Story... life

I had to really resist not using some pun version of Raymond Carver titles for this post - What we write about when we write about blogs... or will you please type quietly please... or where I'm blogging from... or QUIT!

I've been reading Raymond Carver's Bio, A Writer's Life by Carol Skienicka. It's a thick tome full of seemingly every jot, tittle and knee scrape of Carver's life. And I'm loving it. Carver, along with DeLillo and Ford, has been an obsession. Okay, I can add some more writers to that list, but I am trying to focus.

I came across Carver fairly late in my reading life. I was given an audio set of Great American Stories, or some such title. It contained stories from Updike (including A and P) Cheever (including the Enormous Radio) and Carver - including most of the stories from Where I am Calling From. At first I found them kind of melancholy, but oddly fascinating. The guy who read them had an edgy, world weary voice - and I discovered that I couldn't listen to a lot of them in a row... because they made me feel depressed. I didn't pick up an actual Carver book for a couple of years, so I only knew his work from the tired guy's voice - which, incendentally I began to think of as Carver's voice. Much later, when I heard him in an archived radio interview, I thought, "that's not Carver!" He doesn't sound tired enough.

I found a collection of his in a second hand bookstore and read the stories I had up until that time only heard. As much as I liked the audio, I loved the printed versions. I guess it is like watching a movie you see the world, where on radio you create the theatre of the mind. And reading Carver was one step closer to his world.

Cathedral is still my favorite, though I have a fondness for Fat, Neighbours, and Elephant. A quote that sticks with me in Tobias Wolff talking about Cathedral. He said that reading the end of the story he felt himself actually levitate. I know exactly what he meant.

I'll blog again about the actual bio another time - just to say that I am levitating frequently.