October 31, 2024
by Robin Lippincott, fiction and creative nonfiction faculty
In the very first post I wrote for this blog, way back whenever that was (late 2000s?), I championed the work of two writers I admired then and still: Susan Sontag and Grace Paley. Subsequently, several years later in another post, I wrote more extensively about Sontag. And now I want to revisit and more fulsomely sing the praises of Paley, both as a writer and as a human being.
As a writer, Grace Paley had a voice like no one else, “funny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute,” as Susan Sontag wrote. She was also a committed political activist focused on social justice, pacificism, feminism, and civil rights.
I have admired Grace Paley and her work for almost fifty years, and recently I realized that I’d had a unique experience at three of her public readings over a period of forty years. Obviously, there were many others in attendance at those readings, too, but perhaps no one else was at all three. I realized then that I should try to capture these experiences on the page and combine them in one piece. This is that piece.
She was there to help inaugurate the Women’s Studies Program at MIT. The year was 1984. There with friends to see her (and hear her read) for the first time, I was already an ardent admirer, having happened upon (in 1976) a copy of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute in a Tallahassee bookstore; the title tickled me. Back then, she wore her hair long, loosely fastened into something of a bun. She was also chewing gum. With a heavy Bronx accent, she began reading a short story (still chewing). At some point, something got caught in her throat. She tried to clear it, couldn’t, then asked if anybody had a lozenge. Lozenge proffered, she popped it in her mouth (already occupied by the gum), her throat cleared, and she continued to read. It seemed heroic somehow.
From Cambridge, Massachusetts to Montpelier, Vermont, the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program at Vermont College (as it was called then) six years later, where I was finishing my degree. She was the Visiting Writer, read her short story “Listening,” at the end of which a lesbian character asks the narrator, Faith (a longtime Paley stand-in), why she hadn’t written about her and her women-loving-women friends. Brave and admirable of Paley, I thought, to call herself out, to publicly challenge herself in this way. At the end of her reading, I mustered the cojones to tell her how much I admired her for having done this, and to ask why she hadn’t written about her women-loving-women friends? She responded that it wasn’t intentional, she just hadn’t thought of it. Which was exactly, she said, her character’s point.
By 2006, I had attended at least ten, maybe as many as fifteen of her public readings over the years, which were usually in support of something other than her own career (a word she disliked, she said, because it’s a divisive word, a word that divides the normal life from the business or professional life); I had even met her a couple of times, but this was the last time I would see her. She had been ill with breast cancer, and she would die within the next year. But on this night, she was healthy enough to give yet another reading, this one in support of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I was there with two other writer friends, Bruce Aufhammer, who had been my first creative writing teacher many years earlier, and Crystal Wilkinson, my former student. There was a long, winding queue outside waiting to enter the auditorium. The starting time for the event came and went. An expectant audience grew impatient. Eventually, one of the organizers got up to go look for Paley and found her standing in the long line outside. Asked what she was doing, she said, I didn’t want to cut in line. That was Grace.
Robin Lippincott is the author of six books. He has been teaching in the MFA Program of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing since 2001. He lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.