Remembering Grace Paley (1922-2007)
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Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
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DrugReporter:
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Environment:
Activists Protest Natural Resources Defense Council for Collaborating With Polluters
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Food:
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Health and Wellness:
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Immigration:
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Emily Creighton
Media and Technology:
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Movie Mix:
Disney Apocalypse: Why 2012 Sucks
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Politics:
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Reproductive Justice and Gender:
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Rights and Liberties:
Why Fanaticism Can Be a Good Thing
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Sex and Relationships:
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Take Action:
G-20 Meetings: Nothing Much Happened in the Suites, and There Was Too Much Punch in the Streets
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Water:
Revealed: Astroturf Groups Planning Massive California Water Grab to Benefit Big Ag and SoCal
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World:
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Spotting Grace Paley anywhere -- at a march, or on the street in Greenwich Village, and particularly in the crowded rooms of New York literary soirees -- was like coming upon a sunny isle of sanity in a world gone mad with hasty, hardened greetings, glittering costumes, and too much patience with the intolerable.
To see Grace was to come upon a complete human being, so fully herself and at home with herself as to be easily noticed in crowds of people ambitious for any sign of accomplishment. When Grace Paley died on August 22 at the age of 84, the writer and activist left us all much poorer in a world already running short of honest and fearless souls.
She taught many of us, particularly women, what it means to be writer and citizen. As a writer, she taught the value of lives that often go unremarked, and as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist" she showed that embodying citizenship fully is liberating.
Born Grace Goodside, the third child of dissident Jewish immigrants who fled czarist rule in Russia, her childhood was steeped in political debate. She viewed dissidence as a part of citizenship, not as alienation from it.
She was married twice -- first to Jess Paley, a film cameraman, and, in 1972, to playwright Robert Nichols, who survives her, along with her children Nora Paley, Danny Paley and three grandchildren.
Having started writing as a poet, studying at Hunter College and with W. H. Auden at the New School, she brought economy and an acute ear to her fiction. In a 1986 interview, she described the switch to fiction:
First of all, I began to think of certain subject matter, women's lives specifically, and what was happening around me. I was in my thirties, which I guess is the time people start to notice things, women's and men's lives and what their relationship is. […] All sorts of things began to worry me […] I couldn't deal with any of this subject matter in poetry; I just didn't know how […]
[F]or me it was that in writing poetry I wanted to talk to the world, I wanted to address the world, so to speak. But writing stories, I wanted to get the world to explain itself to me, to speak to me.Paley's short stories liberated ordinary women -- single mothers at an urban playground or perched in tenement windows -- from the shadows they inhabited in the work of late 20th-century male writers. She heard the music in the conversations of those in her neighborhood and saw through the artifice of imposing tidy scenarios on the poetry of daily life.
See more stories tagged with: grace paley, memoriam, activist, writer
Thulani Davis's most recent book is the memoir "My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots." She currently lives in New Jersey.
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