In the autumn of 1973, having just completed the year-long Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, Raymond Carver took it upon himself to hold two teaching positions at two separate universities at the same time. For readers familiar with the infrequency and transitory nature of early-career university contracts, Carver's decision will hardly seem noteworthy. However, given the location of each post, Carver's choice is more roguish than it initially appears. For one was a full-time position at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (the same institution, incidentally, at which, a decade earlier he had failed to complete a two-year MFA), and the other was nearly 2,000 miles west, at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Carver's plan, which could only seem feasible to an individual increasingly under the burden and influence of alcohol addiction, was to convince a sales rep at United Airlines to give him free flight vouchers on the promise to include their in-flight magazine in one of his stories, and to fly from Iowa City to San Francisco each Thursday night so he could teach his weekly poetry class in Santa Cruz on the Friday. Predictably, Carver only managed to keep the act together for a few weeks before he caved. Waking up in the San Francisco Bay Area after one particularly damaging binge, Carver petitioned his friends, the novelists Chuck Kinder and William Kittredge, to drive the fifty miles south to Santa Cruz and pin a notice to his classroom door: Can't Teach. Sick. The trio, known amongst their circle as the Beef Trust, then reconvened at Carver's house in Cupertino for a day of drinking. It wasn't long before many of his Santa Cruz students started to complain that they were yet to meet their enigmatic tutor. Taken aside by Provost James Hall, Carver was asked to tender his resignation and focus on the opportunity at Iowa.

While the salacious details of Carver's early adult life might prove to be themselves a kind of intoxication for the well-meaning academic, what this opening anecdote serves to illustrate more than anything is the chaotic struggle that Carver faced as he tried to make a name for himself in the American literary scene in the 1970s.