A Poet Who Savors the Elegance of Simplicity

Like the working-class women in her first book of short stories, “The Lover of Horses” (Harper & Row: $16.95), poet Tess Gallagher has weathered some rough times.

The oldest of five children of an alcoholic longshoreman and logger, Gallagher grew up in a family where money was scarce but quarrels were plentiful. She was “a child with responsibilities” to her younger brothers and sister, and reading was “a stolen pleasure . . . it wasn’t an authentic activity” in her parents’ eyes, Gallagher said.

But, she added in a recent interview, while she still carries many troubled memories from those formative years, she also feels strong affection for her siblings and parents.

A lively woman who laughs often and likes to dress dramatically in silk and satin clothes, Gallagher, 43, draws on her childhood experiences in her writing. Some of her strongest poems play on her feelings toward her father, who could be alternately tender and abusive. By the time he died in 1982, she said, they had “reached an understanding” of each other, and a “loving forgiveness” existed between them.

In Close Touch

Today, Gallagher stays in close touch with her 72-year-old mother, Georgia Bond, who often serves up late-afternoon cake and tea for “Threasie” (before her first marriage, Gallagher’s full name was Theresa Bond) and relates stories about the family and the neighborhood. Sometimes those stories work their way, in transmuted form, into Gallagher’s poetry and fiction.

“That’s how fiction really occurs,” Gallagher said, “you build something new out of what’s already given.”

With three collections of poetry (“Instructions to the Double,” “Under Stars” and “Willingly,” all through Graywolf Press) published to considerable acclaim in the last 10 years, Gallagher is no novice at writing. She’s been called a refreshingly “confident, radiant and strong” writer by Pulitzer prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer. She won a large Guggenheim grant in 1978, and the poetry reading fees and teaching stipends she’s commanded have been sizeable enough to enable her to build a spectacular home in Port Angeles four years ago.

Yet, because Gallagher is relatively inexperienced at fiction, she’s a little nervous about how her stories will be received. However, “The Lover” has already had a few major reviews, which, while they haven’t been unqualified raves, have been positive. Recently the New York Times Sunday Book Review termed Gallagher “an excellent writer of prose who savors the elegance of simplicity . . . whose stories resonate and linger.” Publishers Weekly called the new stories “rewarding reading from a gifted writer,” and in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Elizabeth Tallent wrote that “in Gallagher’s best stories, the ambiguities are dealt with a fine hand.”

Muted Sound of Waves

Most of Gallagher’s writing takes place in Sky House, the dream house she helped design, which sits near the top of a hill facing the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Inside, a multitude of windows lets light into the aerie. In every room, one can hear the muted sound of waves crashing on the beach that’s a steep five-minute walk away.

Here, Gallagher said, “the water is like a current through your days,” and she relates to this current “the way a bird dips into water, takes a drink and looks up . . . I’m always dipping my bill and looking and savoring at the same time, and not really aware of it. I can write just about anywhere, but I feel very good here.”

Gallagher was born and raised in Port Angeles. As an adult, she’s left the Olympic Peninsula often--to study at the University of Washington in Seattle, to attend the University of Iowa’s writers program in Iowa City, to teach and travel--but she always comes back for part of each year. When she goes elsewhere, even for short intervals, she feels like a ship that’s “always pointed on a course of return to this town and its waters,” she wrote in a 1981 essay called “My Father’s Love Letters.”

Most years Gallagher teaches poetry writing classes from September to Christmas at New York’s Syracuse University, where she’s been employed since 1980 and is now a full professor. This year, however, she’s staying home to recover from surgery performed in March and to write her first novel, a still untitled work for which she has a contract with Harper and Row.

Gallagher also recently finished the manuscript of a book of essays, “A Concert of Tenses,” due to be published in mid-November through the University of Michigan’s prestigious “Poets on Poetry” series. In addition, she’s getting “hungry to write poems again,” she said. “I think that has todo with appetite. There’s appetite in art, just like there’s appetite in anything else.”

The novel, she said, is “a real safari for me” because of its length. So far she’s written only a few chapters and said she feels too “superstitious” to talk about them. She relented enough to say her new work is an expansion of the title story of “The Lover of Horses,” a surrealistic tale about a young woman whose great-grandfather could “whisper” horses to follow him.

That story is markedly different from the 11 other stories in “The Lover,” which focus on contemporary people who live ordinary lives, with jobs and spouses and private heartaches they frequently don’t know how to assuage. Words aren’t wasted in these pieces, just as words aren’t wasted in works by the minimalist writers now in vogue in literary circles. But Gallagher said she doesn’t want to be linked too closely with the minimalists, particularly since she’s had a seven-year relationship with one of the most famous of that group, Raymond Carver.

Opposite Sides of Town

“I’m hoping not to be connected too clearly” to Carver, Gallagher said. “My editor really wanted me to guard against that. In fact, I had dedicated the book to Raymond Carver, and he asked me just to dedicate it to Ray. As if there were any other Ray,” she added, laughing.

During the day, the two writers work in separate houses on opposite sides of town, but they get together every evening to share work, talk and relax. Married twice before (to Larry Gallagher, who now works in federally subsidized housing for the elderly, and to poet Michael Burkard), Gallagher said her present relationship with Carver allows her more room for “my development as a writer and person.”

“I think you could live several lifetimes and not hit it so well,” she said. She and Carver have talked about marriage, she added, but “I think the whole institution of marriage is fraught with a history of role misconception. Maybe it’s better to keep those things clearer by not taking on that institution. I have a fear of marriage.”

Years ago, Gallagher said, she also made a conscious decision not to have children, because she wanted to pursue “an artist’s life . . . I think women who do have children have a much harder time finding calm, finding space within which to collect themselves. Women have trouble taking time off from those responsibilities, because we have been used to keeping the show going. To say, ‘I’m sorry, but the show has to go on without me’ ” can be hard, she said.

Subjects Are Never Scarce

Subjects for her stories and poems have never been scarce, Gallagher said. Like “Ginny,” the central character in “Turpentine” (one of the stories in the new collection), Gallagher often encounters strangers who “want to give me their stories, and they don’t even know I’m a writer. I don’t know why that is,” but she finds the phenomenon “very lucky,” she said.

But, unlike the woman at the heart of another story, “The Wimp,” Gallagher said she doesn’t usually spill her own history to strangers. “There are only a few people that I really talk to. I don’t think I confess too much. I think the writing is my place for that--in disguises, in various disguises,” she said.

Many of her fictional characters are older women. In “Bad Company,” a Mrs. Herbert takes flowers to her husband’s grave. There, through encounters with another, much younger cemetery visitor, the old woman slowly realizes how badly she and her husband treated each other: “And then it came to her, the thought that she had been bad company to him, had even denied him her company, going and coming from the house . . . keeping house like a jailer . . .”

She wants to write more stories about people like Mrs. Herbert, Gallagher said. “This woman had been very self-righteous, and all of a sudden the table is turned, and she has a moment of recognition . . . that she lost her husband twice,” both before and after his death.

Having become “really involved” with her character, Gallagher said, she found it “chilling . . . just to feel that loss, just to acknowledge that loss, and express the consciousness that can suddenly come” from such self-knowledge.