An Interview with Richard Ford

What did you learn in writing and in life from Raymond Carver?

I did learn some things from Ray. Sometimes people ask me if he was my teacher; but he wasn’t. He and I were close friends, and were colleagues. But he wasn’t that much older than me — seven years. We were pretty much contemporaries. Though it’s seems strange that he’s been gone now for nearly twenty years. But. One thing that may seem insignificant, but wasn’t, was that his parents and my parents came from pretty much the same place — west Arkansas. His parents had gone out west, and mine had gone down south — for work. And from that coincidence, and from admiring Ray’s early stories very much, and admiring his own instincts for writing them, I think I drew some corroborative strength that my own inherited storage of what was interesting and what a story could be was, in fact, valuable and credible. Ray and I enjoyed a kind of unspoken confidence that we came from the same stock—possibly rough stock.

Beyond that, his early stories and our friendship — which began as he was writing his second book — definitely encouraged me to try writing stories again myself. I’d quit writing stories in the Seventies because I just couldn’t do it very well. But Ray’s stories seemed so natural, almost easy (many people have thought that to their ruin), that I thought I’d try my hand at it again. And I did. At least a couple of the stories in Rock Springs bear signs of his stylistic influence. He always encouraged me to write stories, although I’m sure he felt confident he would always be better at it than I’d be.

He must’ve learned things from you as well, though?

I don’t know what he could’ve learned from me. There might’ve been something. We were friends, we talked about work a lot. We had that confidence that came from our family background. And I’m sure I reenforced his confidence about his work. I also had opinions about some of the stories in his book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love — all of which he showed me in early drafts. But most of what I didn’t like he rejected and later chided me for. Although there was that story, I think it’s ‘A Small Good Thing’, that I and others (the poet Donald Hall and Geoffrey Wolff, probably Toby, too) complained to him about. He’d shown that story to us in an early, much more fully developed form. And then he published it in a rather harshly curtailed form. And we all told Ray he should restore it to its fuller self when he collected it in a subsequent volume. And he did. His work was growing, his sentences getting longer, more complex, his sympathies and intellectual reach expanding. Tess [Gallagher, Carver’s second wife] had a big influence on him — probably the biggest influence. I think that I — and again I was just one of a few people he trusted — I just told him work was wonderful, and that was probably the most of it.

You shared an absolute commitment to the business of writing stories: have you always had that work ethic?

No. I haven’t. I always wished I had it — from an early age. But I didn’t for a long time. It — the work ethic — just arrived during the summer of 1963, when I was nineteen. I’m not sure where it came from. I was working on the Missouri Pacific Railroad as a switchman, and making lots of money and having a pretty happy life. I was supposed to go to college in the autumn, and was giving thought to just staying working on the railroad. But I ended up going to school, instead.

Maybe seeing those working guys I spent my days with made an impression on me; or maybe it was that I wanted to impress Kristina. I don’t really know. But when I got to school, in Michigan, I was just a changed boy. Whatever thresholds I’d not ventured to cross — with regard to my studies, for instance — I just barged across. And it’s been that way ever since. But I should say — about myself and about a work ethic — it’s pretty boring. That’s why we associate the ‘ethic’ with Protestants, who’re also pretty boring. It may lead one on to good, but it doesn’t feel like much of a virtue, frankly.

A work ethic story, though. When I was in college I lived with a guy named Tom Candee, who’s now a veterinarian not far from where I live — down in Massachusetts. And every term our grades came out, and Candee used to laugh at me — rail at me, really. He used to say, ‘Look at Ford, he got all As, but had to worked like a pig to get it. Whereas me, I got all As and never turned a hand. I’m smart. He’s not.’ We eventually came to pretty serious blows, Candee and me, because that used to get under my skin real bad. But the truth was he was right. I did work like a pig. He barely lifted a hand. So, to me, a work ethic has always been a kind of blue-collar trait, something I have to embrace to do anything that’s worthwhile — but spectacularly inferior to being able to waltz through life. I am, however, glad not to be a veterinarian.

I remember talking to Kazuo Ishiguro and he said he imagined the rest of his life in terms of how many novels he would be lucky enough to complete, if he spent, as was his habit, five or six years on each. Do you have a powerful sense of finite time?

Well, the return on Ish’s investment is quite wonderful, isn’t it? So his attitude puts a much better burnish on those working virtues than I can hope to put. I suppose I do share a sense of finite time, all right. But I don’t measure it in terms of how many novels I’ll write, or might write. I agree that to get to write a novel at all is very, very lucky — to get to do one’s best, to get to do what Dostoevsky and Faulkner did, to try to contribute good to the life of people you don’t know. All that’s a great privilege. But every time I finish a novel, or a book (and I’ve only finished nine), I ask myself if this isn’t enough now. I’ve given this last effort — whatever it was — my very best. I’ve held back nothing. Have I not perhaps gone along this course as far as I can go? Are my returns not likely to begin to diminish? Could I really have anything as important as this to write again? Someday, I assume, my answer will be, ‘Yes, this is enough.’ I don’t see writing as a profession, something I’m married to forever. I have to reinvent it every time. And I also see that there’s more to life than writing. I see that portrayed in other people’s lives all the time. I’m as curious about that as I ever was.

The greatest short story writers it seems to me are those with the clearest sense of an ending. Do you always know when you are done?

Yes, I always know when a story’s finished. And I hope that makes me one of the greatest short story writers — if that’s what it takes.

There’s a line you once used: ‘Your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.’ How do you think your own blueprint will look when the time comes?

Sketchy. Whatever there is of good in it is either private — something I shared with Kristina — or else it’s all gone into what I’ve written. That seems just fine.