SOURCE: McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with Raymond Carver.” In Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980's, edited by Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, pp. 66-82. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

In the following interview, Carver reflects on his childhood, his writing methods, and his literary influences.

To be inside a Raymond Carver story is a bit like standing in a model kitchen at Sears—you experience a weird feeling of disjuncture that comes from being in a place where things appear to be real and familiar, but where a closer look shows that the turkey is papier-mâché, the broccoli is rubber, and the frilly curtains cover a blank wall. In Carver's fiction things are simply not as they appear. Or, rather, things are more than they appear to be, for often commonplace objects—a broken refrigerator, a car, a cigarette, a bottle of...