Word: carvers
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...standard advice for young writers has always been "Write what you know." Raymond Carver did exactly that. It so happens that for most of his life, what Carver knew best was hardship, both physical and psychological. In his short stories--tight-lipped parables of abjection that became hugely influential in the 1980s--life is a kind of nonstop distress sale. The apartments are shabby; the rent is unpaid; the living room furniture has been carried outside and strewn across the lawn. The people seem dislocated too, even when they're stuck in one place, licking their wounds and drinking hard...
...Carol Sklenicka's judicious, thorough and sometimes harrowing biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (Scribner; 578 pages), we learn just how well Carver knew the worlds he wrote about. He grew up mostly in blue collar Yakima, Wash., where his father worked in a sawmill, changed jobs frequently and drank heavily, patterns he passed on to his son. Carver was barely 18 when he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, but he had already dedicated himself to life as a writer...
Entry 3: Lucia Carver...
Silly as it is, this matters. Because words shape our world. Ms. is not some trendy modern social contraption. It was first spotted on the tombstone of Ms. Sarah Spooner in 1767, the handiwork, perhaps, of a frugal stone carver. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, Mrs. and Miss were deployed to signal age, not marital status. Both were derived from Mistress, a word that, before it put on its feather boa and fishnet stockings, was the title for any woman with authority over a household...
...became sort of a lazy reviewer tool or label. And a number of writers were labeled minimalists. It became somewhat pejorative when it was more widely used some years back, and the person who came up with the more accurate term was Ray Carver, who said, “Well, you’re actually a precisionist!” He included me and a couple others, including Mary Robison, and himself. We’re precisionists. It wasn’t about what we left out, although that can be important too, but that’s the description...