Paley visits campus

On Wednesday night, author and activist Grace Paley read selected works to the students, faculty and staff in a crowded Carnegie Root Room.

Paley is the author of three collections of short stories, three volumes of poetry and prose pieces and a newly-published essay collection, entitled Just as I Thought.

In 1989 she was appointed the first official New York State Writer. She has received many other literary awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction Writers and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

Creative Writing Program Chair Martha Collins introduced Paley as a writer who "has not, like many writers, simply had ideas; she has done something about them."

Paley shared some of those ideas and what she has done with them Thursday with the Review.

Grace Paley: I'm really a short story writer and a poet. The essays aren't really essays; they're really things I've done for specific reasons. Having been in Vietnam, I had to write reports when I got home. The same happened when I went to Russia.

They're journalistic, in other words. I don't think of them as a form, or at least if they are a form, I haven't mastered it. They're prose forms, the way in which everybody tells a story.

GP: I wanted to write about things I didn't know how to do in poetry. That's not to say they weren't done; other people have done them, but I didn't know how.

I was interested in the lives of women and children, and specifically very interested in what was happening to the women I knew in the mid-1950s, our generation. I wanted to try to understand those lives, and when you write about them you don't understand them. You use writing to try to understand.

GP: I don't know what that means. I wouldn't call it an inspiration. Inspiration gives you the mode to write in, and what I've written about a lot is exactly that. I've written a lot about the lives of women, as I said before.

For me it was writing about things I didn't understand. And I didn't understand anything, like how people live together, what our society imposes upon them, how people live in one culture differently from another.

GP: It's not up to me to describe it; that's up to the critics. I'd only say that I really love language and literature and I'm interested in people, in human beings.

GP: I went to Vietnam in 1969, during the war. I went with a couple of other writers and publishers, partly to talk to the Vietnamese about signing copyright agreements. There was a lot of discussion about international copyrights. I met a number of writers and talked to a lot of people.

When I went that time, I saw the total wreckage we'd made of the country. It was really scary to see the absolute destruction of the tiniest village; it was so depressing to know your own country had done that.

But when I went in January of '98, what I saw were middle-aged American vets trying to help out and rebuild things and put things back together. It wasn't the usual; it wasn't just charity.

GP: The most interesting thing that happened to me was that after I went there the first time, I wrote an article about a woman in a tiger cage there. A tiger cage was where they put a lot of prisoners; it's like being in a hole with the bars on the top, so you're exposed to the wind and rain.

I wrote the article in 1972 describing this woman in a tiger cage, and when I went back to Vietnam in 1998, she came to meet me at my hotel. Someone had shown her the article years later and she found me. She'd been tortured so much, her neck was still out of kilter. But she was a biologist and she was doing well.

It was a very exciting and beautiful experience. I'd written the article for a small paper. You never know when something you do will get back to you.

GP: I don't think like that. What great is, what small is, you don't know. Who knows? People shouldn't think like that.

GP: I went with a group of people in the anti-Vietnam War movement. I went with five other people to say we supported dissidence. We asked them to support prisoners of American oppression. We told them about the woman in the tiger cage, for example.

Chile had just fallen, and we asked people to support those people who were being imprisoned and killed. In Russia we met with Andrei Sakharov, the most important dissident there, and we really stood behind him.

We had a lot of trouble with the Russian government-they were mad at us for meeting 'those people.' But Sakharov said he'd support anybody Amnesty International supported, which was very important.

GP: In my stories, I'm really interested in ordinary lives. I've known a lot of really brave people who went to prison before they gave up.

In my own family even, my father had been sent to Siberia for fighting against the Czar. Family stories really stay in your mind. I put one story my father wrote in my new book. It's about his young self in prison. It's a wonderful story.

GP: No. I was a little kid; I didn't know he wrote. As a child I would write a little of this, a little of that. I probably got it more from my big sister's encouragement. There's always someone in every family who says, 'That's a nice sentence. Write another one.'

GP: You just have to keep writing. Keep a low overhead and never live with somebody who doesn't respect your work-sweetheart, lover, husband, wife-it's crucial that they respect your work.

Also read and read and read a lot. Read our great literary history. You'll get a sense of the past but you need to live in the present. You need to put the two together.

What I've written in the preface to one of my books is that there are two ears for different purposes. One ear is for traditions in the English language. The other ear is for your neighborhood and home language and the language of your early childhood. You shouldn't give up on either one of those languages.

GP: First of all, I'm impressed that they exist, which isn't true on a lot of other campuses. I see a little more energy now in a lot of schools than I did five years ago, so I'm encouraged.

As far as advice, it would be just to stand by their own belief in their natural feeling for justice for all people. And that it's a worthwhile fight that they should realize they might get into for life.

It makes for a very good life; they shouldn't be afraid of it. They may be in for some trouble, but they shouldn't be afraid.