Poet’s Works Derived From Her Own Past

Poet Tess Gallagher came to her writing life from a childhood thick with loggers and a logging family lifestyle and, like she advises writing students, she writes what she knows.

Her mother worked choker setters and the steel cables used to deck the huge trees that suck the incessant rains from the Olympic Peninsula; her father ran the chainsaw. On Saturday afternoons, they would go to Port Angeles to shop and then wait for her father while he drank in “beer joints,” so named by Tess and her three brothers.

Gallagher would sit quietly in the car and watch other loggers and fishermen entering and leaving the beer joints, and other wives and children waiting in other cars for their men. “I noticed what they carried, how they walked, their gestures as they looked into store windows,” Gallagher writes in an essay titled “My Father’s Love Letters.”

Every hour or so her mother would send her on a round of the taverns to look in windows for her father. “I would peck on the windows and the barmaid would shake her head ‘no’ or motion down the dim aisle of faces to where my father would be sitting on his stool, forgetting, forgetting us all for awhile.”

Like “My Father’s Love Letters,” the opening essay in Gallagher’s book “A Concert of Tenses,” much of her work hearkens to her past.

Gallagher will read from her poetry and essays Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Whitworth College Campus Center as part of the Redmond Readings series. A reception and book-signing follow.

For nearly her whole life, Gallagher has written poetry. Now, though, interspersed with her own writing are teaching and managing the work of her husband, the late short-story writer Raymond Carver. This year she is teaching poetry and a class in Carver’s writings at Whitman College in Walla Walla as the Edward F. Arnold Visiting Professor in English; she will be poet-in-residence at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania next spring.

A grant to spend about a month this summer in Ireland writing in a cottage on the same lake where she wrote “Under Stars” is pending. The Lyndhurst Prize she won in 1993 included a three-year stipend, which allowed her to write a short-story collection, “At the Owl Woman Saloon.” The book will be published in September by Scribner.

While Gallagher’s poetry has earned her recognition and awards throughout her life, there’s no doubt that her relationship with the internationally known Carver vaulted her to a different level of attention. Now, even nine years after his death, she’s as involved with Carver’s writing as she is with her own. “I deal with Ray’s writing every day,” she said in a phone interview from Walla Walla last week.

“There is a book coming out in Italy of Ray’s teaching and there are always rights matters I have to do. He’s not a novelist, but Ray’s very popular. His writing is not a big money earner, but there is steady interest in him and that’s what I try to support. Critics are still doing papers on him, and since I teach a class on Ray at Whitman - Behind the Scenes with Raymond Carver - he’s with me every day.”

Gallagher contributed to the making of the 1993 Robert Altman film “Short Cuts,” which is based on Carver’s stories, and to a documentary about the filming of “Short Cuts.” And she contributed to the introduction to “All of Us: The Collected Poems of Raymond Carver” published in Great Britain last year.

The cadence of her life suits her, though. “I feel very lucky. I had a wonderful period of writing (the new book) because I feel fine about being deep into teaching, and because I have a vocation I can be in and feel fulfilled and not feel cheated. I had dreamed that I would sit and read poems (here in Walla Walla) and catch up, but that’s not the case. There are people in front of me every day.”

Like many writing teachers, Gallagher tells her students to write what they know. “My father was a logger, my brother is a logger and my mother worked in logging. There are two logging stories in my new book,” she says.

Her favorite story in the book is “My Gun,” about a widow - “everyone keeps telling her she needs a gun,” Gallagher says. “The story is what they say to her and her reaction to it. I wouldn’t own a gun but it’s the American icon, and instead of not talking about it, we should look seriously at the fact we have people using guns in destructive ways.”

And, her work speaks to regionalism, to her childhood in the Northwest. Although she left the region for a while and still spends long periods elsewhere teaching and writing, her home - named Sky House - is in Port Angeles.

Gallagher organized “At the Owl Woman Saloon” around a Western theme, specifically the saloon, an Americanism for the French salon as a gathering place. Business was conducted and stories were told in old-time saloons; Native Americans weren’t allowed nor were women - unless they were “working women.”

“In my book, everyone gets to come into the saloon,” Gallagher says. “This book is a storytelling saloon. I hope you go into my book one way and come out another; that it touches your life and makes you think you are alive.”

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MEMO: Poet Tess Gallagher will read from her work Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Whitworth College Campus Center. The reading is free.