PORT ANGELES — As Tess Gallagher read from her new book — a collaboration with Irish painter Josie Gray called Barnacle Soup and Other Stories From the West of Ireland — she occasionally invoked an Irish accent and a melodic pacing of her voice.
The voice, the tone, the words are his, she said — but without her careful writing of the stories she heard so many times by a fireplace, they never would have been published.
“I get an awful lot of enjoyment in stories and in telling them well,” Gallagher told about 200 people gathered to hear her at Peninsula College’s Little Theater on Thursday.
In order to keep the book authentically Irish in sound and register, she asked all who read it to look for her voice in the book.
“Any sign of my involvement I tried to erase,” she said.
“When it passed from spoken to written form, there were some things that needed to change, but I tried to leave my voice out.”
Gallagher met Gray about seven years after her third husband, famed short story author Raymond Carver, died in 1988.
She was immediately captivated by Gray’s stories.
“I felt so beguiled by them,” she said.
“I knew I wouldn’t be the only one who would find them delicious.”
Her primary objective in “translating” the stories from the spoken to the written form was to keep the feeling of a story told by a fireplace while drinking hot cocoa, she said.
“The stories were told by one person, telling them to one other person,” she said.
“There is a great intimacy in that.”
The stories include funny, sweet, sometimes sad, and often parable-like tales from real people Gray met or stories he had heard told throughout his life in Ireland.
Gallagher is best-known in as a poet, essayist and short-story and screen writer.
Born in Port Angeles, she graduated from the University of Washington and is the author of eight collections of poetry.
Gray was born on the shores of Lough Arrow, Ireland, and has lived in counties Waterford, Wexford and Sligo.
He has worked as a fruit salesman, barman, farmer and rate collector, and in various family businesses, hauling turf, fruit, sand and gravel.
He started painting in the mid-1990s and has exhibited in Ireland and the United States
