Steve Job's Sister Liked Me

A friend who otherwise meant well, sent me an email to say she had been reading articles about Steve Jobs and his passing. She said an article in the Times mentioned his sister, the writer, Mona Simpson. And how seeing Mona's name made her think of me. What she meant was the me I used to be.

In 1994 I was living on Tulane NE in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'd landed there after quitting a life I'd had in Chicago and decided one day to take a drive. The thought being not unlike the title of Simpson's best known novel, Anywhere but Here. I rented a casita from a daffy, bead-collector, who was a former-Chicagoan herself. I wrote stories. I did not work. The not working and the writing stories and and the much bigger sky forged for me a different me.

I sent out the stories to literary magazines and sometimes to the glossies. The stories, some quickly, some slowly, were returned with the thanks but no thanks. Sometimes an editor took the time and the care to write a few lines. Some of the lines were encouraging. The wildly eccentric Gordon Lish sent me a couple of bizarre notes from his The Quarterly. I've saved those. One I seem to remember began, "This starts good."

I digress.

That first summer was nearly over when I saw NPR was soliciting stories for their show, The Sound of Writing, which was sponsored by PEN's Syndicated Fiction Project. If a story was purchased it was to be read on the show and then having that pedigree, they would shop it around. I sent them two and one day my bead-collecting landlord brought me my mail, two of the manila envelopes I used to send out my stories. They had made their way back home.

Except one had found another home. A nice home. Mona Simpson, the final judge that year, picked my "Helpless" out of the slush and said, yes. I forget how many stories were chosen that year - twenty-something, I want to say - out of maybe a thousand submitted. Many were writers I'd read and admired. Writers with multiple books and New Yorker cachet. And me. And Tess Gallagher.

Tess Gallagher, the poet, and sometimes short story writer, and I had been corresponding. She had been married to Raymond Carver, a hero of mine, when I still had heroes. From him I learned some things about writing. What to put in, and more importantly, what to leave out. The power of the unsaid.

Carver had died six years earlier and I wanted to find Tess and tell her what he meant to me. I went to a reading she gave in Chicago at Barbara's Bookstore, but I was too timid to approach her. But after I settled in New Mexico I wrote her a letter and mailed it to a bookstore in Port Angeles, Washington where she lived. I probably wasn't the first to do so as the bookstore passed the letter on and soon I received one back. In it she told me that shyness was for cats, and should our paths cross again I needed to make myself known.

And now we had both been lucky enough to have won the PEN award. Luck meant a lot to Carver - he wrote about it often - the good and the bad of it. The crazy ways it shaped a life. Having my story chosen seemed, at the time, the good crazy. Mona Simpson had been a friend of Raymond Carvers- he had even written a poem for. She knew Tess well. And somehow I found myself a part of that circle.

I wrote Tess to say how great it was that she won, that I won. I wrote to her on my birthday - and she wrote back saying she hadn't heard, and to thank me. She said she had been out of the country but now she was back and was writing me from Ray's grave - it was the anniversary of his death. She liked to read to him, she said. He loved to hear good news.