Discussion Topics
In Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice,” Shirley defines Christians as “lonesome”. Why?
In “An Interest in Life,” John Raftery claims that Virginia’s problems—which he refers to as a “list of troubles”—only add up to “the little disturbances of man . . . .” What significance does this comment have not only in defining his and Virginia’s characters but in shaping the underlying theme of the story and the collection of the same title? what does his comment say about his attitude toward women, considering that he deems Virginia’s troubles not “real”?
In the same respect, Virginia comments that “noisy signs of life” are “so much trouble to a man.” What does this comment (and the above comment by Raferty) say about gender attitudes?
Of her many stories, Paley’s “The Loudest Voice” is often anthologized and quite popular. What makes the story so accessible, so universal?
Consider the ambiguousness of the title “Faith in a Tree.” What significant meanings do you find attached to the title and present in the story?
What is the tone of “Faith in a Tree”? How is it conveyed by the author?
Consider the stories with neighborhood settings. How do these settings reflect the attitude of the narrator? How does each alienate or embrace the narrator?
As an author, Paley incorporates part of her familial, writing, and political life in her works. Which stories are clearly centered on family and the importance of family? Which are more political in tone or theme? Does the authorial inclusion interfere with the story? In the same respect, do you find her motherly themes an interruption of feminism?
Other Literary Forms
In addition to her short fiction, Grace Paley has published the poetry collections Leaning Forward (1985), New and Collected Poems (1992), and Begin Again: Collected Poems (2000), the nonfiction works Conversations with Grace Paley (1997) and Just as I Thought (1998). She has also contributed short stories to The New Yorker and essays on teaching to various journals.
Achievements
Grace Paley received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Council on the Arts grant, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for short-story writing. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980, and in 1988 and 1989 she received the Edith Wharton Award. In 1993, she was awarded the Michael Rea Award for the short story and the Vermont Governor’s Award for excellence in the arts. In 1994, she was a nominee for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1997, she was awarded the Lannan Foundation Literary Award.
Other literary forms
Grace Paley (PAY-lee) is primarily known as a short-story writer. Although her output was modest, she attracted a devoted following and was praised by critics for her astute dialogue, which was extremely spare and, at the same time, remarkably rich. This dialogue for which she was famous had a tonal diversity that reflected actual speech, great understatements, and sudden shifts in rhetoric. Paley was among the first American writers to explore the lives of women, especially the lives of single mothers who traversed their daily lives between the extremes of sexual longing and relentless fatigue.
Paley’s first collection of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women in Love, was published by Doubleday in 1959. It received rave reviews, and the editors at Doubleday encouraged her to write a novel. She spent a few years working on this longer project but eventually abandoned it, believing it was not very good. In 1968, Viking reissued The Little Disturbances of Man , and it was instantly successful. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published her next...
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two collections of short stories,Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985). She also published a collection of short fiction and poetry, Long Walks and Intimate Talks: Stories and Poems, which appeared in 1991.
Achievements
Grace Paley began attending Hunter College in New York when she was fifteen years old and later studied at New York University but never earned a degree. She attributed whatever success she had as a short-story writer to her study of poetry, which she continued to write all her life. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ms. Fiction, Mother Jones, and other magazines, and have been used as models in writing workshops. She started teaching in the early 1960’s at Columbia University and Syracuse University, then joined the staff of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.
In 1961, Paley helped found the Greenwich Village Peace Center, the same year she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. In 1970, she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1974, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, her second collection of short fiction, appeared. This, together with her first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, used techniques such as fragmented plots, shifting narrative voice, and authorial intrusions, causing Paley to be considered a postmodernist writer by some critics. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980. In 1983, Paley won the Edith Wharton Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. She was named the first official New York Writer by Governor Mario Cuomo in 1989. The Collected Stories (1994) became a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 1997, she received the Lannan Literary Award for fiction and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. In 2003-2006, she served as poet laureate of Vermont.
