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A Gleaming in the Darkness (Kim Edwards); When Children Are Present (Bo Caldwell); A Box of Rocks (Tess Gallagher); When Dogs Bark (Charles W. Harvey); Upstate (April Stevens); From the Mayseh Book (Joseph Skibell); Act of Love (Sharon Butala); The Woman in the Woods (Ann Joslin Williams); Angel in the Nursery (Terence Cannon); Skyway (Janet Steen); Independence (Tyron Baldwin); Virtue (Annick Smith); ... Read more

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This book pays tribute to the literary relationship, mutuality of influence, and companionship of writers Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver, a relationship cut short by Carver's death in 1988. Soul Barnacles is both literary history and love story, chronicling the way a surviving partner is able to carry forward the life and work of her spouse, while pursuing her own life and literary endeavors.
In essays, letters, and interviews written after her husband's untimely death, Gallagher explores 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 Gallagher's introductions to Carver's posthumous collections.
The next section focuses primarily on Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," a film based on Carver's short stories, and provides a rare, quietly dramatic look a poet in Hollywood, determined to see the dignified transformation of one art form into another. The collection concludes with interviews that touch upon the poet's grieving process, the solitude and intensity of a writer's life, and the ways in which her relationship to Carver has continued to evolve, even after death.
Tess Gallagher's poetry collections include Portable Kisses, Instructions to the Double, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Willingly. She is also author of short-story collections At the Owl Woman Saloon and The Lover of Horses and the essay collection A Concert of Tenses.
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Customer Reviews (1)

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 volume for those who love Carver's work.

I could, and maybe should, stop with that reverence, but I'd be remiss if I left out a few words of criticism..."Soul Barnacles" also includes a travelogue written by Tess during her visit to Europe with Ray in 1987.There's some nice photos included and it's interesting to hear Ray turning down drinks in their escapades, but even though Carver had a hand in editing the first published version, the read is rather flat.By the same token, Part 2 of the book is dedicated to writings and personal letters surrounding the making and release of "Short Cuts," the Robert Altman movie of a handful of Carver's stories.Tess seems to have been highly involved as a consultant, and is a staunch defender of Altman's reinterpretation of Carver's writings in the face of criticism and poor box office numbers.But this section can be quite repetitive, such as with Tess' recurrent critique of women as "sexual playthings" in America.It's in this role as discussant and critic that Gallagher's writing tends to fall flat, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Part 3, where several interviews of Tess, mostly surrounding her published books "Moon Crossing Bridge" and "Portable Kisses," are collected.Students of literary criticism and fans of Gallagher's writing may very well find something of value here, but Tess's discussion of her own writing tends towards the high-brow, is repetitive (e.g., recounting on several occasions how she chose the title "Mood Crossing Bridge") and her use of invented hyphenated words (what she calls "word trains") and affection for words ending in "ness" (e.g., "aliveness, "blessedness," "place-ness," "not-coming-backness," etc., etc.) can be distracting.In fact, although we learn throughout "Soul Barnacles" that Tess and Ray reciprocally edited each other's writing (to the point that her influence on Carver's later writing was probably as profound as Gordon Lish's on "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"), Gallagher's writing contains so much more imagery and metaphor than Carver's.As a result, it's quite likely that Carver fans aren't Gallagher-the-writer's fans, and therefore haven't even read "Moon Crossing Bridge," so this section seems expendable.And in general, when Gallagher strays from actually writing about Ray, she has the tendency to drift into obscurity and she often constructs bulky metaphors that seem to take away from the actual thing, in such stark contrast to Ray's "guileless" words.

But of course the reality is that "Soul Barnacles" isn't just Gallagher going through Ray's attic searching for Carver memories to dole out, but a book by Tess that focuses on her own life with, and especially after, Ray.That life includes mourning and moving on, and she does that honestly and in her own voice as an artist.The picture of Tess at Ray's gravesite in her eulogy published in Granta ("Raymond Carver, 1938 to 1988"), along with "Soul Barnacles" as a whole, show us how and how much Tess loved Ray, so we can hardly fault her for that.And the actual bits that she does gives us from her and Ray's attic are gifts, and well worth the price of admission.
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contains poetry and works of fiction with support from the Ohio Arts Council ... Read more

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Essays and interviews by the excellent American poet. "A poem is a thing remembered," she says. ... Read more