The Raymond Carver Review ISSUE FIVE/SIX SPECIAL FEATURE ON JAMES CARVER WINTER 2016/SPRING 2017 Issue 5/6, Special Feature on James Carver, presents an excerpt from Raymond Carver Remembered by His Brother James. This memoir by Raymond Carver’s younger brother and only sibling offers significant details and vignettes of Raymond Carver’s childhood and early adult life; the memoir is accompanying by a review essay, “Raymond Carver and Biography,” from Sandra Lee Kleppe, Director of the International Raymond Carver Society. Issue 5/6 includes five peer-reviewed essays: Taylor Johnston’s “‘Inside anything’: The Evacuation of Commodified Space in Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral’” examines how the decomodified experience of co-drawing a cathedral “relocates the act of reading from the entrapments of the consumer apparatus to symbolic indeterminacy”; Madeleine Stein’s “Keeping Our Eyes Closed: Unsustainable Transformation in Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral,’” uses lenses of narrative distance and gender relations to analyze the metaphorically blind narrator’s transformative interaction; In “‘Kill who?’: Forgiving the Immigrants in Raymond Carver’s ‘Sixty Acres,’” Ann Olson reviews the conflict between Yakama tribesman Lee Waite and trespassing white duck- hunters as a re-enactment of historical complexities; Cameron Cushing’s “The Negative Pastoral in Raymond Carver’s “The Compartment” locates Myers’ decision not to meet with his estranged son in Strasbourg in an interstitial space between Terry Gifford’s concept of an external “contextual pastoral” and Martin Scofield’s concept of an internal “negative pastoral”; and Jonathan Pountney’s “Raymond Carver and Haruki Murakami: Literary Influence in Late- Capitalism” considers how Murakami’s acceptance of Carver’s influence rests in a corresponding desire to depict a societal dislocation tied to the mass-commodification of the late-twentieth century labor markets in America and Japan. Table of Contents Introduction Robert Miltner, Kent State University at Stark News Robert Miltner, Kent State University at Stark Special Feature: James Carver Raymond Carver and Biography Sandra Lee Kleppe, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences Excerpt from Raymond Carver Remembered by His Brother James James Carver Peer Reviewed Essays “Inside anything”: The Evacuation of Commodified Space in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” Taylor Johnston, University of California Berkeley Keeping Our Eyes Closed: Unsustainable Transformation in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” Madeleine Stein, New York University “Kill who?”: Forgiving the Immigrants in Raymond Carver’s “Sixty Acres” Ann Olson, Heritage University The Negative Pastoral in Raymond Carver’s “The Compartment” Cameron Cushing, University of Idaho Raymond Carver and Haruki Murakami: Literary Influence in Late-Capitalism Jonathan Pountney, University of Manchester, UK Contributors The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 News The Raymond Carver Review: Redesigning and Updating Website Beginning with its next issue, The Raymond Carver Review will be hosted on a website at St. Jerome’s University/Waterloo University in Ontario, Canada. Dr. Chad Wriglesworth, Associate Professor of English, for St. Jerome’s University/Waterloo University, has secured a university grant to redesigned the RCR as a fully digital, annual journal, housed on the server of St. Jerome’s University/Waterloo University’s Department of English. The Raymond Carver Review would like to thank both Dr.Scott Kline, Vice President Academic and Dean, and Dr. Tristanne Connolly, Associate Professor and Chair of English, for their support. As a result, The Raymond Carver Review will transition into an annual digital journal, utilizing an online submission manager, and linking more closely with the International Raymond Carver Society, which is directed by Dr. Sandra Lee Kleppe, Professor of English, at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. Beginning with the next issue (RCR 7), the editors will include Robert Miltner, founding editor and representative for Kent State University Stark; Chad Wriglesworth, associate editor and representative for St. Jerome’s University/Waterloo University; associate editor Molly Fuller, PhD Teaching Fellow in Literature at Kent State University; associate editor Kristen Lillvis, Associate Professor of English at Marshall University; associate editor Libe García Zarranz, Trudeau Scholar and Supervisor, Magdalen College, Cambridge University, UK. These changes represents a major development for the RCR as it moves into its second decade as a scholarly journal. New Editorial Board Members Named Concurrent with the re-launch of the RCR as a digital annual, the journal will expand from two co- editors to an editorial team. The Raymond Carver Review welcomes four new editorial board members, beginning with this issue. By expanding its editorial board, the RCR supports emerging academics and Carver scholars. Josef Benson, Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin Parkside, is no stranger to the RCR: his essay “Masculinity as Homosocial Enactment in Three Stories by Raymond Carver” was included in RCR 2, the special issue on Carver and Feminism, guest edited by Claire Fabre-Clark and Libe 4 The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 García Zarranz; and his essay, “Ralph Whiteman as White Construction in ‘Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?’” was included in RCR 4. John Estes is Director of the Undergraduate Writing Program at the University of Alabama, where he teaches poetry and fiction. He is the author several books, including Kingdom Come (C&R Press) and Sure Extinction (Elixer Press); his chapbook, Swerve, was selected by C. K. Williams for the National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. Lin Tian is a lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages at Xiangtan University, Hunan, China where she is writing a thesis on the influence of Raymond Carver on contemporary Chinese writers. Lin Tian presented “Carver in China” in a panel sponsored by International Raymond Carver Society at the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco in May 2016. Molly Fuller, who served as Assistant Guest Editor on this issue, is a PhD Teaching Fellow in Literature at Kent State University and is working on a dissertation on literature and social justice. She has published on Zora Neal Hurston in Revista Atenea; on N. Scott Momaday in essay collection Ekphrasis in American Poetry; and her essay, “Intentionality and Narrative Thrust in the Beginners Version of “Why Don’t You Dance?” was included in RCR 4. Fuller is co-editor of Community Boundaries and Border Crossings: Critical Essays on Ethnic Women Writers (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Dedication This issue is dedicated to Swiss independent scholar Vasiliki “Vickie” Fachard who has retired to spend more time with her family and grandchildren. I have had the distinct pleasure of working with Vickie as co-editors for issues three and four of The Raymond Carver Review; during that same period, we co-edited the collection Not Far From Here: The Paris Symposium on Raymond Carver (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). Before I had the opportunity to co-edit with Vickie, I knew of her talent as an editor from reading (and re-reading) the special issue on Raymond Carver she guest edited for Journal of the Short Story in English. I thought I knew editing until I worked with her on the Carver Review and Not Far From Here. Vickie Fachard introduced me to approaching all editing with a single standard: produce the best issue or book possible from the submitted and selected material. Her macro sense of the project was always evident even while working at the micro level of the sentence, syntax, punctuation; she taught me that it is in the balance between the macro and micro levels that quality editing is achieved. Vickie Fachard edits prose with a poet’s instinct: every word counts, content must dance with form, each project seeks its organic logic. While I worked 5 The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 with her as a co-editor, I now recognize that I was just as equally an apprentice to a master craftsperson. May all scholars be so fortunate to have such a colleague and friend as I have in Vickie Fachard. 6 The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! Raymond Carver and Biography Sandra Lee Kleppe Now that we have entered the “post-truth” age, we can look back on a long line of biographical sources about Raymond Carver (RC)—memoirs, biographies, interviews, photographic and personal essays—with both suspicion of fabricated images and admiration for meticulous documentation.i James Carver’s newly published memoir, Raymond Carver Remembered by his Brother James (London: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd., 2017), attempts to sort through some of the myths surrounding his brother’s life by calling out falsehoods and praising precise fact checking. However, his book is perhaps most valuable for what it adds to the piece of the puzzle of RC’s life. It is especially the childhood years, the ones both close to James’ heart and farthest from public knowledge, that are filled in here with details about the caring environment created by the Carver parents. Contrary to the popular consensus that the Carver boys grew up in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father, James Carver (JC) explains that his parents seldom drank, and when his father did, it was the occasional binge. However, Clevie Raymond Carver did pass on his low tolerance of drink to his son Raymond Clevie Carver, certainly a contributing factor to the writer’s later struggle with the chronic alcoholism that almost killed him in the 1970s. This connection between father and son is explored in an emotional poem RC published in 1968: “Father, I love you,” he writes, “yet how can I say thank you, I who can’t hold my liquor either” (All of Us 7). For readers interested in the biographical details of RC’s life there are several sources with varying degrees of reliability that have accumulated over the years.