Amazing Grace

My heart is heavy today. It’s bad enough to have lost Molly Ivins earlier this year. Now Grace Paley has departed the planet, or rejoined it, depending on your point of view. I can only hope a child’s being born to carry on.

If you have never read a short story (or twenty) by Grace Paley, one of life’s great pleasures still awaits you. If you have read them, you’ll doubtless want to read them again. Her output was dwarfed by her political activism; she nonetheless is undisputedly one of our greatest short story writers.

I hadn’t heard of Grace till the 80s, when writer, teacher, and then coordinator of Women’s Voices Marcy Alancraig invited her to speak to and with us at that workshop. Marcy emerged from her call to Grace grinning. “We were trying to work out a date, and I mentioned one and she said, ‘I can’t come that day. I have to go to jail.’” It turned out she’d gotten busted at a peace march for pouring blood on the White House lawn. When I first read her books, The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, I couldn’t believe the fresh voice, the fresh view. She was not only a great activist; she was an amazing writer.

We all fell in love with Grace when she arrived in Santa Cruz on the bus and joined us for a discussion about writing. For one so celebrated, she was unpretentious about her gifts and informed us that many of her drafts looked terrible in their early stages. It was important to take risks, she told us, “Sometimes you just have to hang out there and look stupid.” She was adorable. She didn’t adopt ladylike poses in her folding chair, and she listened very intently, very respectfully to us all.

When I left Santa Cruz and moved to Vermont, there was Grace. I would see her in the parking lot at the co-op, at the puppet show in the art gallery. She was easy to spot in the community with that wonderful, soft mane of fluffy white hair. “Amazing Grace,” I would say, loud enough for her to hear, then I would scurry shyly away. I have never been good at chatting up famous people.

Now she’s gone, though her writing is a way for me to channel her wit, her wisdom, her inimitable voice. But I’ll sure miss that dear, fuzzy head.