Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

Lots. If the first draft of the story is forty pages long, it'll usually be half that by the time I'm finished with it. And it's not just a question of taking out or bringing it down. I take out a lot, but I also add things and then add some more and take out some more. It's something I love to do, putting words in and taking words out.
    INTERVIEWER
    Has the process of revision changed now that the stories seem to be longer and more generous?
    CARVER
    Generous, yes, that's a good word for them. Yes, and I'll tell
    you why. Up at school there's a typist who has one of those space-age typewriters, a word processor, and I can give her a story to type and once she has it typed and I get back the fair copy, I can mark it up to my heart's content and give it back to her; and the next day I can have my story back, all fair copy once more. Then I can mark it up again as much as I want, and the next day HI have back a fair copy once more. I love it. It may seem like a small thing, really, but it's changed my life, that woman and her word processor.
    INTERVIEWER
    Did you ever have any time off from having to earn a living?
    CARVER
    I had a year once. It was a very important year for me, too. I wrote most of the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please! in that year. It was back in 1970 or 1971. I was working for this textbook publishing firm in Palo Alto. It was my first white collar job, right after the period when I'd been a janitor at the hospital in Sacramento. I'd been working away there quietly as an editor when the company, it was called SRA, decided to do a major reorganization. I planned to quit, I was writing my letter of resignation, but then suddenly—I was fired. It was just wonderful the way it turned out. We invited all of our friends that weekend and had a firing party! For a year I didn't have to work. I drew unemployment and had my severance pay to live on. And that's the period when my wife finished her college degree. That was a turning point, that time. It was a good period.
    INTERVIEWER
    Are you religious?
    CARVER No, but I have to believe in miracles and the possibility of resurrection. No question about that. Every day that I wake up, I'm glad to wake up. That's why I like to wake up early. In
    my drinking days I would sleep until noon or whatever and I would usually wake up with the shakes.
    INTERVIEWER
    Do you regret a lot of things that happened back then when things were so bad?
    CARVER
    I can't change anything now. I can't afford to regret. That life is simply gone now, and I can't regret its passing. I have to live in the present. The life back then is gone just as surely—it's as remote to me as if it had happened to somebody I read about in a nineteenth-century novel. I don't spend more than five minutes a month in the past. The past really is a foreign country and they do do things differently there. Things happen. I really do feel I've had two different lives.
    INTERVIEWER
    Can you talk a little about literary influences, or at least name some writers whose work you greatly admire?
    CARVER Ernest Hemingway is one. The early stories. "Big Two-Hearted River," "Cat in the Rain," "The Three-Day Blow," "Soldier's Home," lots more. Chekhov. I suppose he's the writer whose work I most admire. But who doesn't like Chekhov? I'm talking about his stories now, not the plays. His plays move too slowly for me. Tolstoy. Any of his short stories, novellas, and Anna Karenina. Not War and Peace. Too slow. But The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Master and Man, "How Much Land Does A Man Need?" Tolstoy is the best there is. Isaac Babel, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Connor. James Joyce's Dubliners. John Cheever Madame Bovary. Last year I reread that book, along with a new translation of Flaubert's letters written while he was composing—no other word for it— Madame Bovary. Conrad. Updike's Too Far To Go. And there are wonderful writers I've come across in the last year or two
    like Tobias Wolff. His book of stories In the Garden of the North American Martyrs is just wonderful. Max Schott. Joy Williams. Bobbie Ann Mason. Did I mention her? Well, she's good and worth mentioning twice. Harold Pinter. VS. Prichett. Years ago I read something in a letter by Chekhov that impressed me. It was a piece of advice to one of his many correspondents, and it went something like this: Friend, you don't have to write about extraordinary people who accomplish extraordinary and memorable deeds. (Understand I was in college at the time