thisnewday (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisnewday) wrote2025-01-14 01:05 pm
thisnewday) wrote2025-01-14 01:05 pm
A Moment in Time
For just a brief moment, the magic was here, up on The Hill, in The 'Cuse.
It was 1982 when Tobias Wolff came to teach at Syracuse University and his arrival coincided with the tenures of Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher.
Wolff had been hired to teach in the creative writing program--then chaired by Gallagher, Carver's SO--and Carver himself was teaching English. And drinking and writing and dying.
Well, he'd stopped drinking by that time. But he was still writing. And dying. Both of which can be slow, painful processes--at least in my experience.
Anyway, fast forward a few years, and I'd read all of Wolff's books and all of Carver's. As well as Tess Gallagher's poetry and whatever memoirs and biographies had been written by and about them in the meantime.
By then I'd applied, and failed to gain admission to, the creative writing program which Gallagher had directed and the two men had taught in.
I think Wolff was still there, not having left for an endowed professorship at USC until 1997.
But Gallagher and Carver had long since departed for Port Angeles where Carver died of lung cancer just weeks after marrying Tess.
Like I said, writing is a tough gig. Especially when underpinned by lethal volumes of alcohol and cigarettes. And I can also relate to the poet finding love when it was, by some measures, simply too late.
Although, sadly, for my own life's love, there was no "Moon Crossing Bridge" to be found among the pages I'd written for and about her...
LPK
Dreamwidth/LJ
1.14.2025
It was 1982 when Tobias Wolff came to teach at Syracuse University and his arrival coincided with the tenures of Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher.
Wolff had been hired to teach in the creative writing program--then chaired by Gallagher, Carver's SO--and Carver himself was teaching English. And drinking and writing and dying.
Well, he'd stopped drinking by that time. But he was still writing. And dying. Both of which can be slow, painful processes--at least in my experience.
Anyway, fast forward a few years, and I'd read all of Wolff's books and all of Carver's. As well as Tess Gallagher's poetry and whatever memoirs and biographies had been written by and about them in the meantime.
By then I'd applied, and failed to gain admission to, the creative writing program which Gallagher had directed and the two men had taught in.
I think Wolff was still there, not having left for an endowed professorship at USC until 1997.
But Gallagher and Carver had long since departed for Port Angeles where Carver died of lung cancer just weeks after marrying Tess.
Like I said, writing is a tough gig. Especially when underpinned by lethal volumes of alcohol and cigarettes. And I can also relate to the poet finding love when it was, by some measures, simply too late.
Although, sadly, for my own life's love, there was no "Moon Crossing Bridge" to be found among the pages I'd written for and about her...
LPK
Dreamwidth/LJ
1.14.2025