Susanna J. Sturgis   Martha's Vineyard writer and editor
writer editor born-again horse girl

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Grace Paley

August 25, 2007

Just learned simultaneously from my sister and from AlterNet that Grace Paley died earlier this week, on August 22. Damn. There's a lovely tribute by another writer, Thulani Davis, on AlterNet this morning: "Remembering Grace Paley, 1922-2007)". I particularly like this part:

She taught many of us, particularly women, what it means to be writer and citizen. As a writer, she taught the value of lives that often go unremarked, and as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist" she showed that embodying citizenship fully is liberating.

Born Grace Goodside, the third child of dissident Jewish immigrants who fled czarist rule in Russia, her childhood was steeped in political debate. She viewed dissidence as a part of citizenship, not as alienation from it.

It's silence and conformity that signal alienation from citizenship: how do we get that idea across in these weird times?

I love this too, from a 1986 interview:

[F]or me it was that in writing poetry I wanted to talk to the world, I wanted to address the world, so to speak. But writing stories, I wanted to get the world to explain itself to me, to speak to me.

I wrote a lot of poetry through the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of it wasn't bad, but I never was a poet the way Grace was. For me poetry was always a stretch on the way to somewhere else, though I didn't know where. (Still don't, though these days I have some clearer ideas.) "I wanted to get the world to explain itself to me, to speak to me." Yeah. I also want people to explain themselves to me -- why do you do these off-the-wall things when you know they're not going to end well? -- which is (partly) to say that I'm trying to get me to explain myself to me, and in a way that's cheaper and more fun than going to a shrink.

In May 1994 I found a short announcement in the New Yorker about an upcoming reading by Grace Paley, I think at the 92nd Street Y. The announcement jumped off the page of margin-to-margin teeny print because there was a great portrait of Grace at the top of it, and the prevailing color was red. An interviewer asked Grace if she planned to write about the developing situation in South Africa. Grace replied that she might have a character comment on it, but "If your feet aren't in the mud of a place, you'd better watch where your mouth is."

Yep, that's where The Mud of the Place got its title. "Deer Out of Season," the story that became (with considerable renovation) the backstory for Mud, was published that year. I was still sputtering from President Clinton's vacation on Martha's Vineyard the previous August. What infuriated me wasn't the president, it was the press: How could so many people swarm for so long over so small a place, write so many words about it, and get it so fucking wrong? Plenty of things they didn't see, and even more things they saw but didn't know what they were seeing. And these people were getting paid to write reams of words and shoot miles of film that would go out into the world and shape other people's perception of the place -- a place I was coming to know pretty well, at least well enough to know how much I didn't know.

"If your feet aren't in the mud of a place, you'd better watch where your mouth is." That warning became my goad and inspiration. I extrapolated a bit: If my feet are in the mud of the place, and I'm pretty good with words, maybe that's what I'm supposed to be writing about? If not me, who? What I am doing is not a big thing, but I believe it's worth doing -- and that I may be the only person on the planet who can do it. I broke the 40-page barrier, which I was sure I couldn't do; I wrote a novel, which wasn't even thinkable till the 40-page barrier was cracked; and now I'm trying to get the novel out there, which I'm not entirely sure I can do and if I do what the hell difference will it make? Believe me, I'm not the kind of person who keeps pushing the same damn rock up the same damn hill. At least I wasn't when I started.

All along, my fantasy has been that when Mud of the Place went into production, I'd write to Grace Paley, tell her how I found that little squib in the New Yorker and what it meant to me then and what it means to me now and would it be OK if I used that sentence for an epigraph? In my fantasy she wrote back an encouraging note, said "Of course," and asked for a copy of the published book. It won't happen now. Permission, if needed, will come from her husband, or her estate, or her publisher. Still, Grace Paley is in the mud of my place and always will be.

Rest in peace, Grace. On second thought: don't. Keep asking questions, and keep kicking butt.

 

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