by Kevin Bowen
The book you hold in your hand has its origins in a series of gatherings held in and around Boston and Cambridge to celebrate the life and work of the late Grace Paley. These December “Birthday Readings” were reunions of sorts for many of us, opportunities to gather as a community to remember Grace and at the same time find renewal as artists, activists, and citizens through public readings of her works. Our readers were an eclectic group that included writers, journal editors, community activists, veterans, students, teachers, even a banker or two. There were many highlights. I remember one performance by former Bread and Puppet Theater members John Bell and Michael Romanyshyn, who set Grace’s words to the accompaniment of drum, trombone, and clarinet. These readings, coming around the date of Grace’s birthday and toward the end of the year, seemed always to be a powerful affirmation of the greatness and importance of her work and of the enduring ability of great literature to fire the heart and inspire.
Over the years, I began to notice two discussions typically in the air at the end of the evening. One was of the rejuvenating power of Grace’s words, and the other the realization that, while many knew Grace Paley through one or another aspect of her work, few knew her through the full range of stories, poems, involvements, and essays. In late February of 2015, I wrote to Nora Paley about the idea of a “Grace Paley Reader.” Nora immediately signed on. The poet Yusef Komunyakaa quickly forwarded a query letter to Jonathan Galassi at FSG. I was in Vietnam, standing in front of a poster of a familiar image of Grace hung alongside those of other writers in Hanoi’s eleventh-century Temple of Literature as part of the World Poetry Festival, when I received an e-mail from Jonathan Galassi saying FSG was enthusiastic about the idea. A dozen busloads of poets from around the world celebrated the news that night. I think Grace would have appreciated that!
In the months that followed, Nora Paley and I worked together in compiling the reader. The task of making selections was never easy. An initial long list was drawn up and circulated among friends and family, Ruth Perry, Geoffrey Gardner, Marilyn Young, Ursula LeGuin, and others, who offered feedback. Emily Bell, who took on the project for FSG, guided us through the editorial process. We decided to keep the stories in the order they appeared in individual collections; the poems and essays we organized thematically.
In creating this Reader, Nora and I have had several purposes in mind. One has been to provide readers like ourselves a single manageable collection of the stories, poetry, and essays, a book that would be an essential part of a favorite bookcase, a collection ready to be slipped out for bus trip into the city or a flight to Vietnam. We wanted a book that would be a good companion: an occasion of remembrance, serious thought, for meditations on art, life, politics. We wanted a book that would not only be a reminder of the power of a story well told but would also recognize the achievements of a generation of activists who stood up in the causes of civil rights, social justice, nonviolence, and peace, often putting their bodies on the line as acts of witness.
Our second purpose was to create a book that would be useful to teachers and students. Grace Paley’s work cuts famously across the disciplines. By offering a sampling of Grace’s work in fiction, poetry, and essays in a single volume, we hoped to offer teachers and students in classes on literature, creative writing, women’s studies, American studies, and other interdisciplinary areas of study a new resource.
Finally, and perhaps most important, our purpose was to introduce Grace’s work to a new generation of readers, writers, teachers, and activists. I think, selfishly perhaps, of my own daughter, who was just four years old when Grace inscribed a copy of the then just published Collected Stories to her, “To Lily, I hope we will be friends for a long time.” Lily was fortunate to know Grace, to have Grace and her husband Bob visit each year for our two-week Writers Workshop at the Joiner Center in June. Still it was only after Grace’s passing that she came of age as a reader and was able to appreciate the richness and complexities of Grace’s writings.
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There are many to be thanked. All those who joined us in those Birthday Readings first of all. Thanks to the people at FSG who contributed to making this book a reality. Thanks to the interns who had to type back in the original texts of the stories and essays. Thanks to Emily Bell, who walked us through the sometimes agonizing decisions regarding content and kept us on target through many e-mail and phone exchanges, and Maya Binyam, who filled in during Emily’s maternity leave; Jonathan Galassi, whose vision and support made this project possible; and George Saunders, for his wonderful introduction. Thanks, finally, to my daughter, Lily, who helped enter the poems and did so much else, and my wife, Leslie, who has been my partner through thick and thin, and who with Lily and my son, Myles, opened our house those summers when Bob and Grace and dozens of other writers would visit. And of course, thanks most to Nora Paley for her patience and good guidance and for all her work in bringing this book into being. It has been a joy working with her and witnessing her devotion to her family, to her children, Zamir and Sienna, and to her mother’s work and her many causes.