Amazing Grace Paley: Every Action Was Essential

NOT ONE SEMESTER HAS PASSED since I've begun teaching (remember, I recently received my 15 year pin!) when I have not taught something by Grace Paley or at least referred to her as a writer, poet, activist, teacher, an example to me, at least, of how to be in the world.

Grace Paley died Wednesday at her home in Vermont. She was 84.

I studied with her briefly in 1984 at a writing conference for women at UC Santa Cruz. I was learning how to talk to people then and I made myself talk to her even though I worried about sounding like a fool. I probably did sound like a fool. She was one who perhaps didn't mind fools as long as they were trying. She asked what I was reading, a typical teacher's question for a student.

Raymond Carver, I answered, and you.

Ray Carver, she said, shaking her head, I worry about him, so much darkness, so little hope.

No, I said, the fool slipping away as I began to speak about what I knew well. You need to read his new stuff, this story, "Cathedral." He has hope now, really.

Good, she said, I am glad to hear it. It's about time.

In workshop Paley advised us to tell the stories that only we could tell and to tell them in the ways that only we could tell them. Don't write the stories anyone could write, she said, write what only you can. This from a woman who, as a young student, had studied with W.H. Auden. At the time, she was writing poetry using British English. Auden asked her why.

This is advice I tell my creative writing students – and myself - every semester.

Much of her life's work is found in three collections of short stories. Margalit Fox, in today's New York Times, describes her work this way:

"Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailiness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind."

In the 1980s, Red Emma and I went everywhere Paley was if she was near. We saw her read when we could. Her cloud of white hair, her tennis shoes, her chewing gum. Her stories. Her poems.

Paley described herself as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist" and was a longtime active member of the War Resisters League (WRL), an organization that does exactly what its name suggests. I like how nearly all her obituaries identify her as "writer and activist." She would have written more, she once said, had she not been going to so many meetings, so many demonstrations. This was said without regret.

In this time of war, I like to remember what she said in an interview in the WRL magazine The Nonviolent Activist. It was in 2000, in their 25 Years Later: The Movement Against the War in Vietnam issue.

The question: How do you assess the role of the small radical peace movement in relation to the mass movement, to the large demonstrations of half a million people?

Her answer:

"Every big demonstration was absolutely essential. And every local operation was absolutely essential. There’s no argument about it, it seems to me. If there were no big demonstrations, we would never have known how many people in Minneapolis felt like us—I mean the joy of being in Washington and meeting people from Idaho, what greater sense of unity could you have? On the other hand, whenever we did something, whenever a draft card was burned, whenever one of the Berrigans [Dan and Philip, brothers and Catholic priests who founded the Plowshares movement by destroying draft board files during the war] or Women Against Daddy Warbucks [which also raided a draft board] took an action, they would say, “You’re turning people against us.” But that was ridiculous because the people were not turned against us, the people were interested. So I think they were both absolutely essential."

Every action is essential. There is life in those actions, big and small. In the poems. In the stories. The leaflets. The letters written. The signs. The marches, big and small. There is hope. Grace.