Grace Paley

"None of it happened, and yet every word of it is true."

Grace Paley said that about her fiction, and I think it just about sums up how I think of my work, and how I hope readers will think about it.

Paley died of cancer yesterday. (Click here for her obit.)

I took a seminar this summer where we did close readings of a few of her stories, and boy am I glad I did. I learned so much from her writing about what makes a short, short story work: how the story can simply express a moment in time, and show the slightest change in the character at the end. In that way, I think that Paley's fiction is the heart of truth--after all, to paraphrase the Eagles, people change so slowly if they ever change at all.

Poetry Thursday

A poster from last year's Poetry Month hangs proudly on my cube wall. It has snippets of lots of different poems. Here's one my favorites--and one that is particularly relevent on this dark, dreary, and snowy morning here in Boston:

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow
~Roethke

Yawn!


And in other literary news, here's a reading that I may try to go to next week, though I'll have to be late because of my French class:


A Reading by Grace Paley
with Robert Pinsky and Samantha Mineo Myers

Wednesday, April 18
7:30 p.m.
Boston University Photonics Center
8 Saint Mary’s Street, Room 206

Reception and Book Signing to Follow

GRACE PALEY is one of the most celebrated and widely read short-story writers in the United States. Her most recent book, The Collected Stories, gathers short fiction from earlier collections, including The Little Disturbances of Man and Later the Same Day. Paley’s many awards include grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Vermont.