Writing influenced
by Carver.

Carver taught a generation of writers that leaving things out was not a weakness. It was the technique.

Dirty realism · Working class voices · The unsaid as structure

Raymond Carver is the unavoidable influence in the Tumbleweed Words tradition. Not because his biography is interesting — though it is — but because his formal solution to the problem of fiction changed what was possible in the short story. Carver understood that the emotional weight of a piece could be carried entirely in what was not said, provided the surface was specific enough. A man staring at a wall. A woman washing dishes. Nothing is happening and everything is happening.

"She had been carrying the sound of her mother's voice inside her for thirty years and still could not say what it sounded like. That was the Carver problem: the most important things resist description."

David — Tumbleweed Words — in the Carver tradition

The Carver influence in Tumbleweed Words is felt primarily in the working-class voice — the specificity about money, about labour, about the way economic pressure deforms domestic life — and in the technique of withholding. Write the scene. Trust the reader. Do not explain what the scene means. The meaning is either in the scene or it is not there at all.

David — Tumbleweed Words Flash fiction and poetry in the minimalist tradition. Published in Litro, Adelaide Magazine, Cleaver Magazine. Pushcart-nominated. Read the newsletter.