“Whether you are new to Raymond Carver’s work or a longtime admirer who knows about his singular style and impact on the American short story, I hope you’ll join us. When we’re done you will have gained either a useful introduction to a unique storyteller or else a deeper, fuller understanding of a writer you already know matters.”
– William Giraldi, Five Things I’ve Learned about from Raymond Carver about the Suffering of Average People
About this class: My name is William Giraldi, and I hope you will join me for my upcoming two-hour class, Five Things I’ve Learned from Raymond Carver about the Suffering of Average People.
Raymond Carver has been a staple of my reading life since I was nineteen years old, thirty years ago now. He is probably the author about whom I know the most, having taught his imperishable short stories during my first decade at Boston University. You won’t spot Carver’s trademark style or subject matter in my three novels, two memoirs, and collection of literary criticism, but you can safely say that Carver was one of the three writers most responsible for turning me into one too. If asked to name the top three most important American story writers, I would put Carver next to Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor. And by “important” I don’t mean only most talented but most influential.
From the late 1970s until his death in 1988 at the age of 50, Carver’s distinctive portrayals of working-class malaise, written in what I’ve elsewhere described as “a demotic splendor, a conversational artfulness,” constituted a kind of revolution in the American short story, a sea change not seen since the mid-1920s when Ernest Hemingway’s stories transformed the English sentence. Carver showed that literature, that art, can be made of the everyday anguish of common strivers: the marriage is shot, the rent is due, cash is scarce, booze is near, and deliverance is nowhere. The critic Irving Howe once pointed out that in Carver’s world, ordinary life is the enemy of ordinary people. On the face of them, Carver’s stories shouldn’t have the strong pull they do, or lodge themselves so firmly, so unforgettably, in a reader’s selfhood. From where do they draw their peculiar power, their capacity for communion?
Attend this class and we will closely unpack five of Carver’s most iconic stories contained in his collection Where I’m Calling From: “Collectors,” “Gazebo,” “Careful,” “Fever,” and “A Small, Good Thing.” I’ll make reference to some of Carver’s other famous stories—”Fat,” “Neighbors,” “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” “Where I’m Calling From,” “Chef’s House,” and “Cathedral,” among others—and we’ll discuss Carver’s life and the extent to which it informed his fiction. We will also have a conversation in which comments, questions, and criticisms are most welcome.
Whether you are new to Raymond Carver’s work or a longtime admirer who knows about his singular style and impact on the American short story, I hope you’ll join us. When we’re done you will have gained either a useful introduction to a unique storyteller or else a deeper, fuller understanding of a writer you already know matters.
Thank you to all. I look forward to seeing you.
-William
And: my essay on suffering in Raymond Carver’s fiction can be read here: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/redemption-raymond-carver
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