Sonkowsky has taught college English and written on a wide range of topics in education. He is currently involved in the creation of alternative educational programs that take an intergenerational approach to learning. In the following essay, he examines images of supportive older men in "Where I'm Calling From" and discusses their implications about the role of father figures in personal growth and development.

We feel one thing one minute,
something else the next.
-Raymond Carver, from a poem entitled
"Romanticism' ,

The stories in Raymond Carver's 1983 Cathedral collection include possibilities for characters' growth and development not found in his earlier stories. Carver commented in interviews that he was aware of something "totally different" about the stories as he was writing them-something which, as he put it, "reflects a change in my life." Reflections of two of the biggest changes in the author's life-quitting drinking in 1977 and sharing...