Seeking to show a new generation of writers how to "light up the darkness" with their words, renowned poet and short story writer Grace Paley is teaching a senior seminar in poetry writing this term.
Paley, the author of a collection of short stories called "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute" and numerous anthologies of poetry, teaches English 85, a workshop in which students read works in progress to Paley and the other members of the class, who then critique the writing.
The class, Paley said, allows students to receive the practice and attention writers need to improve.
"What people need if they're a writer is to write," Paley said. "They need determination to write.
"The purpose that most writers have is to light up the darkness," she said. "Everybody who seriously writes has this little flashlight that lights up issues like they're under a rock or in a cave."
Paley said she thinks members of the class have the promise to become excellent writers, and she tries to lend them her experience to help them grow.
"What I have to offer is that I'm a writer and I'm working on years of experience," she said. "I take writing very seriously. It is my life and I guess that's what you should work with."
Much has changed since Paley first visited the College many years ago.
"BlitzMail--what is that?" Paley asked, still unclear on the concept behind Dartmouth's favorite means of communication.
"I don't have a computer here so I can't go 'blitzing around,'" she said. "Most of the people in my class are '94s and '95s, or whatever they are, and they all blitz. I've heard about all this blitzing stuff. How do you blitz?"
At 72 years old, dressed in a matching pink and purple woolen sweater and beret, Grace Paley may look like a grandmother, but there is nothing sedentary or old-fashioned about her. She quickly caught on to the explanation of Dartmouth's favorite means of communication.
"Well you know what may be good about that? I have thought for years that the use of the telephone has destroyed the letter," Paley said. "What happens is that everybody calls each other up. But now they have this 'blitzing,' at least they're writing full sentences."
Paley has visited the campus many times prior to teaching here. "I wondered what it would be like" now, she said. "When I first came here it was an all-boys campus and it really was very different.
"Women have made a great difference. It's infinitely better," she said. "I don't mean just in the school but in the whole Hanover community."
Paley describes Dartmouth students as "extraordinary." In her first term teaching here last spring she said she found that College students "were smart, but everybody's smart, you know?
"It's not so hard to be smart," she continued. "But they were also interested in each other's work and they were very thoughtful about their own. They were serious."
Paley's face lit up when asked about how she liked working closely with students.
"If you're interested in young people they have to be awful to make you uninterested," she said. "And then of course if they're awful it makes you really interested."
Her students appreciate her enthusiasm. Deirdre Goodrich '94 described the writer as "a down-to-earth person who is open-minded and interested in what her students have to say. I have noticed that the other professors look up to her as a mentor."
The steady stream of visitors to Paley's office, in the basement of Sanborn House, seemed to validate the praises she received from her students.
"She's great. She's a terrific teacher ... very approachable," said Brandon Hudgeons '94, a member of Paley's class.
Jacqueline Taylor, the author of a biography of Paley titled "Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives," wrote that, "In a world where women's voices have been routinely silenced, Grace Paley dares to create a voice that is boldly female."
Paley proudly admits to being a feminist. "You start off growing up and you notice a few things about women's lives ... then, later on, you have children and you spend a lot of time with women and you notice a few more things," Paley said. "We have lives in common -- in some cases repressed, in other cases oppressed."
Grace Paley won the Rea Award for the short story this year. She said she writes "most of the time" and would never consider teaching full time. "I'm past that in my age," she said. "I'm taking advantage of my years of having done stuff. I do a lot of gardening around the house. I hang out a lot. I read."
Paley has lived in Vermont for almost 20 years. She was raised by her parents, Russian Jewish emigrants, in the Bronx, N.Y. She attended Hunter College and New York University, and has taught at Columbia and Syracuse Universities and at Sarah Lawrence College.
