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Three: [Recommended.] Read Carver's interview with the from Summer 1983.

Read articles, take your pick, on Carver that are linked at The New York Times.

Five: Visit The New Yorker's The magazine has published many of Carver's stories and remembrances of him over the years.

The draft of the story, "Beginners," which became "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," can be found It shows Gordon Lish's edits. There is also a brief sample of Lish's edits

Lish's edits are an excellent example of the dynamics, or call it the conflict, that exist between writer and editor. See a discussion of Carver's July 8, 1980 letter to Lish, protesting his recent editorial cuts (some as much as 70%) of his collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Letters from Carver to Lish, including the July 8, 1980 Carver letter to Lish, can be found here .

Now that you are an expert on "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," I invite you to read "What We Talk About When We Talk About Doughnuts," from The New Yorker, May 10, 1999.

Six: The Library of America publishes, as they say, "Authoritative texts of great American writing." They have a page on Carver. They also made a statement on Gordon Lish's editing of "Beginners"/"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" and a letter, a tortured letter, by Carver with a plea to Lish to return the story more closely to the original. The Library of America's statement and Carver's letter
Seven: Find "The Bath" at this site.
Eight: Find an early version of "So Much Water So Close to Home"right here. Please note, however, that this version incorrectly includes a question mark ("?") at the end of the story; it should end with a period.

Nine: Carver's stories have inspired a number of films. They include Short Cuts by Robert Altman (and a cast of dozens, at least). Go here to read an interview with filmmaker Altman and poet Tess Gallagher, Carver's widow. Here's Roger Ebert's review of Short Cuts. A list of other Carver-inspired films can be found at IMDB.
Ten: Listen to writer Richard Ford, a close friend of Carver, read Carver's "The Student's Wife."
Eleven: Want to learn more about Carver and his editor, Gordon Lish? Read this from The New York Review of Books. Thanks to former English 1B student Oshin Edralin, we have a YouTube video to watch about Lish and Carver. Here it is:

Twelve: For poetry by Carver go to at the Poetry Foundation and click the tab for "Poems, Articles and More." Poetry Soup has a pretty good sample of his poetry, too, as does All Poetry .

Carver described, in a Paris Review interview from the Summer 1983 issue, his writing process and the hard but pleasurable work involved in doing revisions:

"Much of this work time, understand, is given over to revising and rewriting. There's not much that I like better than to take a story that I've had around the house for a while and work it over again. It's the same with the poems I write. I'm in no hurry to send something off just after I write it, and I sometimes keep it around the house for months doing this or that to it, taking this out and putting that in. It doesn't take that long to do the first draft of the story, that usually happens in one sitting, but it does take a while to do the various versions of the story. I've done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story. Never less than ten or twelve drafts."

In the Paris Review interview, published in the Summer 1983 issue, Carver also discussed the purpose and pleasure of fiction:
"The days are gone, if they were ever with us, when a novel or a play or a book of poems could change people's ideas about the world they live in or even about themselves. Maybe writing fiction about particular kinds of people living particular kinds of lives will allow certain areas of life to be understood a little better than they were understood before. But I'm afraid that's it, at least as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps it's different in poetry. . . . Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another. That end is good in and of itself, I think. But changing things through fiction, changing somebody's political affiliation or the political system itself, or saving the whales or the redwood trees, no. Not if these are the kinds of changes you mean. And I don't think it should have to do any of these things, either. It doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it, and the different kind of pleasure that's taken in reading something that's durable and made to last, as well as beautiful in and of itself. Something that throws off these sparks-a persistent and steady glow, however dim."

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Three: [Recommended.] Read Carver's interview with the from Summer 1983. Read articles, take your pick, on Carver that are linked at The New York Times. Five: Visit The New Yorker's The magazine has published many of Carver's stories and remembrances of him over the years.

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Carver struggled with alcoholism in the past in especially in his first marriage. This part of his life is prevalent in most of his work.
-CE

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Was married and a father of two before he was twenty -BS

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Carver born in an Oregon logging town, the author married and the father of two before he was 20, later remarried - SW 

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Carver born in an Oregon logging town, the author married and the father of two before he was 20, later remarried - SW 

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Like his characters, Carver worked at a series of low paying jobs: he "picked tulips, pumped gas, swept hospital corridors, swabbed toilets, and managed an apartment complex," according to Bruce Weber in a New York Times Magazine
-G.Mc

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Carver was the recipient of a Livings stipend granted by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters which freed him from his post as a teacher of creative writing on the faculty of Syracuse University.
- SR

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Carver taught creative writing in California and produced two books of poetry before his first book of short stories
-G.M

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"...reticent prose style, which seems to register every detail with the same neutral intensity, the same dispassionate precision."
- Grace M

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"His stories were beautiful and moving"
- LW

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"His stories are minimalist in style with almost an abstract feel".
- LW

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"During the time Carver wrote the story, the mid seventies...Women were being hunted down, kidnapped, raped, murdered and disappeared. Hunters and hikers made grisly finds of young women, mutilated and showing signs of 🤬, on a regular basis...throughout Washington, Oregon and Northern California."
- Grace M

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"Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, were still years from being captured."
- Grace M

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Gordon Lish is considered one of the most prominent editors in contemporary publishing, has claimed to have had a crucial role in the creation of the early short stories of Raymond Carver. Carver and Lish met at Palo Alto, when the author was having serious problems with alcohol. The editor was interested in his writing style and this is how everything started. However, his relationship ended after Lish had edited three of Carver ́s books. The basic idea was that he had changed some of the stories so much that they were more Lish's stories than Carver's.
~ Patrick

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“Lish had cut the length of the book by over 50 percent; three stories were at least 70 percent shorter; ten stories had new titles and the endings of fourteen had been rewritten. 202 pages compared to 103 in the present volume. Lish's published version is 4,800 words, or about half as long as Carver's.” Carver was in anguish and ended his relationship with Lish

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Carvers second spouse, Tess Gallagher, was also a poet and short story writer. She influenced the way he perceived love and happiness, she even published a book called Soul Barnacles: On the Literature of a Relationship, Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver. This shows how strong their relationship was and how they helped each other in their work.
~ Patrick

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Yakima, Washington, where his father worked as saw filer in a lumber mill. This is what influenced Carver to generate a majority of the scenery ideas for his books. -LC

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His stories mainly take place in his native Pacific Northwest Region and involve characters of the lower-middle-class  that he was farmiliar with while growing up  -B.S

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One of the most celebrated authors of the last two decades of the 20th century. -LC

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Many critics considered him as one of the best minimalist writers because of his simple, colloquial and informal prose, always hiding a mysterious halo. -JM

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"the collapse of human relationships, stories take place at the moment where things fall apart". - SW

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"the collapse of human relationships, stories take place at the moment where things fall apart". - SW

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During the years of Carver´s youth, his father had serious problems with alcohol consumption, his mother was fighting with his father and desperate for the family situation to change the young Carver had an eating disorder. -JM

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At the age of nineteen he married Maryann Burk and his wife gave birth to two children two years later. Carver felt guilt as he could barely keep his family afloat and this guilt influenced him to drink. -LC

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"He wrote about incompatible couples with dysfunctional lives, alienated children, financial problems and characters with addictions" which is present in So Much Water So Close To Home.
- LW

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Carver writes using dirty realism focusing on the dark side of contemporary life. He writes about ordinary things in a simple language that depicts pain and suffering rather than hope.
-CB

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In 1967, he worked as an editor of textbooks for Science Research Associates in Palo Alto, California. However, he was fired some years later because he became a heavy drinker. -JM

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In 1958, the family moved to Paradise, California, where he entered Chico State College. There he was taught by John Gardner
on a creative writing course. This influenced carver to start to produce his short stories and poems. -LC

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Carver avoids using adverbs
-CB

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"Reveal a tremendous amount of detail about their characters and their lives, which can be considered as "dirty" and sad."
- LW

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Carver's fictional world is a place where "people worry about whether their old cars will start, where unemployment or personal bankruptcy are present dangers, where a good time consists of smoking pot with the neighbours"
- SR

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In short stories Carver describes emotions, disappointments, and relationships with simplicity and stoicism
-CB

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"Carver was about as far from this world – both in content and style – as it was possible to be. His characters worked in diners and motels; they had amputated limbs and their families had left them"

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"Carver was about as far from this world – both in content and style – as it was possible to be. His characters worked in diners and motels; they had amputated limbs and their families had left them"

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Carver has taken the dirty realism of day to day life and explored it
-CB

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Carver writes about ordinary things in a simple language that depicts the pain and suffering rather than hope.
- SR

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Carver's stories are populated by characters who live in America's shoddy enclaves of convenience
- CB

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"This new collection,which he titled Beginners, was the first he had written since he thought he'd never write again the first since he'd been sober, the first since he'd left his wife"  8 July 1980 - SW

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"This new collection,which he titled Beginners, was the first he had written since he thought he'd never write again the first since he'd been sober, the first since he'd left his wife"  8 July 1980 - SW

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Tess Gallagher said that the exposed, unornamented landscape of his home town inspired him and that it had something in common with the “foresaken quality” to be found in the lives of his characters.

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Unhappy marriages and people who continue living a futile life just because there is nothing else left to do.
- SR

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There is unhappiness present in majority of Carver's stories

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"His stories make the characters appear inarticulate and alone."
- LW

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"Unmotivated characters who were implicated by in trivial actions characterised by the economy of words."
- LW

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Aims to convey through language and symbols the special moments when peoples empty lives are separated from chaos.
- SR

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The lives of farmers, alcoholics, secretaries, mechanics and other ordinary people.
- SR

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"it is his skill to understand and portray the sensations of the characters that shows how the real life of common people in the years '70s and '80s in the USA really was".
- SR

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"The murder of women in the great Northwest outdoors was an ominous phenomenon in Carver's day...Carver's story is therefore a fictional recording of the contemporary trauma of the persuasive threat of the 🤬/murder of young American women in non-suburban settings."
- Grace M

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"Maybe if I were alone, by myself, and no one had ever seen these stories, maybe then,knowing that your versions are better than some of the ones I had sent, maybe I could get into this and go with it. But Tess has seen all of these and gone over them closely." (Raymond Carver) -SW

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"Maybe if I were alone, by myself, and no one had ever seen these stories, maybe then,knowing that your versions are better than some of the ones I had sent, maybe I could get into this and go with it. But Tess has seen all of these and gone over them closely." (Raymond Carver) -SW

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Carver applies the techniques of juxtaposition and suggestion, which he had become familiar with in his minimalist phase.
-G. Mc

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Died in 1988
- SR

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(he died of lung cancer at the age of 50, in 1988).

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(he died of lung cancer at the age of 50, in 1988).

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SW

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"The naked female corpse becomes a symbol of the state of that society, and the protagonist clearly identifies with the dead woman's plight"
- Grace M

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In 1985, the US surgeon General identified domestic violence as a major health problem. By 1984 serial killers in Carvers home state had molested and killed dozens of young women abandoning them in areas within an hour or two’s drive of the setting of “So Much Water, So Close to Home”. The threats to women's health and lives is vividly portrayed in Carver’s story by using Claire as the narrator who experiences threat which are specifically gender related. -G.M

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"Carver developed as a sort of extreme form of Hemingsway's  telegraphic realism"
- K.M

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"Hemingway is the only writer from this period who had a significant influence on Carver's later work"
K.M