Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

keep trying to see if I can find that out. It's a process more than a fixed position.
    There was a time when I used to think it was a character defect
    that made me have to struggle along like this. I don't think this way any longer. Frank O'Connor has said that he was always revising his stories (this after sometimes taking the story through twenty or thirty rewrites in the first place) and that someday he'd like to publish a revised book of his revisions. To a limited extent, I've had that opportunity here. Two of the stories, "Distance" and "So Much Water So Close to Home" (from the original eight stories that made up Furious Seasons), were first published in book form in FS and were then included in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, When Capra approached me about reprinting, between two covers, Furious Seasons and At Night the Salmon Move— both books were then out of print—the idea of this book began to take hold. But I was in something of a quandary about these two particular stories Capra wanted to include. They had both been largely rewritten for the Knopf book. After some deliberation, I decided to stay fairly close to the versions as they first appeared in the Capra Press book, but this time hold the revisions to a minimum. They have been revised again, but not nearly so much as they once were. But how long can this go on? I mean, I suppose there is, finally, a law of diminishing returns. But I can say now that I prefer the later versions of the stories, which is more in accord with the way I am writing short stories these days.
    So all of the stories here have been reworked, to a greater or lesser degree; and they are somewhat different now than the original versions published either in magazines or in Furious Seasons. I see this as an instance in which I am in the happy position of being able to make the stories belter than they were. At least, God knows, I hope they're better. I think so anyway. But, truly, I've seldom seen a piece of prose, or a poem—my own or anyone else's—that couldn't be improved upon if it were left alone for a time.
    I'm grateful to Noel Young for giving me the opportunity, and the initiative, to look at the work once more and see what could be done with it.
    Raymond Carver
    Syracuse, New York
    September 7, 1982
    ABOUTTHEAUTHOR
    Raymond Carver was born in 1939. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979 and has twice been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at the University of Iowa, the University of
    Texas, and the University of California, and in 1983 he resigned his chair at Syracuse University in order to accept a much-coveted Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award. In addition to his books of short fiction, he has brought out three collections of poetry. His work has been widely anthologized, and he was the 1983 first-place winner in William Abrahams's distinguished short-fiction annual, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Mr. Carver now lives in the Pacific Northwest.

This book made available by the Internet Archive.