Grace Paley, born in the Bronx in 1922, is an accomplished short-story writer and poet. She taught creative writing and literature at Sarah Lawrence College for nearly two decades, and now lives in Bedford, Vt. An activist in anti-war and anti-nuclear, as well as feminist, movements, Paley calls herself a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist.” Paley was in town recently to receive the Harold Washington Literary Award, given by the Printer’s Row Book Fair, and she sat down with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor to reflect on her career:
Q. You once said that “history happens when you’re doing the dishes.” What does that mean?
A. Looking back, I think what it could mean to me really is that everyday life happens while large events occur. Another way to look at it is that the large event is doing the dishes. The large event is, for women, a lot of their lives. And the history of women’s lives is the history of half the human race.
Q. You’re identified with the phrase, “The personal is political.”
A. Well, you know, that was very smart when I said that! That was a smart day. And it’s true.
Q. Did you study with W.H. Auden?
A. He came to this country when I was about 171/2. I was out of school. But I was a big poetry reader. That was what I read. And I was crazy about him.
He’d come to the country and was teaching a class. You didn’t study with him; it was lectures. He lectured at The New School. At that time, I guess I lived in the Bronx. . . .
I was crazy about [Auden]. And so I was working somewhere [near the New School] and I couldn’t wait for Thursday. Thursday would come and I would walk full of joy to this lecture, most of which I couldn’t understand. Because, first of all, he had just come over and he had this Cambridge-Oxford accent, whatever . . . it was. But I just loved it. I was very happy. And I knew all his poems, so every now and then I’d understand something.
And then he did ask us if we wanted him to look at our poems, and I did ask him to. I was using very literary language. He said, “You don’t really talk this way.” What I was writing was in British. Crude British. For a Bronx kid that was funny.
Q. So he helped you find your voice.
A. I didn’t know it for a long time. I mean, I heard what he said, but I paid no attention for the next, maybe eight years.
Q. How did you make the transition from poetry to short stories?
A. I was writing poems, you know, not at a fantastic rate. But it just was natural to me by then. But then around my 30s I really began to think I should try to write some stories. I read stories. I liked stories. At the same time I was spending more and more time with women, because of the children. Going to parks and meeting women. Their lives interested me a lot and really began to create a kind of pressure in me to write. And that was good because I wouldn’t have done it otherwise, because I’m really kind of lazy. I wouldn’t say I’m lazy. I’ll just say I’m indolent. I wouldn’t say I’m indolent. It’s just that I like hanging out. . . .
This was in the mid-’50s, and it was a period of very masculine literature, which really began to irritate me a little, but I wasn’t even that conscious of being irritated. What I felt was that I really wanted to write, but I couldn’t write about what they were writing about. . . . Basically it was like it was a boys club somehow or other. It’s not that I felt excluded. I just felt that I was getting less interested in them and they were certainly not interested in me. So I think partly I felt the pressure to write because I wasn’t reading what I wanted to [read]. I think a lot of writers finally write because they’re not reading what they want to . . . read. So they write it.
So I began to write these stories. I wrote three stories, and by sheer luck the editor at Doubleday–it’s an old-time story–came to pick up his kids from my house (I was baby-sitting them), and he took the stories and looked at them, and he offered me a contract right away and said, “Write seven more.”
Q. How did you learn to write, and do you bring that to your teaching?
A. I’d read a lot. Whenever I talk to students about writing, [I tell them] they should read–reading other people’s work and reading only really, really wonderful work, good work, is how you learn. I mean, you don’t even know you’re learning. Your ear fills up with such good sentences that you are ashamed when you write a rotten one.
Q. So what do you read now?
A. I read everything. . . . I read a lot of fiction and I read a lot of poetry. I read poetry all the time.
Q. How do you juggle your activism and writing?
A. Well, it’s just been interesting. There’s the everyday fact of life, either you go out on an action or you stay home and write. So that’s a pull that you have. You make that decision all the time. And sometimes it’s one way, and sometimes it’s another. Meanwhile the kids are hollering. . . .
Sometimes it’s very important really to stop writing for a while and go out and do something. You can’t help but learn from everything you do or everything you hear or everything you see. You know, people used to say to me, “You mean you have to go do that, you have to go to the park with those kids everyday?” I said, “No, but really, I love it.” I didn’t know it, but I was making the friends of my life, who are my friends to this day, 50 years later. And the political friends of my life, because we became part of the women’s movement together. They all went in the peace movement. That whole act. . . .
It was really like I was given the gift of my subject matter. It was like a present from some mysterious place that helped me to find what I wanted to write about.
Q. How important is place to you? Your writing is infused with New York, yet you live in Vermont.
A. Everybody lives in a latitude and a longitude. Everybody. There’s a spot on Earth where you stand and that’s really, that’s your subject.
Take the park, or the city, or the street–the streets, the city streets, the Bronx, that’s my material. I mean, that’s what I write about. It’s specific. You know, you can have certain abstractions in poetry, but even in poetry people are always writing about leaves and trees.
My first thing I did when I began [to live] in Vermont is I wrote a series of Bedford poems, all full of flowers and this, that and the other thing. I mean, that was my place. But basically I’m still a New York writer, although I’ve written a few stories, small stories, about living in Vermont. But basically I don’t have a lingo for it.
