It was the first day of class and to honor Grace Paley’s memory I gave the students copies of “A Conversation with My Father.” The writer tells a story to her dying father; he wants a different story, and in light of his comments, the daughter changes her story. (For those who don’t know the line “everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life” is a line from that story. It is a comment about people, but also about stories.) All writing is rewriting but this rewriting also involves writing for or against the voices and expectations of others. I guess that was the pedagogical lesson I had in mind but what amazed me was the ways in which different students, even within the space of a few minutes I gave them to do the exercise in class, quickly settled down to write, often with powerful feelings of injury and love, brief letters to their fathers.

Go here for a discussion between Grace and Ann Charters about the above story. The photo above is from here, and is a fine reminder of which particular fathers the writer had in her sights. Here’s a poem by Grace Paley that I found in the obituary that Katha Pollitt wrote in her memory (via):

The Poet’s Occasional Alternative

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper
the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor
everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it many friends
will say why in the world did you
make only one
this does not happen with poems
because of unreportable
sadness I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership I do not
want to wait a week a year a
generation for the right
consumer to come along