Raymond Carver, Oregon native and one of America’s most influential short story writers, is honored this weekend in his hometown of Clatskanie with poetry readings, workshops, and pie.
The Raymond Carver Writing Festival kicks off at 6 p.m. Friday, May 17, with readings by regional writers, followed by a keynote address by Kim Stafford, former Oregon poet laureate.
Admission to the festival is free. The volunteer-fun festival is funded by grants and operates on a shoestring budget, Brian Bagdonas said. Bagdonas and his wife and business partner, Rebecca Gilbert, are organizing this year’s festival. “We want it to be accessible to as many people as possible,” he said.
“The modest size of this annual festival means attendees have many chances to participate, whether you consider yourself a writer, reader, or an enthusiast for small-town events,” the festival’s flier entices.
The theme of this year’s festival is “Where I’m Calling From” — the title of one of Carver’s short stories — and many of the readings, workshops, and other events will consider ideas of place and home. Other workshops will focus on topics including overcoming writer’s block, memoir, and poetry.
The annual Raymond Carver Writing Festival has taken place in Clatskanie since the early 2000s (with the exception of a pandemic hiatus) and honors the American short-story writer and poet.
Carver is often credited with rejuvenating the popularity and critical interest in the short story. He was posthumously nominated for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his short story collection Where I’m Calling From. In their citation, the jury wrote, “the revival in recent years of the short story is attributable in great measure to Carver’s mastery of the form.”
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Carver was born in Clatskanie and spent part of his childhood there (his family moved to Yakima, where Carver graduated from high school). The influence of the rural former logging town in Columbia County is clear in Carver’s writing: Many of the characters in his stories are working class. His writing is sometimes called “dirty realism,” for portraying seamier, underbelly situations, or completely mundane and ordinary moments. Carver died in 1988 at age 50 and is buried in Port Angeles, Wash.
In addition to Stafford, the festival will feature author and ecologist Robert Michael Pyle. A “parking lot poetry” event in the parking lot of Clatskanie’s Safeway (also known as the Evergreen Shopping Center) will encourage participants to read poetry — their own or another’s — in the parking lot. The event is inspired by a 1984 reading that Carver and Tess Gallagher, a poet who would become his wife in the last year of his life, gave at that site.
The winners of an annual poetry contest, also in honor of Carver, will be announced Saturday night. There are three age-based categories for youth and one for adults. Clatskanie Mayor Robert “Bob” Brajcich will announce he winners of the youth categories and presented their awards.
The festival closes Saturday night with a “poetry and pie” community potluck, featuring Carver’s favorite dessert.
Carver was born in Clatskanie, but never grew up here. I live in Clatskanie and is a joke amongst some locals. Apparently his parents were travelling and Clatskanie happened to be the place where his mother went into labor. But after his birth, they left Clatskanie, and I can find no evidence that he grew up here nor that he ever returned. If you want to see where he grew up, it’s more likely Yakima Washington. Some want to use Carver to spur tourism in Clatskanie, but I’m not sure this is an honest way to do so. If it is true that he grew up here, then where is (or was) the house?
According to Martha Gies’s essay on Carver in The Oregon Encyclopedia, Carver was, indeed, born in Clatskanie. His family was living at the time in the lumber community of Wauna, a dozen miles from Clatskanie, and moved to Yakima when Carver was three years old. His ties to the Northwest were strong. Gies quotes him: “If I’ve ever gone about consciously locating a story in a particular place…I suppose that place would be the Pacific Northwest.”
I am so delighted to see this, although I believe I have missed the dates. I am connected to both Carver and Stafford in many ways and celebrate their presence in our northwest oeuvre. I did not meet Raymond Carver, but I studied his work and read both his poetry and short stories on my own and in literature classes. I did meet Kim Stafford at Fishtrap and knew his dad as well. Treasures, both of them.