Faculty Member Joan Silber on the Influences of Grace Paley

Grace Paley was my teacher, senior year at Sarah Lawrence. People have asked me ever since what she taught me, and I don’t know that I’ve ever answered this right. What I’ve said is true: she told us fiction was all about character, she emphasized voice, and I once heard her say she could write stories when she understood they could be organized like poems. This last bit made perfect sense to me at the time—story as a pattern of emotion—though people are confused when I say it now. I wanted to be a poet then—it was a mixed genre class—and Grace’s first fiction assignment for me was to write in the point of view of someone I was not in sympathy with. She may have gotten this from someone else—it was her first year teaching and it’s a pretty common assignment—but I still take to heart the impulse behind it. (In fact, I saw now, when I was looking again at her three books, that Mrs. Rafferty, who’s a pain in the ass in a story in the first book, has her own story in the second. How could I not have remembered that? I who do that all the time.)

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