Gary V. Powell, Author

I just finished reading "Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life" by Carol Sklenicka (on the Kindle I received from Mary for Christmas). I'm still trying to absorb it all, still trying to work it all out. Ray Carver, in so many ways, has been such a big part of my life that reading this biography of him has left me strung out, depleted, hung over with emotion.

I discovered Ray in the early 1980s when I was working as a young lawyer at Northwestern Mutual and raising a young family. I'd decided, at age 30, that if I was ever going to get serious about writing, it was time to do so. I signed up for a creative writing workshop--it was a terrific workshop with a lot of quirky, talented, hard drinking writers--at Marquette. I attended a couple of nights a week for two or three years. I made some great friends, shared some good stories, and had some great times. I started to believe that maybe I had the natural talent and could acquire the skills to be a writer. Some people I respected took me seriously and encouraged me to take myself seriously.

Along about this time I stumbled on and read my first Ray Carver stories. I was blown away by "Neighbors," "Fat," and "Will You Please be Quiet Please." Unlike Updike's snooty, stylish prose that pissed me off more than anything, the prose was clean and hard. Unlike Cheever's upperclass, whiny east-coast characters, these characters were working class or working poor or just out of work or between jobs. And the apparent simplicity of the stories made them easy to attempt to imitate. I wasn't the only one who thought this--Ray was probably one of the most widely-imitated writers ever.

Ray and I have a lot in common. Our families were both Scotch-Irish from Arkansas. We were both transplanted when our families moved somewhere else looking for work. We both grew up in gritty, blue-collar towns and have been influenced by that in our writing. We both wanted to write before we really knew what that meant. We both had to figure out how to make a living and raise a family while also learning how to write. We were both influenced early on by John Gardner. Ray met him in the 60's at Chico State. I ran into John in 1971 at SIU, where I heard him lecture on the green. Those lectures became the basis for his books, "On Moral Fiction," and "On Becoming a Novelist."

There are probably some other similarities, but not as many as I once thought. On a personal level, I enjoy a drink or two, Ray was a drunk. I get irritated when my kids interfere with my writing, Ray outright neglected and borderline abused his kids, Chris and Vance, although he eventually reconciled with them. Ray was always a scrapper, more so than me. He stiffed his publishers, restaurants he ate at, and friends who loaned him money. Although he took pay as a professor, he was usually unprepared or ill-prepared. He showed up drunk for readings, bedded his students, and took advantage of his first wife Maryanne when they eventually divorced, refusing to share the revenue with her from stories he wrote when they were together and she was his muse and co-enabler.

Ray was a good writer, but had the great fortune, when the literary world was much smaller,and less complicated that it is today, to encounter an editor like Gordon Lish at Esquire who promoted him relentlessly as much for Lish's and Esquire's benefit as Ray's. If you say someone is a "great writer" often enough, people start to think it and other people start to say it. Ray had a lot of that going for him. Lish heavily edited, sometimes re-wrote, some of Ray's most famous stories including "What we Talk About When We Talk About Love." The truth is, Ray wrote the story drunk, he lacked confidence in himself when he sent it to Lish, and he let Lish have his way. Lish, who went onto claim the title of "Captain Fiction," always struck me as huckster more than a literary giant.

Ray eventually sobered up, married poet Tess Gallagher, and took on an aura of respectability. Guggenheim and Strauss Living awards allowed him to write without the money pressures he'd felt earlier. His kids grew up. Maryanne went her own way. Lish and Ray parted ways and Ray wrote a few stories that are among his best, especially "Cathedral," in the years when he was sober. Mostly, he promoted the earlier work he'd written while drunk during the days when he was known as Running Dog by his wild and crazy friends. A chain smoker since the age of 14, Ray died of lung cancer at age 50 in 1988.

I don't try to imitate Ray anymore. I've pretty much found my own voice. But I do write about a lot of the same types characters that Ray did and Ray's story structures and styles are no doubt an influence in my writing.  Like Ray, I've had to balance work and family with writing and most days it's a battle.

In my mind, what sets Ray's stories apart from others is the wierd way Ray had of looking at the world, the strange things he saw and picked up on that others turned away from. His characters have boogers in their noses, they're greasy and blind and fat and drunk and do the goddamnedest things. He's more Robert Crumb than New Yorker, although the New Yorker published several of his stories.

I have a personally autographed copy of Cathedral. Ray signed it at reading attended by my friend Jim Hartwig. Ray was already dying at the time and he wished me good luck. I keep the book next to my bed.