Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher at the Heaney Centre, QUB.

The room is overcrowded. All kinds have crowded into what should be our MA class only, drawn by the famous name. My territory, my habitual chair, is already usurped by a stranger. I find a seat in a sunny spot by a window in the furthest corner of the room.

The Diva enters. With liturgical reverence, Maebh McGuckian, feminist Belfast poet, removes Tess Gallagher's acid burnt velvet scarf (there's a name for the material but it eludes me) and drapes it on a chair. The visitor emanates assurance. In her genius? Who can tell? An odd presence, I noted at last night's readings, similar to the presence of a mother prioress among nuns and girl boarders in a convent boarding school. There is security and comfortive in her authoritative presence.

Tess Gallagher tells us she has travelled insubstantially, without children, who might have taken up the energy and solitude she needed for her work. What foresight! How ordered. No incidents of passion resulting in consequences. However, it's not totally true. She admits that life is a snowball, collecting obligations. And so she has cared for siblings, her mother, her recovering alcoholic husband, Raymond Carver. "Walk past the drink. Walk out of there. Get in your care. Drive home. I'll be waiting in the driveway," she said when he phoned from a bar to dramatise his closeness to an alcoholic drink that was poured and ready for him to drink.

Tess appears to possess saintly forebearance. I would tell such a self dramatizing soul to piss off. And hang the alcoholic relapse. I so loathe addictive personalities. My mirrors.

I have a different view of the lovely ceiling. From this position I cannot avoid seeing four fluorescent lights cased in shatter proof perspex. They are ugly and filled with dust. When I sat directly under them I didn't see them.

Tess built her house with the help of her first husband who was a Vietnam veteran with issues, lots of anger to work out, demanding her energy which she wasn't willing to give. Therefore, divorce.

Looks as if Tess got the house. Save, save, save, she advises. Americans have an average of $4000 credit card debt. Less than €3000? Is that all? What's a credit card for if not to test your creditworthiness? Tess begins to sound like my mother's generation who considered debt immoral. No matter, when divorce or first family claims arise, Tess keeps the house and the car and the royalties. Raymond Carver's first family cost Tess a lot in legal fees as they try to claim some inheritance. Tess refers to themas 'vampires'. I squirm with disapproval. Of Tess, not RC's first family.

Tess has issues with the literary canon, from which she has been excluded by Nobel Prize winner Helen Vender/Linda Graham/Grey???? by not including her in her major anthology. Shades of Yeats who excluded Monk Gibbon from the Oxford Book of Irish Poetry. Did Heaney include him in his? I haven't checked and won't. Who cares?

She has been rescuing sheep down the road, in County Sligo where she is a guest of Josie, so far as I can ascertain. I wonder if she will wind up owning his house and fields and turbary on distant hills and his ewes and lambs. And his royalties from the book they are writing jointly from his oral telling of tales.

Maeve keeps interrupting with insider remarks and references, creating an esxclusive zone from which the rest of us are excluded. Who is Bob whose son drowned? Again, who in this room cares? Can't they do small talk another time? I care about the tatooed woman whose body was taken out of the Erne at Belleek this morning. She is near enough to matter to me.