Grace Paley, the famed short-story writer and poet who weathered the Great Depression, protested the Vietnam War and created believable and vivid characters with wry humor along the way, will offer students her sometimes-unorthodox literary expertise as a Montgomery Fellow this term.
Paley grew up the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Bronx, N.Y. Raised during the Depression, Paley was told she had to have a trade, and writing was not considered acceptable. She worked as a typist, all the while writing poems. Ironically, Paley published only three poems before she began writing short stories, and none of her poetry was published until after she had gained recognition as a short-story writer.
"People who are writers are really kids who sat under the dining room table listening to people," Paley said Friday in an interview with The Dartmouth. "I'm interested in how people talk -- it's like listening to music for me."
In her writing, Paley draws on the rhythms of speech from her childhood, such as the sound of parents' voices.
The author theorizes that people have two ears -- one for the classics of their culture's literature and another for the language of their homes, their streets or their houses. Paley's ability to capture the sounds of home is why her dialogue rings so true, she said. Through her dialogue, she skillfully brings her characters to life with very little physical description.
Paley is candid about her writing habits. "I'm a very bad example for youth," she said. "I usually have a first sentence. I don't have a story. I don't have a character. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I have a tune."
But Paley says she has a lot of papers on which she has written the first few sentences of what may become poems and short stories. Each time she reads them, she asks herself, "Do I have a story?"
The poet laureate of Vermont does not perpetuate any mysticism about her art. When asked for solutions to writer's block, she said, "Write badly. [You] may suddenly find yourself working into a story."
Paley taught at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., for 22 years and brought the first drafts of her manuscripts to class to show her students their low quality. "Don't worry about being so perfect," she said. "I do a lot of revision anyway. Write that first bad draft. It's usually full of baloney -- you just gotta clear out the crap."
This matter-of-fact approach to writing, coupled with her inherent writing abilities, has helped Paley garner prestigious literary awards, including the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit, a 1961 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1987 Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in recognition of her lifetime contribution to literature.
Paley is critically acclaimed for imbuing her characters with the good humor and realism of her distinct writing voice. To develop such a naturally appealing voice, Paley said she tells stories from the point of views of old women, self-centered young men and children.
"You will get your voice if you begin to write in other voices. That's how I taught myself to write, by using other people's voices," she said.
As a suggestion, Paley recounted one exercise she used to give her students. When teaching undergraduate writing courses, Paley would instruct young writers to pen a story from the point of view of someone with whom they were in conflict. She wryly noted that they usually wrote about their mothers or their roommates.
"Write what you don't know about what you know. It's what you don't understand about what you know that makes you write," Paley said. "It could be anything, [maybe] a person you don't understand. Your job is to illuminate what isn't seen, what isn't known."
