December 11 would be Grace Paley’s 89th birthday. I’ve assigned her story “Faith in the Afternoon” for a writing workshop I’m teaching this weekend, and re-reading it I’m just as dazzled by her brilliance as I was the first time I encountered her work. Grace was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, and no writer who cares about the shining possibilities of language can afford to skip her magnificent stories. In honor of Grace, I’m re-posting a piece I wrote for this blog a couple of years ago.

We lost a great writer last year.  As the remembrances and assessments of Grace Paley continue to roll in, I’m taken aback by the degree to which they focus on her activism and her positive human qualities.  They paint a portrait of a woman beloved for her kindness and conviction, for her good-heartedness and generosity.  This is the  Grace Paley whom Donald Barthelme once called, with respect and affection, an essential “troublemaker”.  Combined, they form a eulogy of love.

I don’t miss Grace Paley because I loved her (although I did, and deeply).  I miss her because her passing means I’ll never get to read a new Grace Paley story.  And that thought cuts to the quick.

Of all the writers whose work has influenced my own, Grace Paley stands head and shoulders above the others for one primary reason:  she captured the human voice so accurately and so unflinchingly that it made me want to abandon all other occupations and try my hardest to hear – and to collect – as well.  Her ear was exquisitely tuned to the nuances of the heart as expressed in the music of our language, and her success at capturing both takes my breath away.  Open any story to any page – to any line – and you’ll find poetry of a level we haven’t seen before in narrative.  (In “story”, as Grace insisted it be called.  There was nothing precious about her view of literature.  She wanted, I believe, to tap in to the unruly river of generations – millennia – of stories, not to be trapped in the ghetto of “fiction”.)

Take, for instance, this, from “Faith in the Afternoon”:

As for you, fellow independent thinker of the Western Bloc, if you have anything sensible to say, don’t wait.  Shout it out loud right this minute.  In twenty years, give or take a spring, your children will be lying in sandboxes all over the world, their ears to the ground, listening for signals from long ago.  In fact, kneeling now on the great plains in a snootful of gray dust, what do you hear?  Pigs oinking, potatoes peeling, Indians running, winter coming?

Faith’s head is under the pillow nearly any weekday midnight, asweat with dreams, and she is seasick with ocean sounds, the squealing wind stuck in its rearing tail by high tide.

That is because her grandfather, scoring the salty sea, skated for miles along the Baltic’s icy beaches, with a frozen herring in his pocket.  And she, all ears, was born in Coney Island.

It is only with great difficulty that I can stop excerpting from a story I rank among the very best work of any time.  She tempered a smart-alecky attitude with enormous depth and sensitivity, harnessing the techniques for such that we’ve come to take for granted (but rarely see applied with such finesse):  launching into the middle of the conversation; granting broad freedom to a shaky narrator; flinging language like paint splats that require standing in the middle distance to perceive the picture as a whole.

Grace Paley builds a world.  It is the New York City of the late(r) twentieth century, when social patterns were shifting, men and women were redefining their relations to one another and to their parents and to their children, and it is never far from the old country that spit the ancestors – like watermelon seeds from the curled tongue of a willful child – to this continent.  More than any other writer I know, she captures the essence of a place as the combined dreams and loves and failures of its people.  She will not walk away from the hardest things:  from rape, from murder, from racial violence, from the backhanded brutality we inflict on one another.  But neither will she deny the strength of love or the astonishing things that can happen to bind us together.  That is her place, those are her themes – and I think they’re so large, so compelling, that they interfere with our ability to adequately assess her technical contribution to the literature of our age.

But let’s just take a quick look at a few of those technical accomplishments.  She flaunted quotation marks and mastered dialogue that was simultaneously pitch-perfect and loaded with multiple meaning.  She was funny – no, she was hilarious! – in her dry manipulation of the power inherent in compact poetic contradiction.  She managed a sustained omniscient voice that sparkled with brilliance at the same time that it ducked low enough to let the individual voices and peculiarities of the characters to shine through. And, indeed, she hosted a whole slew of characters in each story, captured each one succinctly, and generously gave even the most minor the opportunity to knock us off our feet.

As a young writer, I was dazzled by the music of her language.  I’m still dazzled.  And I’m still learning.  Yes, she was a grand lady; the one time I met her in person I was overwhelmed with her warmth and kindness toward me.  For that I love her.  But for her stories, I thank her – and now that there will be no more, I miss her dearly.

The stack by my bedside grows. I just picked up Marilynne Robinson’s ABSENCE OF MIND, which sounds a bit like a murder mystery title but is instead a meditation on the tension between science and religion. Being a science geek with a decidedly non-empirical approach to the world, I’m pretty excited to read what she has to say on this topic.

Robinson is one of our finest novelists writing today. Wait; that sounded lukewarm, and I am scalding hot in my appreciation for this writer’s work. I read GILEAD straight through, and then I turned back to the start and read it all over again. HOUSEKEEPING; HOME — these are master works by a writer who marries an achingly beautiful approach to language to a penetrating inquiry into the nature of morality, particularly as it pertains to human relationships.

And who writes a damn good story.

Speaking of which — I’ve just finished two of those.  Susan Breen‘s THE FICTION CLASS came out in 2008 and I’ve just now read it.  Breen is one of those rare writers who can make you laugh all the way through and then fell you with the earned sentiment at the end.  This novel follows a woman — Arabella Hicks, named for the heroine of a romance novel — who teaches fiction to a colorful assortment of beginners in New York City while juggling the demands of her aging, ailing mother.  Wry, sly, and with not a touch of meanness, THE FICTION CLASS made me laugh, made me tear up, made me laugh again.  I developed a lasting fondness for the characters and for Arabella herself, an old-fashioned and at the same time thoroughly contemporary woman doing her bumbling best to make sense of a world through the stories it offers her.  Extra pleasure for anyone who’s ever taught fiction.

I turned from NYC of THE FICTION CLASS to the Los Angeles and Salton Sea of  CUT AWAY, a short and breathtaking novel by Catherine Kirkwood and published by the inimitable Red Hen Press. Kirkwood has the corner on stunning sentences; this novel may be short in pages, but it’s long on poetry. Surefooted, inquiring, cool in the very best manner, CUT AWAY follows three women whose lives intersect as each gives chase to a missing teenager, a girl who fled her home in search of a clearer understanding of her own identity. Each of these adult women, too, seeks to understand who she is beneath the multiple disguises she herself wears. Los Angeles may be the city of hard surfaces, but it’s the arid, unforgiving landscape of the Salton Sea that serves up the most accurate mirror for these characters — and Kirkwood’s prose is a match for that unrelenting honesty, yielding pleasure at every turn.

You reading anything good, lately?  Or has the world outside snatched your time, too?

photo by Kathy Namba

Yesterday morning we woke up to spring snow, a layer of white that melted well before noon. Beautiful! Except for the fact that we’ve got apricot trees growing in our new digs here in Taos, and the branches are loaded with delicate white blossoms that mean a bumper crop of fruit this summer — IF they can make it through spring without freezing.

It’s a long shot, I know.  One good year in seven are the general odds for apricots in Taos County.  Last year we were swimming in fruit, so I ought to quit being so greedy and just enjoy the snow.

Hanging out among the blooming branches of fruit trees is one of my most favorite, how’d-you-get-so-lucky kind of ways to spend an idle hour. Bees buzzing, sun streaming past the petals, the smell that’s too earthy to call ambrosia. Who wants to go to heaven when you can sit in the crotch of an apple tree here and let heaven settle around you?

My friend Lucy Gonzales wrote about that experience in a writing class I taught in Questa in 2002. Eight years later, she’s got a book out — Treasures of My Valley:  Humor and Survival in Early 20th Century San Luis Valley – that describes not just the joys of spring but also the hardships of growing up native New Mexican, and the resourcefulness and cooperation it inspired. She’s got tales of picking wild raspberries, wearing bloomers sewn from flour sacks, driving a tractor, raising five kids, burying a husband. She’s got a lot of stories. Lucy is 92.

But the story I love best is the way she describes her “secret place.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about secrets in general and secret places in particular. One of the most provocative panels I attended at AWP considered the use of other people’s private details in fiction. What kind of responsibility do we have to the owners of those details when we borrow them for our own work?

Put another way, how much respect should we pay to the privacy of other people’s personal lives?

And places? Even our own places? Can we describe them without revealing their location? Can I say what they mean to me without insisting they mean the same for someone else?

I almost didn’t go to the panel.  Me? I’m hugely respectful of other people’s privacy (I thought). I rarely use details that arise directly from experience, my own or anyone else’s (I thought).  When I write, I take the kernel of a thought or an experience and cultivate it in my imagination (“culture it in a petri dish” is probably a more apt analogy, given the messy state of my mind) so that what emerges will, I HOPE, resound with the emotional truth of the original impulse while bearing no identifiable relation to that specific motivating detail.

But I went, and realized … all that “no sir, not me” stuff? Kinda bullshit.

All writers do it. Autobiographical or not — and I land far on the “not” end of the spectrum — we use the raw stuff of our daily lives as grist for the mill.

So the moral issue stands, for all of us. And sometimes it means a hard, hard choice. Abandon the felicitous detail — the one perfect capsule of meaning that motivates the whole story — or risk treading on something deeply valued by someone else.

Is there a way that the transformative power of art justifies this kind of theft? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m really asking.

‘Cause, the way it feels to me? If I use a secret — my own, or someone else’s — I’m risking some kind of bad karma. I’m risking having that thought or secret or experience taken away from me.  Door closed.  Story over.

Oddly enough, I excuse memoirists from this exchange — on the basis that we each own our own interpretation of our personal history. Memoir carries in its membership rules the one that says:  this is how I see it.

In fiction, we are doing something different.

Aren’t we?

In the northwest corner of New Mexico lies a small jewel called Ghost Ranch. Its redrock landscape is familiar from the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived and painted there for fifty years; and in August of every odd-numbered year, a bunch of women writers from across the country gather to write, to learn, to share their stories, to drink wine, to hike the backcountry, and to have the tops of their heads blown off by that thing called poetry.

Well, poetry and fiction and drama and memoir… all these genres are represented at A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Women Writers Retreat. This year, the fourth incarnation of the conference, faculty included fiction writer Pam Painter, actor and playwright Ellen McLaughlin, memoirist Meredith Hall, poet Dana Levin, and a host of others at the top of their game. The quality of the evening readings blew my mind. Rita Dove, former Poet Laureate of the U.S., was in good company when she read for the group on Wednesday; her spectacular performance, remarkable for the intimacy of the setting and for the generosity with which she shared her thoughts and life experiences, fit seamlessly into the lineup of gorgeous work we listened to all week.

It was especially poignant for me, as it confirmed once more that this organization is one of the most unique, positive, and effective supporters of women writers that exists. I’m fresh off a two-year stint as recipient of their $50,000 Literary Gift of Freedom Award, a grant which allowed me to write WRECKER, the novel I’ve wrestled with since ARROYO came out in 2001. I’m immensely grateful to the organization for its support, and it was with the greatest joy that I passed on my imaginary tiara to the 2009 recipient, New Orleans writer Barb Johnson.

Haven’t heard of Barb? Trust me: you will soon. She’s an amazing talent wrapped in Southern humor and graciousness, a writer who conveys with strength and delicacy the heartbreak of life in Mid City, New Orleans – and the love that redeems it. I’m a new fan, about to be joined by thousands more when her first collection of fiction, More of this World Or Maybe Another, hits the bookstores in October. I’d spoken to Barb a few times before, but spending these days together at Ghost Ranch, and hearing her read a story to the group, assured me that she’s the real thing: smart, funny, original, generous; a writer whose intense language lets her story leap from the page and change the reader’s life.

I felt overwhelmingly grateful to be there, and to stand between two writers – Barb to one side, Meredith Hall, 2004 Gift of Freedom recipient and author of the already-classic memoir Without a Map (a runaway bestseller), to the other – whose work I admire and whose friendship I cherish. It seemed to me a great example of what AROHO does best, which is to bring together women writers whose work and lives enrich each other and spur each other to work harder, trust deeper, believe more strongly in the power of literature to transform our personal lives and to – yes, I’ll say it – make a better world.

That week at Ghost Ranch was a better world, and it was this world: no fantasy, but a real example of what work and intention and love can do when yoked to a worthwhile cause. A tremendous amount of all of those things went into the making of the retreat, and I offer my greatest thanks to Darlene Chandler Bassett and Mary Johnson, founders of AROHO and directors of prior retreats; to Kim Ponders, extraordinary novelist and teacher who threw herself into directing this retreat; to Tracey Cravens-Gras, a writer herself, who worked tirelessly to keep all the ducks in a row; and to all the gifted and generous participants who came together to make this week so tremendous an experience for all.

No question about it: I’ll be there in 2011. Can’t wait to see you then.

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By which I mean to say:  this story is the real shit, and you should rush to read it.

We talked a lot in the workshop in Taos about ways writers reveal place, and I looked at this story with a special interest in how Quade tackled the task.  (I’ll try not to spoil your experience of the story by giving away plot points.  Seriously, you’ve got to read it.  It’s online.  Click on the first link above.)  First – clearly – there aren’t many other places in the country where secret societies of men reenact the Passion annually.  “This year Amadeo Padilla is Jesus,” the story starts.  “The hermanos have been practicing in the dirt yard behind the morada, which used to be a filling station,” and – bingo – we’re set not just in place, but roughly in time.  The story continues to accrue details that set it squarely in present-day northern New Mexico: we learn we’re close to Espanola, we get “Law and Order” and “America’s Next Top Model” on satellite TV, we meet Amadeo’s fifteen-year-old daughter Angel, pregnant and enrolled in parenting classes.  This is no caricatured New Mexico; this is the place in all its rough glory, with its cholos and its lowriders, its fringe Catholicism and contorted views of women and sex, its sense that family is all you have and that that’s why you betray them, again and again, for the sin of their importance to you.

What we don’t get are sweeping vistas of iconic landscapes.  We don’t get blue-framed windows or blossoming hollyhocks or adobe walls or howling coyotes.  We get exactly the details this story requires: nothing less, and nothing more.  An unnamed village where Amadeo Padilla grew up, the “roll of skin where skull meets thick neck,” the crucifix, “violence in the very carving,” hanging in the morada.  These are the details we need to understand the movement of the story, the slow burn of Amadeo Padilla’s growing awareness of his role in Christ’s Passion as well as in the human one unfolding before him.

I have nothing against hollyhocks.  I like adobe walls.  But in the same way that writers can rely on readers to conjure a picture of Paris in their minds without mentioning the Eiffel Tower, I’m happy to see this particular writer lay off the iconic images and direct our attention to the details that matter.

I’m fresh off the experience of teaching at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, a seven-day rush of great words, wonderful people, and – certainly for me, and I’m hoping for the 25 writers (in two groups) who traipsed about Taos by my side – terrific visits to places that reveal the heart of this region. The week started with a five-day “Writing the Where of It” course, alternating days in the classroom with days in the field, and closed with a weekend workshop, “Writing Around Taos,” spent exclusively out and about. I got to hang around with a bunch of talented, interesting, exuberant, good-spirited people who share a love for writing and a curiosity about Taos. What could be better? Well, watching people’s ideas and images bloom on the page in real time – and that’s what the workshops afforded me: the real-time unfolding of beautiful work inspired by the question of place and by the real places we visited.

I’ve got a few people to thank for all the fun I had. First, hats off to Sharon Oard Warner, who launched the first Taos Summer Writers’ Conference eleven years ago on a wing and a prayer, and who must be crazy-proud to see it grow into such a tremendous success. She’s got a crackerjack team working with her. Barb van Buskirk has an infectious smile and a handle on every last detail, and the MFA student interns are smart, cheerful, and always a step ahead of any trouble, quick to head it off at the pass. Teddy Warner (sex and pumpernickel, Teddy? – well, you got us all to smile for the group photo) was everywhere and did everything that needed doing. And Sam Tetangco, Lucy Dupertuis, Robin Brontsema, and Bruce (what’s your last name, Bruce?) were each stellar in carrying out their duties as van drivers for the groups – and brilliant writers to boot.

And the participants? I don’t know how I got so lucky, but to a person both groups were filled with the most engaging, accomplished, good-hearted writers a teacher could ever hope to meet. Watching you guys get to know one another, loosen up in your writing, and enjoy this place I love so much was a true delight for me, and one I won’t forget soon. Sam, Linda, Nancy, Pintki, Ian, Dove, Susie, Valerie, Cathy, Allyson, Lucy, Anne, and Leslie in the first group, and David, Tom, Julia, Jan, Marjorie, Marie M., Marie R., Kim, Jeanne, Suzanne, Robin, and Bruce in the second – you guys rock. Write on, and write well. You’ve got what it takes.

Writing is such a lonely occupation, most of the time. We sit at our desks or draped in our armchairs, the pen poised or computer humming… and we rarely get the chance to exchange ideas with other writers, to talk shop or compose together, to offer our work or listen attentively to others. For one week in July, the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference changes all that. I’m so glad I got to be a part of it.

“To paraphrase our beloved James Baldwin: the world is held together, really the world is held together by the love and compassion and clarity of thought of a very few individuals. Though this idea may be frightening, the world being in such distress, it is also comforting. At least there are a few people who can be counted on to lead us in a proper direction for survival as humans, and for thriving as a species. Aung San Suu Kyi is at the top of the list.” — Alice Walker

In a move of calculated absurdity, the ruling military junta of Myanmar — the former Burma — has brought charges against Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and moved this 63-year-old woman of fragile health from house arrest to jail.

I learned about Burma when I learned Vipassana meditation from those who had been taught by the Burmese “householder” S.N. Goenka, whose teacher was Sayagi U Ba Khin. And one of the first things I learned — not from meditation practice but from the news, and from word of mouth — was that this brave and steadfast woman had made tremendous personal sacrifices to serve as the voice of democracy in a country shackled by a corrupt and vicious military junta. Born into a political family in Burma and educated in and living in the West, Suu Kyi returned to Burma to care for her ailing mother and stayed to lend her nonviolent support to the movement for democracy.

Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and has become an international symbol of peaceful resistance to an oppressive regime. For me, she embodies the grace and strength and courage required to stand up, day after day and year after year, to brutality — and to keep your soul unclenched in spite of what your eyes take in.

Most of the news we hear from Burma is bad.  Cyclone Nargis killed hundreds of thousands of people a year ago.  The suffering escalated as the junta prevented international aid groups from entering the country.  A year before that, a popular uprising led primarily by Buddhist monks was brutally repressed. And Ms. Suu Kyi, who has the support of the vast majority of Burmese people, has been held without trial under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years.

Her house arrest is due to expire at the end of this month, and many observers have accused the junta of arresting Ms. Suu Kyi under trumped up charges in order to extend her detention.

Human rights groups estimate that more than 2100 political prisoners are being unjustly held by the government.

You can learn more about Aung San Suu Kyi at Alice Walker’s blog, and in a long letter  to Aung San Suu Kyi Alice wrote and posted for the world to read.  Another useful commentary that speaks to the world’s response (or lack of it) is posted in this piece in the Guardian.