By Peter Monaghan Walla Walla, Wash.
On her book covers, the poet and short-story writer Tess Gallagher cuts an impressive figure: Arresting gaze. Dramatic garb. Big hair.
Within those covers, her poetic persona, too, radiates audacity. In one of her early poems, set in Port Angeles, Wash., the fishing and lumber town where Ms. Gallagher grew up, the men say "She’s saucy!" when they learn that she wants to work on the docks, like her father and brother.
"The matter / drove me to wearing / a fedora. Soon, the gowns, the amiable / forgeries," she writes.
In person, Tess Gallagher doesn’t disappoint anyone expecting a singular personality. Paisley jacket, three oversized rings, large earrings, pendant, and brooch all signal that she hasn’t changed much from that brazen girl in Port Angeles, where she still makes her home.
Yet with all her flamboyance, it’s her precise diction, expressiveness, and wit that prove most compelling as she teaches a class here at Whitman College. For the past year, Ms. Gallagher has taught literature and writing at Whitman, as well as a class on her late husband, the short-story writer Raymond Carver.
As one literature class begins, she hands back assignments and says she’ll give a second chance to students who fell short. "The objective here is not for you to do poorly," she says. "It’s for you to do well – so I look like a good teacher."
She has no problem in that regard, her students say. "She just has a command of language that I haven’t had in a teacher before," says Katie Ford, a senior studying English literature and creative writing. "She’s very passionate. And her ear is so trained that in a revision of your work, she can just change one word or turn a line around and make all the difference. And she has an intimacy. You feel let into the world of poetry."
Ms. Gallagher is at Whitman on a one-year visiting professorship, trading the salty mist of Puget Sound for the rolling wheat country that surrounds this liberal-arts institution of 1,300 students. For most of her career, she has devoted herself to her writing, eluding the strictures of workplaces and timetables. "I somehow leaped out of the food chain," she jokes.
But she’s no stranger to the classroom. Since the 1970s, she has taught at several institutions, including Syracuse University, the Universities of Montana and Arizona, and Kirkland College.
She has an ease and generosity of spirit that seem to reassure students. And she expresses delight that they feel free to disagree with her. "I can’t believe I’m paid to do this, because I enjoy it," she says.
The visiting professorship that brought her here was set up with a bequest from Ed Arnold, a long-time Walla Walla Valley resident, who died in 1968. The position usually is filled every second year, or when wheat revenues permit.
Students who have enrolled in Ms. Gallagher’s poetry- and fiction-writing classes, which are restricted to 12 students each semester, are working with one of the best-known poets in the country. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Washington State Governor’s Awards for Poetry. The novelist Joyce Carol Oates has said: "It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher’s poems without being drawn into their mesmerizing rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images."
Ms. Gallagher’s other class this semester is on Raymond Carver. After they became friends in 1978, Carver began to battle his alcoholism, which had contributed to the ruin of his first marriage and had left his business affairs tangled. By 1979, the two were lovers. She sorted out his business problems, and he left his troubled marriage. He also took up writing again, after several years away from it. He and Ms. Gallagher became partners in editing and writing, and he dedicated several of his books to her.
Then, in 1988, when he was only 50, Carver died of cancer, not long after he and Ms. Gallagher had married.
In one poem about their life together and his severe illness, she describes him as a "violin / who threw yourself into my arms / violin asking not to / be broken one more time." In Moon Crossing Bridge (Graywolf Press), her 1992 collection of 60 poems about her grief following Carver’s death, Ms. Gallagher wrote: "With my body’s nearest silk / I cover you in the dream-homage, attend and revive / by attending. I know very little of what to do without you."
The literary critic Judith Kitchen wrote that Moon Crossing Bridge "seems, if anything, to be staving off acceptance – not to indulge in self-pity but to keep something alive and to fend off the knowledge that love must (as even the poems in their essential wisdom admit) now go on, one-sided, with a diminished life of its own."
While she was writing those poems, Ms. Gallagher was locked in a legal battle over Carver’s estate with his first wife, who disputed her claims to the publishing rights of his work. Ms. Gallagher eventually prevailed.
"Nobody here asked me to teach Ray," Ms. Gallagher reflects after one class session. As she understood administrators’ wishes, she says, "they just wanted the students to have exposure to me." But she decided that with Moon Crossing Bridge well behind her, she was ready to talk about Carver’s work and her role in it. "I asked myself to do this," she says. "It’s very restorative to teach about Ray."
She adds: "I decided I’d like to do something that nobody else could do the way I’d do it . . . . I don’t just teach it as a bystander. I teach it as a writer and companion."
Her approach to the Carver material certainly is distinctive. She provides students with information even Carver scholars wouldn’t have known.
For example, she asked students in one class to compare three published versions of the Carver story "So Much Water So Close to Home." Two had been abridged by editors, and the other one, in the 1988 collection, Where I’m Calling From , had not. It ran to 24 pages of text; the version in the well-known 1977 volume, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love filled only seven pages.
The story tells of four men whose fishing weekend begins with the discovery of a woman’s body in a river. They go ahead with their plans despite the grim discovery, fishing and carousing close to the naked corpse. Carver hints at unexplored emotions in the four friends, but his focus is on the wife’s reaction after one of the men returns home and she hears of the dead woman and her husband’s actions: She dies a little, too.
In the 24-page version of the story – which Mr. Carver preferred, Ms. Gallagher says – he explores this subject in depth. When her husband begins to fondle her in bed, the wife, who narrates, says, "I turned slightly and then moved my legs." The edited version reads: "I turned and opened my legs."
Ms. Gallagher says she was "livid" when she learned that an editor had recast the story, leaving out Carver’s detailed evocation of the woman’s emotions. Carver himself was "ashamed of what happened," she recalls, but was too depleted by his fight with alcoholism to object to the editing. "He was battling for his psychological life," she tells her students.
No biography of the short-story writer has yet appeared, and so Carver scholars are keen to hear such insights. James Maxfield, a professor of English here whose scholarship includes Carver’s work, has sat in on the class.
"I was particularly interested to find out how editing affected his early work," he says. The information puts Carver’s early reputation as "minimalistic" in a different light, he says.
Also helpful have been details about how Ms. Gallagher contributed to her husband’s work. For example, Dr. Maxfield has learned that in the story "A Small Good Thing," Carver was able to depict bakery work so authentically because Ms. Gallagher had told him in detail of working in a bakery herself.
Many of the students in the Carver class are long-time fans of his work, she notes. "There’s a sort of touching of the hem that is happening."
Above all, though, Ms. Gallagher uses Carver’s stories to help her students understand the craft of writing. She relates facts from her life with Carver that he decided to "barnacle on" to his stories, as she puts it, to show students "that writers are drawing from the normal things that are happening around them – that their stories are not elsewhere."
Exactly how this theory plays out in Ms. Gallagher’s creative-writing class, only she and her 12 students know. She closely guards their sessions from intrusions that might restrict the students’ willingness to open up in their writing.
"I try to get them out of just the personal regurgitation of their troubles," she says. "That’s not going to be interesting. They have to find corollaries. They have to find metaphors. They have to build an approach that will interest somebody."
She compares her students’ successes in writing to eggs hatching. "Throughout the term there are little pecking noises I hear. Then all of a sudden there’s a gigantic scrawny beak and neck sticking out, and somebody has written something that has just knocked us off our chairs."
Her metaphor moves her to a gust of laughter.
She encourages some students to work in other areas of literature, such as translation. "There are many important things that writers can do that are not necessarily writing the original poem," she says.
An unusual program at Whitman gives Ms. Gallagher, too, the opportunity to tap into a different kind of creativity. She is working with students in a books-arts program, taught by an artist, Keiko Hara, to create a hand-bound edition of one of her stories.
Teaching here, whether about poetry or about Raymond Carver, has been all the more enjoyable because of a certain aspect of Pacific Northwest life, Ms. Gallagher says.
"It’s a place where you can talk about things that elsewhere might embarrass people," she says. "On the East Coast, I wouldn’t be as comfortable talking about spirit or soul. Here, it’s not handled in any heavy-handed, judgmental, or even religious fashion. It’s just that, well, we have these feelings about one’s presence in the world, and we have those words, and we’re always trying to find out what they mean."
"My work is very human-spirit centered, and it’s very helpful to be in this kind of climate."
That may stem from the region’s history, she speculates, smiling as she turns the thought over in her mind: "It is pioneer country. I think the people who came here first believed God got them here."