Poet, essayist, and short story writer Tess Gallagher was born in 1943 in Port Angeles, Washington, to a logging family. Her early years were marked by the rhythms of seasonal work, as well as the landscape of both the Northwest and the Ozarks, where her grandparents lived. “I don’t know how many children really get to explore vast amounts of territory like that,” she has said in interviews. “It builds something in you.”

Another observation to extend your analysis: The comma in, "To call myself beloved, to feel myself" has power and allows one to associate the clause "to feel myself" with either "To call myself beloved," or "beloved on the earth." In the former, one can read the penultimate line as a list of two separate things that were wanted: calling oneself beloved and, also, feeling oneself. The comma connotes logical force and deepens the meaning of "To call myself beloved," to calling oneself beloved because of or after feeling oneself, i.e., after knowledge of self. To me, the clause "feeling oneself" brings the notion of exploration, or actively pursuing and encountering oneself. With these connotations, the sense of calling oneself beloved becomes profound: If the exploration of self is at all worthy of being called "feeling myself," surely things will be encountered that are painful, other than one wishes, maybe even shameful and embarrassing. Nevertheless, I "call myself beloved." With that comma, the love becomes profound. The final line also deepens. In the previous line, the wish was merely to _call_ oneself beloved. The final line, read disconnected from "to feel myself," becomes a sigh of contentment and sufficiency, a final reflection of a fact, "beloved on the earth." Gallagher’s increasing interest in the possibilities of narrative, and her relationship with Carver, whom she met in 1977, led her to write The Lover of Horses and Other Stories (1986), her first volume of short stories . Frequently depicting small moments of ordinary epiphany, Gallagher’s prose is known for its urgency and emotional honesty. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called Gallagher “a strict, highly disciplined writer, and the tensile quality of her prose often reinforces the sense of danger—emotional, spiritual and physical—that lingers over these stories. Reading them, one begins to fear that something will happen... or even worse, that nothing will occur, leaving the characters to stew, alone, in their disconsolation.” Gallagher’s other collections of short stories include At the Owl Woman Saloon (1997) and The Man from Kinvara (2009). The literary executor of Carver’s estate, Gallagher has staunchly defended his work, seeking to publish the original version of his famed What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, published in 1981 as the product of severe editing on the part of Carver’s editor Gordon Lish. Bringing the book out as Beginners (2009) in the UK, Gallagher also fought to have it included in the Library of America’s Collected Stories of Raymond Carver (2009) . Speaking to Jeff Baker of the Oregonian, Gallagher said, “I think what [ Collected Stories] has done and what I have done in getting it published is... I have pushed the reset button on understanding Ray, what he cared about in his writing, his tone, his care for his characters.” Ebert, Roger (October 22, 1993). "Short Cuts". Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original on June 2, 2013 . Retrieved June 3, 2022. But aftera moment's anxiety you were okaybecause it was really a sidewalksale, and the shoes you were wearing,or not wearing, were fine for that. After the publication of "Neighbors" in the June 1971 issue of Esquire at the instigation of Lish (by now ensconced as the magazine's fiction editor), Carver began to teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz at the behest of provost James B. Hall, an Iowa alumnus and early mentor to Ken Kesey at the University of Oregon, commuting from his new home in Sunnyvale, California.The fall began with Ray's trip to Missoula, Mont., in '72 to fish with friend and literary helpmate Bill Kittredge. That summer Ray fell in love with Diane Cecily, an editor at the University of Montana, whom he met at Kittredge's birthday party. "That's when the serious drinking began. It broke my heart and hurt the children. It changed everything." Author of foreword) Raymond Carver, Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose, edited by William L. Stull, Vintage Contemporaries (New York, NY), 2001.

Carver hated to be called a "minimalist", and he was called one often. One wonders if he disliked the term because he knew that minimalism was the aspect of his writing that was least his own. If you are a Carver reader who mainly associates his work with a certain style, then you may be surprised to find that the style itself – his sentences and paragraphs, the blunt, mid-air endings of his stories – was in many cases engineered by Gordon Lish. If, however, you take Carver's world as a whole – the brutality of intimacy, the unplaceability of anxiety, the mess any and all of us can make of love – you may think that Lish saw something in Carver, rather than imposing something else on him, and helped find a form to fit the content. In the mid-1960s, Carver and his family resided in Sacramento, California, where he briefly worked at a bookstore before taking a position as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He did all of the janitorial work in the first hour and then wrote at the hospital through the rest of the night. He audited classes at what was then Sacramento State College, including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver and Schmitz soon became friends, and Carver wrote and published his first book of poems, Near Klamath, under Schmitz’s guidance. By fall of '74", writes Carver, "he was more dead than alive. I had to drop out of the PhD program so I could get him cleaned up and drive him to his classes". Over the next several years, Maryann's husband physically abused her. Friends urged her to leave Raymond. Everything Goes directed by Andrew Kotatko (2004), starring Hugo Weaving and Abbie Cornish, based on Carver’s short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” Carver was nominated again in 1984 for his third major-press collection, Cathedral, the volume generally perceived as his best. Included in the collection are the award-winning stories “A Small, Good Thing”, and “Where I’m Calling From”. John Updike selected the latter for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. For his part, Carver saw Cathedral as a watershed in his career, in its shift towards a more optimistic and confidently poetic style.And yet the poem’s speaker has nevertheless tried to put this happiness into words, the words that constitute the poem which is itself called, in what feels almost like an existential joke, ‘Happiness’. Happiness cannot be adequately or accurately described in words, so here are some words to a poem about happiness, called ‘Happiness’. Then there is the strange, small, yet perhaps emblematic change: a ritual alteration of characters' names, so that Herb becomes Mel, Bea becomes Rae, Kate becomes Melody, Cynthia becomes Myrna, and so on. This habit in particular feels like an imposition, a suggestion that the editor knew the writer's inventions and his world better than he did himself. Here, you wonder how the relationship changed. After The Denim” directed by Gregory D. Goyins (2010) starring Tom Bower and Karen Landry, based on Carver’s short story “If It Please You”

Carver describes, without a trace of rancor, what finally put her over the edge. In the fall of '78, with a new teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, Ray started seeing Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who would become his muse and wife near the end of his life. "It was like a contretemps. He tried to call me to talk about where we were. I missed the calls. He knew he was about to invite Tess to Thanksgiving." So he wrote a letter instead. On June 2, 1977 Carver stopped drinking with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. After this 'line of demarcation' his stories became increasingly more expansive. His first marriage ended in 1977 and Carver married his long-term partner, the poet Tess Gallagher (b.1943), whom he had met ten years earlier at a writers' conference in Dallas. The wedding took place in Reno and two months later, on August 2, 1988, the author died of lung cancer. I said, "Let me get you a drink. What's your pleasure? We have a little of everything. It's one of our pastimes." Whoever Was Using This Bed, also directed by Andrew Kotatko (2016), starring Jean-Marc Barr, Radha Mitchell and Jane Birkin, based on Carver's short story of the same nameIn November 1977, Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers' conference in Dallas, Texas. Gallagher later remembered feeling "as if my life until then had simply been a rehearsal for meeting him." [14] Beginning in January 1979, Carver and Gallagher lived together in El Paso, Texas, in a borrowed cabin near Port Angeles, Washington, and in Tucson, Arizona. National Book Awards 1977". National Book Foundation. Archived from the original on October 24, 2018 . Retrieved June 3, 2022.