To Write and Keep Kind; Interview with Tess Gallagher

ce but hey i'll sit at number of all that simple questions is where the first meet ray reactors need rain well and then unknown first time in dallas texas and it was sunday scott france riders were there in fact he met richard ford they're the same time that he

met me and he was very fragile you just to stop thinking about five months before and he read a story and called a fly out you dance and i was just thinking to myself as i heard him read this little lanes you right here now and he was very fragile and he could just barely stand the fair and front of an audience it hadn't appeared i think this is he stopped drinking and his voice was very small and he unfolded it you know i'd looked kept looking at the audience to see if they were still there or not they've left you know at some point we look down almost own and that we ate together in these big community features that put on force they're quite nice nice luxury as hums and i kept following around and beyond ai knows he's taking now a lot of the gravy

and biscuits in family hands things like this where you from and he said initially grew up in eastern washington yeah can talk about and living in california as a bit where are you people from and he said that live from arkansas i thought well that explains away you're eating as a ny people from missouri as in the ozarks over neighbors and so that so that you know we got on he would be up early in the morning so that we'd have breakfast together there in the summer that was about a week we were there i didn't really realize that you wanted to get well there was a long line to cross country and the courts here i went on out to be met again in the end not el paso after this initial meeting in dallas and that was certain the summer was probably august this old seventy eight on and down really just

to again really liked being around one another hack and are by that time he was a lawyer with his first wife and they had been separated for some months and so it was so when a possible to think to heck having a good close friendship starting there aren't so i about went to mexico ensemble fights with them and undoubtedly just met his from the people that he would be their teaching with there and i went back to west coast because i had read a cabinet discovery day and i was on the guggenheim grant night in one of the dislodged us buddy hello things probably settle out from that marriage gray cotton's been a twenty year marriage and i didn't want to interfere in and what might have to settle out their stockpile just go home to my writing and will keep in touch and see how this develops now so he rewrote it every day we called on most every day and he came out here to port angeles a couple times he came at

thanksgiving with all thanksgiving we met and seven sisko actually became before that and again reading here so it began to be a backup fourth kind of thing and then he came to christmas is his allies saudi the homeless man i ran the house in and i want to get on the plane is many years and so i did i just decided that you know that that proximity was the biggest part of a full on our relationship and that i was the one who was portable at that point says i didn't have a job and i just well be in el paso with him he really needed some money and done and it just it just was what i wanted to do more only illuminated well as if i i didn't see him drunk ever see it in an

old when he was a recovering alcoholic and on some of the history i have of it is what jerry he's told me and what franzen and during that time had told me long course on my own history was it had its own an alcoholic examples and then my father was a drinker and my second husband so alone i i knew what it was like and so i was caught close to what he had been through that identified an exclusive on other character in one cell the egg he i think that did the drinking was happening just at getting very bad write about a time when that first book of his swiss were published or will you please be quiet please and he was hospitalized three times and nearly died and he hits of the bottom and hit the bottom and hit the bottom

and he had been bankrupt us three times he had no lost homes lost jobs now the family structure completely fall apart as he describes it and fires he says you know the children had somehow got into the driver's seat and then save us he and his wife had had this drinking problem which they he ultimately came to terms with both of them did get out of it but i think that period of the drinking was about ten years for him a very hard drinking and he was dying and they told him he was dying and he went to a place called duffy's which is signed in california and now as a dry out of sochi where they gave you will with the call hummers slow shot glass is full of whiskey and they get into you one every hour in one every two hours and then it does gradually bring you down because you can go into deep teasing and seizures and that kind of thing

i'd leave you really did have a seizure in the doctor's office one time and he told me about that cities had been quite frightened to have of going into into that night because one thing that stops alcoholics i'm trying to go office that they're frightened of those things i generally they have to have a you know it's as i said hit baja him before they will go in free trade but he didn't work for him completely that beijing had relapses an actor duffy's he had a relapse and then he took himself off to this place which she talks about in the store a chef's house is a low a little house there in california near the winner the water in your arcade or somebody else will know the real detachment anyway it bothers house in and went there to to get sober on his own as a tv did go to alcoholics anonymous oh for help but sometimes he was drunk even when he went he said

so that he just had such a struggle larry played bingo the eldest time on his hands didn't know what to do with the last one things that happen alcoholics when they come off the blues you know it's a fine horse as a whole day i think it was something to do in it at the time but by the time i met him he was just beginning to be able to be out in public and with some ease he still was not answering the telephone he didn't know how to do things just you know that we would take for granted like writing out the bill to pay for the gas and when i arrived the gas man was there and the next day to turn off the gas and i said do you really have to do that he says yeah listen as invaders the last two months we really have to do it i said wow ok this bill was just resist urine as they were out of the snow have his gas so i

took over the bills and just really we're trying to teach him just those orderly things about living a life in which people are pursuing and i make a mess at all pfizer know once you get your date as the telephone today the graduate would build up roll away from this kind of fugitive existence that he had been living as an alcoholic do you do how you handle is there and then you hear your imagination or you feel here felt that really i think he knew he needed help i need to tell somebody steady i was terry ryan's day and i did help him and that it wasn't i wasn't bossier anything that i i didn't know that i was not going to carry his loan that

that is his responsibility and that we were going to be with each other as adults in and that i was going to be a writer and so's he gone well and it's when i met him he was not about writing he had not written for about a year and a half and he said i don't know five or will rise again and i do believe he would but the main thing it then was getting him well you know because it isn't just stopping drinking doesn't mean that you're immediately out of its own right some alcoholics on what they call a dry drunks for years are always wanting alcohol still unwilling to live their alcoholic on the it's kind of life where you're having previously why you think he can it work that i didn't relate to him just as an

alcoholic know i had it i knew that that was that was the problem area and sinead had enough experience that i knew i could at least recover from it because i had been in that zone as a child and and also as an adult and up and down that now goods the experience isn't totally and i mean i think that you know going through hearts hard day experiences doesn't give you a kind of emotional fiber and down and i i i didn't feel that he was on his way out of it i felt strongly his view he's gonna make it ends i can make a difference here and i i am intended for that to happen i was scared you know is not exactly assured that you know the three time bankruptcy and then recovering from alcohol that there were

things you do you do when a life i think it's take chances are you attracted can still feel you have lived if you only live on the face i'm the street now and it didn't interest me to lose that by time i get here so simmons enjoyment are in anything that was going on i just sit a celebration of the day i'm in you you just still licking about amending enthusiastic you know about a mountain an hour or hour on the way the sky looked hour or something we were talking about how something we might do on the ages had a kind of them to the excellent excellent acceleration six nominations thats the word at about his feeling for life if you love stories

that he told me a lot of them and i told him my stories are business awards and a feeling there was a feeling about ray our own for a real interior of kindness that had been misused in some ways before i had come come close to it and i thought oh i just want a check that riot night is when i see a china that's it's what i want it that is completely silly just a minute he assesses that you say sending that the things i love about ringer and then i just start with that and just in one stanza just a thing the things that i love about radio word especially in a kind of kindness and generosity that i i felt there was a kindness and generosity and so for

instance that the more big and tall and so yeah i think it are our backgrounds were all so similar and that there is a current running through that we both had come from working class families and the kind of recognition of beginnings and we were both those at turning places in our lives i had this grant is served and grandson the term it was giving me my chance to be on the teaching for a while and he had his first job and he was turning the corner on this drinking so it was a place of beginnings and he was he was leaving behind a lot of fellow really know hardships that you know he wanted to recover from that maybe the briefly speaking

here on their background well i was so married to the first time very young are twenty one years old i had known is my first love was eighteen mini mac and down he was sun aeronautical engineer tim see washington did not drink and i was watching very carefully in those days and was trying to live the careful you know life and anti he was an only child and eight and a very intelligent interesting man with a lot of dreams ultimately he ended up in the vietnam war it became a pilot and so that was really it down the hardship that we went through was that war he did come home alone but came home mucha

disillusioned by what he had seen this thing which he loved flight is two plus jason napalm in bomb another country so that marriage broke up home and i went back to school going back to receive washington got in and they ultimately went on to get an mfa at university of iowa the writer's workshop and i had been there about a year when i met the man to be my second husband who might at first class that can't recall that anyway the marriage took place the second year that i i was there and he was a poet and a very talented pool it was writing was well i've called that are rational or how was very hidden and recess to an end and very interesting

not available as always say ray sponsor even my own are mostly on but there and that marriage only lasted as a going thing for about two years ago although the official record wasn't from for about four years we did teach together and done and have made a good try at a life together but the young the problems was that the drinking really are dismayed and finally an impossible we do have this two marriages that helped you in accommodating to ray that's why i have to think for a while i don't know that i'd really done that kindness assessment to announce aren't going to sort of in it and living very intuitively just a sigh and in my mind were probably

ah i guess a sling which i said about that i can recover and then i don't have to be afraid of the experiences and people that attracts me i think as one for one thing and in that i felt i have the stamina and the energy that network would ever happen might require an hour so then you can explore if you're if you're frightened than you not going to go in there and i think i believe as the plot you know that you you do have to be curious and you do have going to the difficult places and so you see that fb