Slouched back in her chair, only with her fluffy white hair in view from the back, author Grace Paley listened to Professor of English Blanche Gelfant introduce her to the audience in Cook Auditorium on Saturday. Paley gave the final reading of the Women's Writers Conference hosted by the Institute for Women and Social Change last weekend.
Gelfant spoke of the enormous changes in the world, which Paley reminded the audience, are always possible. Gelfant interpreted this as a sense of hope for everything, even at the last minute. She reminded the audience of the love between man and woman that Paley writes of, of the continuity of the story, and how Paley tells "us" what could happen and what should.
Addressing the audience listeners candidly, Paley reflected upon all the activity in her life, as she rummaged through her Le Sportsac -- a pocketbook popular in the '70s -- to find her papers from which she was to read. "I did all that with so many others ... looking back it's hard to believe I did it."
In an interview before the conference, she spoke of her political position as a feminist as having evolved out of her writing. "I started writing in the 1950s, when I was in my mid-30s. I became a feminist after I wrote my first book. After thinking so much about the situation of women alone with children, I became deeply concerned."
Paley carries her deep concern into everything she does, including the Dartmouth campus. She has taught writing classes in the English Department and finds it most important to teach her students here how to listen. She stressed the importance for a writer to be able to "get into other heads, write from other points of view, other lives." She believes that in writing from the point of view of someone "with whom you are in conflict, you can still hate the person, but you've stretched out away, and understand yourself by getting into the head of someone else."
She emphasizes the need for students to find a truth in the language they use, and to maintain a clear voice in their heads. She employs the technique of asking students to read their work aloud in class, which allows them not only to understand their own voices, but the works of others as well.
Paley's own literary voice matched the woman herself, as the story she read to the audience. "Six Days," painted a lively portrait not only of the six days she was locked up in the Women's Dentention Center in Greenwich Village, New York, for civil disobedience against the American involvement in Vietnam, but also of the subtleties of her thoughts and reactions to the unfamiliar territory around her.
She planned not to complain throughout her six days, as she lived amongst people who were sentenced longer than she.She had nothing to read, however. They had taken away her pens, and she had no paper."This paper and penlessness," she read to the audience, "gave me a pain in that area of my heart."It was funny not to have paper "despite the great history of prison literature."
It was at junctures such as this during the conference, when it became evident of the role the writer's personal voice takes in making the world aware of the social travesties in contemporary America.
Paley is known for devoting her writings to political commitments. Her sister, however, has often criticized her for not contributing to the plethora of literature on mothers and daughters. "Some things are hard," she commented to the listeners in Cook.
