Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

hours a night, but I was paid for eight hours. There was a certain amount of work that had to get done, but once it was done, that was it—I could go home or do anything I wanted. The first year or two I went home every night and would be in bed at a reasonable hour and be able to get up in the morning and write. The kids would be off at the babysitter's and my wife would have gone to her job—a door-to-door sales job. I'd have all day in front of me. This was fine for a while. Then I began getting off work at night and going drinking instead of going home. By this time it was 1967 or 1968.
    INTERVIEWER When did you first get published?
    CARVER When I was an undergraduate at Humboldt State in Areata, California. One day, I had a short story taken at one magazine and a poem taken at another. It was a terrific day! Maybe one of the best days ever. My wife and I drove around town and showed the letters of acceptance to all of our friends. It gave some much-needed validation to our lives.
    INTERVIEWER What was the first story you ever published j And the first poem?
    CARVER It was a story called "Pastoral" and it was published in the Western Humanities Review. It's a good literary magazine and it's still being published by the University of Utah. They didn't
    pay me anything for the story but that didn't matter. The poem was called 'The Brass Ring/' and it was published by a magazine in Arizona, now defunct, called Targets. Charles Bukowski had a poem in the same issue, and I was pleased to be in the same magazine with him. He was a kind of hero to me then.
    INTERVIEWER
    Is it true—a friend of yours told me this—that you celebrated your first publication by taking the magazine to bed with you?
    CARVER
    That's partly true. Actually it was a book, The Best American Short Stories annual. My story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" had just appeared in the collection. That was back in the late sixties when it was edited every year by Martha Foley and people used to call it that—simply, "The Foley Collection." The story had been published in an obscure little magazine out of Chicago called December. The day the anthology came in the mail I took it to bed to read and just to look at, you know, and hold it, but I did more looking and holding than actual reading. I fell asleep and woke up the next morning with the book there in bed beside me, along with my wife.
    INTERVIEWER
    In an article you did for the New York Times Book Review you mentioned a story "too tedious to talk about here"—about why you choose to write short stories over novels. Do you want to go into that story now?
    CARVER
    The story that was "too tedious to talk about" has to do with a number of things that aren't very pleasant to talk about. I did finally talk about some of these things in the essay "Fires," which was published in Antaeus. In it I said that finally a writer is judged by what he writes, and that's the way it should be. The circumstances surrounding the writing are
    something else, something extra-literary. Nobody ever asked me to be a writer. But it was tough to stay alive and pay bills and put food on the table and at the same time to think of myself as a writer and to learn to write. After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two or three year stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get some kind of a payoff from immediately, not next year, or three years from now. Hence, poems and stories. I was beginning to see that my life was not—let's say it was not what I wanted it to be. There was always a wagonload of frustration to deal with—wanting to write and not being able to find the time or the place for it. I used to go out and sit in the car and try to write something on a pad on my knee. This was when the kids were in their adolescence. I was in my late twenties or early thirties. We were still in a state of penury, we had one bankruptcy behind us, and years of hard work with nothing to show for it except an old car, a rented house and new creditors on our backs. It was depressing, and I felt spiritually obliterated. Alcohol became a problem. I more or less gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit. That's part of what I was talking about when I was talking about things "too tedious to talk about/