not so simple, being simple

Been reading and re-reading Carol Sklenicka's magisterial (I've always wanted to use that word!) biography of Raymond Carver. Of course I always knew Carver's elegantly simple stories were the result of months and years of writing and rewriting. But what the bio makes more abundantly clear than ever is the amount of pain that went into each story and poem.

It made me think about what Jen, my yoga teacher, said about doing things the easy way. That's a good goal for yoga, and for a lot of life. But easy is not the place where a story like "Cathedral" comes from. (Yes, I'm one of the "Cathedral" saps.) In writing, the writer gets all the difficulty and the reader gets all the ease.

Of course that is why Carver was so imitated. He made it look so simple. So easy. But Sklenicka's bio makes it seem like Carver's writing was the hardest thing in the world.