Wants

Grace Paley once said, "I think I could have done more for peace if I'd written about the [Vietnam] war, but I happen to love being in the streets." Grace Paley is the author of The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Later the Same Day, The Collected Stories, New and Collected Poems, and a gathering of essays, Just As I Thought. Her many honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Senior fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship in fiction, the Edith Wharton Award, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for short story writing, a Lannan Award, and a citation as the First Official New York State Writer. Grace Paley is clearly a writer of great renown, but in some circles she is known primarily for her political activism. She is a member of the War Resister's League, the Women's Pentagon Action, and she has long been an influential member of PEN, the international association of writers. Perhaps the best description of her politics is her own: she calls herself "a cooperative anarchist." This side of Grace Paley grew out of protests against the American involvement in the Vietnam War, but the end of the war did not stop her involvement in grass roots and feminist causes. Her linking of personal life to political issues shows both in her approach to politics and in her writing, although her fiction is never didactic. Its subjects are apparently modest: friendship, child-rearing, divorce, intolerance at a very human level. Her politics are likewise apparently modest. As the narrator in the story "Wants" says, "I want to be the woman who brings these two [library] books back in two weeks. I want to be the effective citizen who changes the school system and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of this dear urban center. I had promised my children to end the war before they grew up."

George Bernard Shaw used to apologize occasionally when writing friends, "I'm sorry I did not have time to write a shorter letter." Grace Paley was a teacher of mine and the best advice she gave me was to be unafraid of writing little. By that she did not mean spend little time writing. A critic once said of Grace Paley that her "commitment to political activity and to raising children limited her literary activity." I disagree. Grace Paley has written some of the densest, most complex short stories in the language, and the writing of these stories has clearly taken great time and care. Angela