Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray

By Tess Gallagher

Book Overview

This bittersweet collection of diary entries, memoirs, essays, letters, and poetry celebrates the marriage and literary partnership of the late fiction writer Raymond Carver (1938---1988) and the poet Tess Gallagher. Soul Barnacles is both literary history and love story, chronicling the way a surviving partner carries forward the life and work of her mate while pursuing her own life and literary endeavors. These essays, letters, and interviews, written after Carver's untimely death, explore the inextricable bonds that linked their lives and their writing.
The book opens with excerpts from a journal of the couple's last trip to Europe and a selection of Gallaghers introductions to Carver's posthumous collections. The next section focuses primarily on Gallagher's engagement with the filming of Short Cuts, a film directed by Robert Altman and based on Carver's short stories. Gallagher's recounting provides a rare, quietly dramatic look at a poet's experience in Hollywood, determined to see the dignified transformation of one art form into another. Following are a number of interviews that touch on the grieving process, the solitude and intensity of a writer's life, and the ways in which Gallagher's relationship with Carver has continued to evolve, even after death. The collection, richly illustrated with photographs of Carver and Gallagher during their all-too-brief time together, ends with "I Asked That a Prayer," an original poem by Tess Gallagher, and a complete listing of the published work of this remarkable literary couple.
Tess Gallagher's poetry collections include Portable Kisses, Instructions to the Double, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Willingly. She is also author of the short-story collections At the Owl Woman Saloon and The Lover of Horses and the essay collection A Concert of Tenses.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472089129
• ISBN13: 9780472089123
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Tess' life without Ray-ness

It's likely that much (most?) of the audience interested in "Soul Barnacles," a collection of pieces written by Tess Gallagher about Raymond Carver in the years after his passing, are, like me, Carver fans looking for additional insight into the life of the writer and poet, rather than fans of Gallagher, his widow who is a writer and poet in her own right. With that assumption, Soul Barnacles is a bit of a mixed bag as it contains some great anecdotes about Ray (though most of them are taken from sources that Carver fans will likely already own), as well as some writing that is more topical to Tess. We'll start with the gems... Gallagher's foreward to Carver's "No Heroics, Please," as well as "All of Us" are included - these are wonderful pieces that shed some light on Ray as a person and his "second life" with Tess. In the "All of Us" preface, Gallagher acknowledges the "transparency" and "guileless(ness)" of Ray's poetry, admitting that "overreach was natural and necessary" for him. For fans of course, this is what draws us to Carver, if to the chagrin of certain literary critics. "Soul Making" is Tess' preface to "A New Path to the Waterfall," a posthumously published collection of poetry coauthored by the couple - it therefore mostly focuses on several of the poems from that work, but also mentions the origin of the "Ghost Fish" painting by Alfredo Arreguin that adorns its end pages. It also documents Ray and Tess' touching goodbye before he goes to sleep for the last time. And then there's the anecdote of Tess finding a shopping list in Ray's shirt during the time after doctors had let them know he only had a limited time before he would succumb to cancer. The list includes "eggs, peanut butter, hot choc" and then "Australia? Antartica?" Words to live by. The foreward to "Carver Country," a photobook about Ray's Pacific Northwest writings, is here too. It's a great little mini-biography of Ray's years, visiting his upbringing, alcoholism, his wedding to Tess, and the story behind "Cathedral." Also included are "Unending," a two-page reflection on Tess' time before and after Ray's death (taken from "Heart of Marriage: Discovering the Secrets of Enduring Love" by Cathleen Rountree), and "A Nightshine beyond Memory," a longer piece about Tess' decade after Ray's passing. The latter includes some revealing anecdotes about the construction of a letter box at Ray's gravesite, Haruki Murakami's relationship to Ray as translator and friend, and a little snippet about two young Japanese men who visit Tess unannounced one day hoping for a touch of Ray. One of them writes in her guestbook, "Thank you very much Mr. Carver. You are my, believe it or not, you are my hero." It's that sentiment that makes the anthology of forewards and other writings in "Soul Barnacles" a treasured read for worshippers of Carver. Likewise, it's the little bits of Ray that she gave her Japanese guests and gives us, in this book, that make this a necessary