Asked by an interviewer about the starting-point for his stories, Raymond Carver once commented:

I never start with an idea. I always see something. I start with an image, a cigarette being put out in a jar of mustard, for instance, or the remains, the wreckage of a dinner left on the table. Pop cans in the fireplace, that sort of thing. And a feeling goes with that. And that feeling seems to transport me back to that particular time and place, and the ambiance of the time. But it is the image, and the emotion that goes with that image – that's what's important.

If Carver was interested in moving from the image into narrative, his stories have had a tendency to inspire their readers to translate them back into images. This was initially a critical tendency, as parallels were frequently drawn between Carver's stories and the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the paintings and sculptures of Photo Realists such as Duane Hanson, Richard Estes and Ralph Goings. But it was not only critics who looked to draw connections. In 1989, for example, Jo Ann Callis used a selection of Carver's poems to accompany her photographs in an exhibition catalogue, Objects of Reverie, while Bob Adelman has produced a book of photographs purporting to represent Carver Country.