 Grace Paley
The Grace Place
Grace Paley died on August 22d 2007. She was a beloved friend and one of the great story-writers of America. I will miss her laugh, her brilliant common sense, her kindness, her wit, her warmth, forever. It is an abiding joy to have known her.
I want to keep a little green place here on my site for Grace, where anybody who loved her can come and visit. I hope to get some photographs and perhaps some of her own words here.
Just about my favorite memory of her is from a Flight of the Mind workshop, where somebody asked her the inevitable question — “Grace, you do so much! you bring up kids, you are politically active, you hand out leaflets, you support causes, you go to jail for it, you make speeches, you teach, and you write poetry, and you write stories — how do you do it? how do you fit it all in??” And little Grace thought about it and said, “Oh, well, you know, I got all day.”
I asked her, the last time I saw her, a couple of years ago in Greenwich Village, if she remembered saying that. She didn’t, but she laughed and said, “It’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
If you don’t know Grace Paley’s work, the NYTimes obituary is a pretty good introduction, though her poetry deserves more mention. Here, from about ten years ago, is a nice interview with Grace at Salon.com. And a beautiful
Celebration of Grace Paley, by Robin Morgan, at Women’s Media Center.
Here’s a link to Judith Arcana’s web site, with information
about her biography of Grace.
— UKL
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