Fires - Raymond Carver

By Raymond Carver (Essays, Poems, Stories)

I really enjoy the essays collected here. I have read and reread them over the years. There are just four of them. Rest of the book is poems and stories which I browse through. I somehow cannot read his stories because of the subject matter and generally I tend to stay away from modern lives while reading fiction. It puts me in a despairing state of mind. Somehow I need the space & distance between the lives we lead and the stories we read. But his language is so sharp, so crystal, so pointed, that the essays are always a delight to read. Short, crisp, and they read as if the writer were talking directly to you.

Following little excerpt from his preface to John Gardner's book 'On becoming a novelist'. Carver titles the essay, 'John Gardner: The Writer as a Teacher'. He studies creative writing under him, and following he recalls:

"For short story writers in his class, the requirement was one story, ten to fifteen pages in length. For people who wanted to write a novel -- I think there must have been one or two of these souls -- a chapter of around twenty pages, along with an outline of the rest. The kicker was that this one short story, or the chapter of the novel, might have to be revised ten times in the course of the semester for Gardner to be satisfied with it. It was a basic tenet of his that a writer found what he wanted to say in the ongoing process of seeing what he'd said. And this seeing, or seeing more clearly, came about through revision. He believed in revision, endless revision; it was something very close to his heart and something he felt was vital for writers, at whatever stage of their development. And he never seemed to lose patience rereading a student story, even though he might have seen it in five previous incarnations."

I'll get to the stories too, eventually. But the habit of bringing everything home can leave you heartbroken at times in his stories. The sadness can be piercing. I find myself then returning or retreating to Victorian fiction. Perhaps one day someone should talk about the courage of a reader.