Raymond Carver's widow, the American poet and short story writer Tess Gallagher, tells the story of going through Carver's clothes shortly after he died and finding a folded piece of paper in one of the pockets. On it Carver had written his last "errand list":
eggs
peanut butter
hot choc
Australia?
Antarctic??
Whether a personal note or a planning fragment for one of his stories, this is classic Carver. He grew up in the 1940s and 50s among the unemployed and working poor of the Pacific Northwest. He was married while still a teenager, and had two kids by the time he was twenty. A dozen years of part-time jobs, part-time school, part-time writing and full-time parenting eventually took their toll: two bankruptcies, a marriage breaking up, and a doomed feeling of "unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction" from which there seemed no escape ... FULL STORY »
