"Call Me If You Need Me" by Raymond Carver

1.7.22

“Call Me If You Need Me”

Raymond Carver was my true entrance into the genre of short stories. I tried to emulate him for a long time. The sparseness of his work, totally stripped down, intrigued me. It’s now widely understood that his editor, Gordon Lish, considerably reworked many of Carver’s stories. It can be eye-opening if you compare the drafts and finished products side-by-side. “Call Me If You Need Me” is a story that was gathered into a collection of the same name, a gathering of “loose” works. The story is defined in the book as uncollected.

I haven’t read Carver in a long time. He’s brilliant. He also has a legacy at Syracuse, one of the many writers who taught there. I used to walk by his old house almost every day on my way to and from school. We heard stories of how he was before he quit drinking.

I always felt a connection to him because I’d also grown up in the Pacific Northwest, mostly poor, raised by a single mom and mostly absent dad, careening from school to school. …