Fathers and Daughters
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
Hi Ami,
Grace Paley sort of died last week. It was long and slow and coming and she persisted until the end. I went with her to sit in Rep Peter Welch’s office in Burlington in March to try to get him to vote against war funding. Grace sat next to me on a couch in his office and we took turns with other protesters reading the names of US and Iraqi dead. Grace kept asking me what people were saying because her hearing wasn’t so good anymore. A few weeks later, there was a big impeachment meeting with Welch in white River Junction and Bob and Grace were going to come. We kept looking out for them (I had just spoken with Bob the previous day and he assured me they would be there), and finally Bob arrived alone very late. He had forgotten and Grace was too tired to come.
Then she was supposed to give areading at the Norwich bookstore in March and it was cancelled due to snowstorm and re-scheduled for May. When she and Bob read, someone asked her to read her poem about spring that had been in the New Yorker that week. She read the poem in her delicious, accessible manner and when she finished she said, “I don’t know why they didn’t publish this in April. I sent it to them in plenty of time. Oh well, what do I care, they paid me for it so they can do what they want to with it.”
We had a lovely friends and family memorial at The Roth Center at Dartmouth Sunday morning. I have been so weepy about this, having spent so much time with Grace in so many different venues and been so close (as many also were), doing lots of politics and protest together. It was a beautiful event. Even Galway Kinnel came and read a poem of hers. We sang Yiddish partisan songs and freedom songs that she sang with the children in Thetford Elementary School next door and where her grandkids go to school. She has left such a space for us to fill. Always read with a laugh and wise words.
Thanks for putting her on the blog.
Love, Liz
Comment by Liz Blum — August 30, 2007 @ 10:11 pm