i saw grace

many years ago (i'm guessing when i was about 20 give or take) at fordham university. she was giving a reading. a friend had turned me on to her poetry and after that i was gone! i wasn't expecting what i heard. for some reason or another, i thought ms paley was going to have a soft, quiet gentle voice. it was anything BUT that

ms paley's works moved me. it's been years since i've read her. i know what i'll be doing for the rest of the week

Remembering Grace Paley (1922-2007)

By Thulani Davis, Women's Voices for Change.
When the writer and activist Grace Paley died this week at the age of 84, we were left much poorer in a world already running short of honest and fearless souls.

Spotting Grace Paley anywhere -- at a march, or on the street in Greenwich Village, and particularly in the crowded rooms of New York literary soirees -- was like coming upon a sunny isle of sanity in a world gone mad with hasty, hardened greetings, glittering costumes, and too much patience with the intolerable.
To see Grace was to come upon a complete human being, so fully herself and at home with herself as to be easily noticed in crowds of people ambitious for any sign of accomplishment. When Grace Paley died on August 22 at the age of 84, the writer and activist left us all much poorer in a world already running short of honest and fearless souls.
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.
She was married twice -- first to Jess Paley, a film cameraman, and, in 1972, to playwright Robert Nichols, who survives her, along with her children Nora Paley, Danny Paley and three grandchildren.
Having started writing as a poet, studying at Hunter College and with W. H. Auden at the New School, she brought economy and an acute ear to her fiction. In a 1986 interview, she described the switch to fiction:.......