and mine expanded to that it was gone as generative work in an economy in a penetrating way the last story that carver wrote is based on the death of anton chekhov who would become carver's spiritual mentor this doctor sees that chekhov is dying and it says

something to alter connector chekhov's wife that we better send for some oxygen and chekhov was a doctor himself says don't bother know by the time of the riots are be a corpse and this kind of turns over on its side and eight and the doctor then goes the telephone and calls for a bottle of champagne and visit this bottle of champagne and the waiter pours the three glasses and and chicago checkoff takes a drink of this campaign and has turned sour uses its own spell longtime the side hatch campaign he spends years turns over his side and he dies in his short story around carver tries to render chekhov's experience of dying he had been through many many gaffes and he said i just i had to to get out of the story and i had seen and after two by then and i was emphasizing with this

is so wait your character and i said can do you know that waiter is going to be looking down and you know what he's going to see his fantasy that cork that has popped out the champagne i think the ending is involved with his route his response in character to that cork and that home is going to bend down to get that and we're going to know that something found that gesture that that actually look at that moment the young man is thinking of the cork steel resting near the top issue to retrieve it he would have to bend over still gripping the vase he would do this he leaned over without looking down he reached out and closed it in his

hand i know that without looking down that's the miracle of what he did with that and without looking down just so hard because he has to maintain his decorum in the room also in his late books there is a new element of transcendence an acknowledgment of the love the lies behind the will to battle the previous an extreme alienation of his characters the consistency of ordinary human obsessions and even the much discussed minimalism of his style came to grant some leeway to expansiveness and hope of a wet tess gallagher has turned the benign menace so central to his writing always remained and soaks it now to sort out the form and test has was doing good things to was always amazed me to buy this you know the fact is after the east coast to go to work prep schools or to go to work you know work new year tradition a prestigious use code

school's before he became internationally famous i was always get a kick out of that that he was being so well received by the cr expect east you know and then i was going to cover the view and because of the french and tongs and i'm just to whet your pillow just cooking japanese and think where's arabic and and says the major oil companies were well received it was really i think his book though what we talked about we talk about love landing on the front of the new york times book review and getting the kind of appreciative you that it did they got him a lot more readers but that also was an indication that the publishing towers in new york are shifting their ground to they were shifting to accommodate good people who are out there and for some reason clever put a lot of us over the top and certainly sadie's remains regime

establish limits for city was far away the most influential contemporary writer i'm writing students and as well as other writers we i think was tremendously influential as a writer we used to see it it's crabs die out somewhat now that when ray was at its peak we would see every week the hundreds of stories written in frank imitation roman car and it was it just to me because these stories prove just how good ray carver was because people used to say race chris is a this is the this is flat unaffected languages is just boring so anyone can do is anyone could not and if you saw the imitation she would know but at the height of his career in nineteen eighty seven carver started spitting up blood from lung cancer and then he said it doesn't look good

he said it looks bad in fact real he said i counted thirty two of them on one line for a quick count and i said i'm glad i would want a law but any more being where the man he said are you a religious man you knew down far as girls and let yourself ask for help when you come to a waterfall ms mullane vince your face and you start understanding of those moments i said not yet but i intend to start today he said i'm sorry he said i wish i had some of that kind of news to give you i said i'm a man and he said something else i didn't catch it not knowing what else to do not wanting him to have to repeat it and lead have to fully digest and i just looked at him for a mad diva back it was then i jumped up and shook hands with those men who'd just given me something no one else on earth and every given a name even of thanked him have it being so strong

but he loves his life i heard a voice say hers and the un dr harvey skipping a beat i know i guess you had to go through those seven stages but you end up an acceptance after that will at a lunch in a little cafe we've never been in before she had pastrami i had soup a lot of other people were having lunch to luckily nobody we knew we had plans to make time pressing down on us like a vise squeezing out hope to make room for the everlasting back home we held on to each other and without embarrassment or cajun as they all reach full meaning this was fifth so any holding back had to be stupid had to be insane and neither how many ever get this and i thought at the time it's not far from here to needing a

celebration of joining a bringing your friends into handing out of champagne and perry reno said let's go to reno and get married in reno i told her it's matches and remarriage is twenty four hours a day seven days of weeks no waiting period just i do and i do and if you simply give ten bucks extra and maybe he'll even furnish a witness reno was just the place she had a green cotton dress i bought her in bath she'd send it to the cleaners we were getting ready as if we've found an answer to that question of what's left when there's no more hope that's coming down the hill country the clip reel so one more chance and then that's weak engaged

because i had been with him in his struggle he still looked beautiful to me in a very tender day i think one of the things that was curious to me about being is having to live in such a pitch and such intensity during last month's was that we just couldn't keep the death in front of us all the time life and was trying to send some of those times twenty mrs justine and what happened to us that their relationship had ronan and all the wonderful things that have happened to his to his

writing and what he had helped happened for literature in this country and really all over the world in we celebrate that verbal a limp as a verbal realization these things are so important to people who are writers why is local cutting against israel will or

is this program was made possible in part by a grant from the national endowment for the arts he's