[The following interview was originally conducted with Paley in 1988, and was originally published in The Brick Reader, edited by Linda Spalding and Michael Ondaatje, 1991. In the interview Paley discusses her characters’ voices, her political interests, and the inspiration for several of her stories.]

[Wachtel:] Why did you start writing short stories?

[Paley:] I’d been writing poems for a number of years—in fact for most of my life. But they weren’t doing the work I wanted them to do. So I felt I had to try to see what I could do with the story form.

When you say the poems weren’t doing the work that you wanted, what do you mean?

I mean a couple of things. I couldn’t use people in the way I was really interested in doing. I began to think about language and sentences, and using other voices. And I had also become oppressed by my worries, my feelings about women’s lives. That was in the mid-fifties. I began to hang around with women, doing the mundane things that most people don’t enjoy too much but which I really loved. I liked working in groups. I began to feel a great deal of pressure on my soul about women’s lives. A lot of them, even then, were women alone with kids. My kids were in day care. Also it’s as though some kind of sound in the air had begun to be heard by other women and by me, even though we didn’t know what it was.

A lot of this began to bother me. It wasn’t just a question of women. There were my aunts, my mother, et cetera. I had to find a way to write about them. My husband was really good about this. He said, “You have a sense of humor and it’s never in any of these damn poems.” And it’s true, it wasn’t. “And you’re interested in people.” All of this was true and I was also interested in myself as a Jewish woman, which I had not really thought about particularly or read about in literature. So all of that came together at one particular time and I began to write stories. Once I started I was lucky. I was sick that year. As a result I had to be home a lot and the kids had to be away a lot, so I had a couple of months in there—maybe two months—in which I could really carry one or two things to completion. Getting that done was important. Actually beginning and finishing the two stories in my first book—“The Contest” and “Goodbye and Good Luck”—was great.

What kind of voices are you referring to when you talk about the use of other voices in your work?

For me, you don’t get to your own voice until you use other people’s voices. I mean, you’re not going to get that gift until you have paid enough attention. And maybe in the use of other voices, in that kind of dialectical experience, something happens so that your own voice comes through, almost in opposition. It sounds peculiar, but I think I’m probably right. That’s what I was interested in when I wrote those two stories—one in the voice of an aunt who’s totally invented and the other in a man’s voice.

Your writing style is very original. Were you conscious of going your own way when you began writing short stories?

I was conscious in this sense. I had gone to school to poetry, I hadn’t gone to school to fiction. I’d gone to school to poetry to learn how to write, so I had the habits of a poet, which seem original maybe in fiction. That’s part of it: the kinds of jumps and leaps and liking of language that a poet has. The other thing was that I didn’t like literary life. I was afraid of it. I didn’t want to be part of it in any way, so that must have entered into the way that I began to write. I was afraid of being cut off from my own life by going into another world that was more literary. But I didn’t think, “Oh, I’m being original.”

I had done a lot of imitating. Not on purpose, though. I didn’t even know it when I was imitating someone like Auden and writing with a British accent. Not on purpose, but because this tune was in my ear and I couldn’t get my own tune going until I wrote stories. I wasn’t so much aware of it as I felt something peculiar was happening. I’m probably doing something wrong, I though. I was writing about those lives that no one would be interested in. I was putting in all those kitchen scenes that no one would care about. And I was writing in a funny way that probably nobody would like. But I had a great commitment to finish.

To some degree you write the way people talk. You have syncopated rhythms of speech. How do you do that?

I don’t know. I just listen to people. If you pay attention you get some things right. I also rewrite a lot. I don’t get it the first time. It can take me a helluva long time to get even the simplest dialogue right. Just an exchange between two people in four lines can really drive me crazy before I get it right.

A lot of people say they write to create order out of chaos, but you let a certain amount of chaos into your stories. Everything isn’t tidy and ordered. Things jump from one thing to another.

That really comes from the poetry. Once you write poetry you get a certain courage about jumping and making leaps. You don’t feel you have to put in five paragraphs of transition every time you go from one room to the next. I don’t know if one makes order from chaos, it’s such a general statement. I’ve said it myself, to tell you the truth. But it seems to me that that’s just one way of looking at it. You might just as easily and with as friendly a tone of voice say: “I’m here to make disorder from excessive order. I’m here to bring a little bit of noise into this quiet place.” Why not? Why not say that too?

Where do you start with a story?

It could be anything. It could be a sentence. I’m thinking of a story called “Distance,” which begins: “I was the lady who appreciated youth.” And I just put that sentence in. I was thinking about something. I didn’t go on with it for a long time. Then I wrote another paragraph. Then I realized I was writing about this Irish woman and it was her voice I was writing in, which I didn’t really know until I was well into the second page and she was the mother of one of the characters in another book. So that’s how it starts. Sometimes it starts with an argument, like “The Immigrant Story.” I was just having this abstract argument between two characters. One was being psychological and the other historical. I was writing that argument out for myself and I realized a few years after I wrote it out that it was the beginning of a story that I had been thinking about for a long time.

Do you recall what it was about women’s lives that you particularly wanted to write about?

In my first book—I guess it was in my mid-thirties—I was trying to understand men’s attitudes towards women, which I had begun to dislike very much, after years of liking both men and their attitudes. I had lived in army camps years earlier with my husband who was a soldier when we were kids—I mean we were in our early twenties, maybe nineteen. And I liked men pretty well in those days and I like them now, but there had begun to be something very wrong. And I had begun to be aware of it in a way that a lot of women were—suddenly feeling a discomfort—even women who were presumably happily married or who had not seemed terribly dissatisfied. I had not been very ambitious, so I can’t say it was because suddenly I realized I couldn’t be a lawyer or a doctor or something. It was nothing like that. I didn’t want to be anything. I didn’t even want to be a writer; I just wanted to write. I liked having kids, I liked all that very much. But I became very resentful of the general attitude of men towards women and maybe getting older had something to do with it.

Where did your feminist consciousness, or whatever you want to call it, fit into your general political awareness?

It didn’t for a long time. It did to this extent: that I worked a lot with women. Women, in general, have been the main workers in local organizations, even the local organizations of great big centralized organizations. But forget that. Think of ordinary things, like getting a light at a crossing. I worked for a long time, at a time when Jane Jacobs was in New York, at keeping a road out of Washington Square Park. Lots of things like that. PTAs were almost entirely women. A kind of sisterhood was happening inside local work—a lot of which involved children, but not all. And then finally, when the Viet Nam War came, there were men working with us too. We had a local [Greenwich] Village centre, but women were still doing a tremendous amount of the work.

To what extent do you draw on your own life? The work seems autobiographical.

Basically I don’t, or basically I do. My life is totally different from this woman Faith’s. I lived with my children’s father for twenty-two or twenty-three years, whereas she’s really alone. My children are different. And so in every particular way, in every accountable way, it’s not my life. But on the other hand, she could be a friend of mine. She could be some friend who hasn’t been registered yet.

Do family or friends think they appear in your work?

Actually, much less than you’d think. I had to point out to a couple of my friends that I had really jumped off their backs. That’s what you do: you get on the back of a person or a sentence and you jump. Sometimes they are very close to life. I have a couple of stories, like “Friends,” which I wrote in memorial for a friend of mine who died, so that happens sometimes.

In that story about the death of a friend, you write that you, or the character telling the story, are “inventing for my friends and our children a report on these private deaths and the condition of our life-long attachments.” Is that your purpose as a writer?

I never really think about my purpose as a writer. If I did, my standards would be so high that I would never reach them. If you said, “What should be your purpose as a writer?” I’d think something noble and gallant and great. But as it is I write because I want to tell you something. I write because I don’t understand what’s going on. And I begin to barely understand my writing. In that particular story, I was trying to understand all our difficult relations, not just with the woman who died, but with the other women. And another reason you write—it’s just what every writer does—you simply illuminate what’s hidden so in that way you become a person who makes some justice in the world. Every writer does that who’s serious, but you do that by accident.

You equate illuminating something with justice?

Yes, if you have lives that are hidden, where nobody wants to talk about them and you shine a light on them then the world sees that light for the first time. You see that in all new work. We began to write about women and put it in the same scale as the life of men. Black women, Native Americans, different classes. The middle class shone a light in the nineteenth century or earlier, saying: This is how we live, not just the nobles. We’re this rising middle class, get a look at us, we’re having a good time, we just invented capitalism.

Is it difficult or problematic to try to integrate politics into writing without being didactic?

No, it’s not difficult in that sense. It’s something that for me is maybe a little easier than for someone who doesn’t do a lot of politics. I really want to write about those people who think about it and talk about it. And I really believe that more people think and talk about politics than writers let on. Writers don’t let them talk about anything mostly. So it’s not hard. And as for being didactic, you want it to be part of the form of the story and one of the things that the story is about. So that to leave it out would be much more noticeable than putting it in.

One of the things that you try to do when you’re writing—you can’t really do it—but you try to give as much primary experience as you can. That is, you want people to respond to what you’re writing in a way that is as close as possible to the way you yourself responded to the event. But the only way you can do it is by not telling them how to respond, because once you do that they won’t. People are very stubborn. There’s no dealing with them. So what you try to do is be as primary as possible—really really do the event somehow. You might do it in a very surreal way, I’m not talking about naturalism or realism. You may go way out and yet the reader knows what you’re talking about. But if you start telling people what to think they get kind of grouchy. My characters’ political nature just means that they’re aware that they live in the world.

What can a writer do, while functioning as a writer, to have some impact on the world politically?

It’s kind of mysterious. I don’t even dare to think in those terms because it’s too great a dream to think that you could be that useful. Everybody longs for that. And yet we know that there are writers who have been able to speak for different classes or groups or colors. The success of a lot of Black women writers has been empowering to women, whether they mean to do that or not. I think partly you write to give yourself a sense of possibility. In the sense that you strengthen others, you can be useful. You give courage. It’s the thing writers think about a lot. And you don’t really know who’s the boss of beauty.

Who’s “the boss of beauty”?

Who’s the judge? Who’s the critic? Who are they to say you can be political or you can’t? Who knows in what way other work will come forward that is both didactic and beautiful? Who’s in charge?

You have this line in a story called “Anxiety” [from Later the Same Day]: A woman is leaning out from her window and talking to a young father she doesn’t know and she says, “Son, I must tell you that madmen intend to destroy this beautifully made planet. That the murder of our children by these men has got to become a terror and a sorrow to you, and starting now, it had better interfere with any daily pleasure.” Is that you talking?

It’s me talking, but you don’t see me doing that … Think of people who are doing really outstanding political work, for example in Central America. People who really decided that they’re going to put their lives into trying to prevent a war down there. Take a guy like Ben Linder who went there to build dams, and to help construct—not protest—but construct a new society. These people make up their minds to put away certain daily pleasures. I’m sure they have had a great time—in fact, Linder’s a clown from before and rode a monocycle and did wonderful things with children. You can’t live without joy and pleasure. But there have to be a lot of serious people around, of whom other people say: Tsk, they never think of anything else. What’s wrong with them? There have to be a lot of people who never think of anything else any more.

Are you one of them, or have you been at different times in your life?

No, I never have been totally. During the Viet Nam War, I spent a helluva lot of time doing all kinds of work, and I do again, now and then, but I’m a writer too and I have to do that. I have strong feelings for happiness.

How can you maintain your optimism?

Who said I was optimistic? No, I happen to have a cheerful disposition. But I’m not optimistic. I think we just may kill ourselves ecologically before we kill ourselves with nuclear war, so that’s a great piece of anxiety. But at the same time, you do see—I think some of my early political struggles had some success. The little ones, the small ones, really, that shaped the city, that helped make parts of the city decent, which most of it isn’t, New York, I mean. So you have some of those successes and they shape you a little bit, they give you courage for the future. And I think the United States would be at war right now in Nicaragua if it weren’t for the breadth of the anti-Central American War movement—if it wasn’t for that, and if it wasn’t for the fact that we worked so hard during the Viet Nam period. So in general, Americans no matter how often they vote for Reagan really don’t want to go to war right now. They’ve lost their taste for it. I’m happy that I was a little tiny part of helping them lose their taste for war.

Are there other American writers you have an affinity to who are writing political fiction?

There are many different kinds of writers who are thinking about these things. There’s a young woman, Irini Spanidou, who isn’t writing about the U.S. at all, she’s writing about Greece. She has a book called God’s Snake and it’s all about women. Then there’s E.M. Broner who’s a very interesting writer. Mary Gordon thinks about these things a lot. There are a lot of women writing about women, but in a very narrow kind of way, in a way that is so classbound. I really don’t know how to describe it because although it does what I believe in doing, it describes the lives of women, which I’m interested in, I don’t really care about that particular middle class or upper middle class of women and marriages and infidelities and stuff like that. It’s a little too late for that. There’s got to be more of a move. Marge Piercy has given herself the great and serious task of covering all the bases, and there are people I really love like Tillie Olsen and Kay Boyle who are still writing away there—Kay is in her eighties—fierce and amazing women.

Are you conscious of apportioning your time towards writing or political action or happiness?

No, I’m just pulled one way or another: writing, politics, house and family. That’s all right. It’s an idea of life. If you can take it, and you don’t feel guilty. Feeling guilty is what’s wrong. I tend to be pulled without an excess of guilt—just enough so I know something is happening to me. I’m a writer but I’m also a person in the world. I don’t feel a terrible obligation to write a lot of books. When I write, I write very seriously and I mean business. I write as well and as truthfully as I possibly can and I write about the things that have created a good deal of pressure in my head.

Who are the people who you hope or imagine will read your books?

The whole world. I’d like everybody to read them. Sometimes I’m surprised by the people who read the books. Without the support of the women’s movement the response might be different. I’m very conscious of the fact that there exists a movement, a political and women’s movement that supports all women writers, no matter who that writer is, even if she says: “I hate feminism and I don’t really like women too much.” Even so, that woman, whether she knows it or not, is supported by the historical fact of the wave of the women’s movement. So that exists for all of us women right now and we’re very lucky.

Do you think of yourself as a realist writer?

No, I don’t think about where I’m lodged in the house of literature.

How do you want to be remembered?

I don’t know. I just don’t think about that. We all throw ourselves into the hearts of our grandchildren and luck.