By contrast, the techniques that Lish imposed on his own fiction, and that he advocated for decades in the notorious non-MFA writing workshops he ran after leaving Knopf (workshops in which he mentored, among others, Amy Hempel, Christine Schutt, and Diane Williams), are considerably simpler to articulate. “Recursion” is Lish’s fancy term for unfancy “repetition”; “consecution” is a catch-all concept for the ways in which the grammatical or phonic qualities of a word, or the structure of a sentence, can be brought to bear on the choice of the word or the structure of the sentence that follows; “swerve,” meanwhile, is Lish’s method for frustrating “recursion” and “consecution,” by introducing into the body of a fiction a theme, or narrative vantage, which hadn’t been used before, and is not logically, structurally, or phonically expected. This trinity of techniques is so prevalent in Lish’s work as to read like a trinity of tics. Take the fiction entitled “The Practice of Everyday Life,” in which the recursion abounds, the consecution hinges on the polysemy of “come” and the opposition of “out loud” and “aloud,” while the swerve is accomplished with the belated identification of the narrator’s audience or occasion:

Since the originals of Carver’s stories are often two or three times longer than the canonical versions, what Lish did to them (and gloated about doing to them) requires another verb. Not “edit” but “traduce,” “violate,” “molest.”