Grace Paley

And then, um, I keep some of my books in his room, and I grabbed a book off the shelf, and it happened to be, I think you'll, you know, like this know.

Grace Paley, uh, it was Enormous Changes at the Last Minute-

Mm

... by Grace Paley.

And so I started reading it, and then I, I read her, um, the first story in it once.

I don't know if you remember that one, but that's where she, um, she's, uh, going into the library to return these overdue books that she's had overdue for eighteen years.

That's true.

But I remember going to see Grace Paley, the great short story writer when I was in college, read.

And she just got up there and read a couple stories because they're fairly short.

And because I was an empty-headed 19-year-old, I did not understand until I heard her read that her stories are hysterically funny.

They, they considered themselves good people.

And, um, I wanted to really get, you know, the, like Grace Paley say, "Get under the rock of your character's reasoning."

Mm.

What is the, what is the, um, the, the logic, the breakdown behind a violent attack? At the same time, I didn't want to dwell too much on it 'cause then I'd throw agency to the people who mean gay people harm, and I certainly wasn't gonna do that.

And during that more than two decades, I was leading a fairly straightforward writer's life.

I was doing the things that writers do, writing books and talking about them, often in public.

I must have done I mean, probably hundreds of public appearances without there ever being any hint of trouble.

So I had come to think of that part of my life as a closed chapter.

And if you're a novelist, you're not used to collaborating.

Yes, I want to ask you about that.

I mean, how does it feel as a writer to share authorship, which is not something that writers tend to do? No, well,

the reason for doing it, initially, Liza and myself thought, maybe we can just make the film ourselves.

And there were always these white people in my workshop who will come up to me if I'm at the AWP conference and I wanna say, "Would you please get the fuck up out my face? You bullying asshole.

Do you think I don't remember?" I will never forget walking into a party where the great, the late, great Grace Paley, she was a mentor of mine.

She actually went to the director of that program and lit her up because we, the four of us, the four women of color, went to dinner with her, and we were, we were telling her about the racism and about how we felt.

And this, this little old Jewish lady went to speak to the director of the program and was like, "You all ought to be shaming yourself." I'll never forget her humanity.

And we talk about...

The unthought known, and then there's Grace Paley's great, we write what we don't know we know.

And this from some ancient Chinese anonymous poet, we poets knock upon the silence for an

answering music.

nevertheless we resist

nevertheless um I have read some Grace Paley and I love her and I don't know what's taken me so long to like really dive in at this level um but it's been so much fun I just read um Little Disturbances of Man which is I think her first short story collection or an early one um now i'm reading enormous changes at the last minute um i think bill stands that book

it's so pretty sure

it it's so