I've never not known Grace; she was my great aunt, my grandfather's baby sister. I last saw her in Provincetown on Cape Cod at my parents' condo about two weeks before she died. I was in a bad mood and had decided that my husband and I would go out to dinner instead of spending the evening with her, her daughter, her grandchildren, and my parents. As we started out of the complex toward town, I saw that she had left the condo and was standing alone on the faded boardwalk looking out onto the pebbled parking lot. She was holding a flower that she must have just picked from somone's tiny garden. I stopped to kiss her goodbye. I had that feeling a person sometimes gets when they suspect that it's the last time. We went out anyway. I don't know if I'd feel better now if I'd stayed. Probably not. But still I wish I'd stayed, at least a few more minutes. I would like a few minutes with her now.

Grace Paley wrote the way my grandmother talked: pointed, succinct, yet somehow showing you a new way to look at something. You didn't miss what was left out. I had the honor of introducing Grace Paley when I directed River Styx in the 1980s in St. Louis, and I recall that when we had dinner in a Chinese restaurant -- Bill and Mary Gass, about ten of us -- we were at a round table, and, somehow, we talked in the round. Among the many celebrated voices that we brought to St. Louis, Grace Paley seemed most "at home."

i am damned lucky to have known grace for my entire life, her syntax and vocal pitch partially raising me, the soup smells of her kitchen nourishing me from an early age, the very singular feel of her compact hugs a constant throughout my childhood. there is this hole now, where her very vibrant, vivid self used to be. i can't stop hearing the echoes of her soft, pursed (somehow it was), significant voice; nor would i ever want to.

I first met Grace in the 70’s. I was living in Queens near the Nassau County border and I thought everything pertaining to feminism and writing happened in New York by which I meant Manhattan. I joined the Feminist Writers Guild and became its Program dDrector. That’s where I met Grace. She was the Guild’s godmother, always willing to speak at meetings, give advice, availalble.
She didn’t look like the writers whose pictures I saw in the papers or who read at the 92St. Y. Nor did she dress like them, but then she didn’t write like them either She wrote about women who sat in the parks and playgrounds, with their kids in tow, talking about life and how to live it.

Over the years I went to her readings, took a workshop with her; she introduced me and others at a reading series, gave me a blurb for my first novel. I became involved in Global City Press for which she gave benefit readings, contributed stories, advice. She appeared as the keynote speaker at two writing conference I organized, coming to the second one by bus from Vermont already ill, pale, but determined.

It was not til after she moved to Vermont that our friendship took on a more personal nature, mostly through Saturday morning phone calls. “How are you?” she’d ask and mean it.

She missed New York. “It’s not the same, bearing witness in a mall out here,” she’d say. “I miss the streets.”
Maybe that’s why we got along. She was a Jewish girl from the stoops of the Bronx, I was a Jewish girl from the stoops of Brooklyn.

We talked about our families. After my fiftieth wedding anniversary, she said, “I’ve been married fifty years, too. Twenty five to one and twenty -five to the other.
After my husband died, she called the next day to ask what she could do and to tell me she loved me.
We talked about our children, she had two, I had four. Her only regret, she once said, was that she didn’t have two more children. She told me how when she was starting out, she took a course at the New School and the instructor told her she’d never be a writer. She talked about her grandson Zamir whose name means song, and how she took him to Dartmouth for a Saturday morning Jewish program.
Ae talked about my granddaughters and their American Girl historical dolls. She said she would get the African-American doll for her younger granddaughter.
I interviewed her for Jewish Currents about being Jewish. She said her basic philosophy, one we all needed to live by, was to speak truth to power.

She talked about the cancer, how solicitous her son was,how, caring her daughter was, watching, not letting her do any work, getting her special treatments, how it had spread. She made a joke about a drug that gave her a lot of energy, but also caused her to talk a lot.
She talked about her wig. She said it was so natural that people complimented her on her new haircut.
She talked about the transfusions and the wonderful family trips to Cape Cod. She didn’t want a fuss made about her personally, refused public birthday celebrations.
I saw her at demonstrations especially against the war. We both decided not to go to the demonstration during the Republican Party convention, persuaded by our families that it would be too hot, too crowded, with possible violence. We both regretted our decision.
The last time I saw her was at the last march against the war, she with her daughter and husband, and I with a. daughter-in-law. When I got to the tent at the end near Foley Square, I collapsed in a chair, and there a few feet away was Grace. I hardly recognized her. She was thinner, pale, tired
“It’s getting too hard,” she said.
I said, “It seems as if we’ve been marching all our lives.” She said, “As mir leben, muz mir tuun.”
Loosely translated, it means, “As long as we are alive, we must do the work.” She did the work to the end.
I miss her.

I had the incredible good fortune to take a Jewish Literature course with Grace at Dartmouth College in 2000, and her amazing empathy, kindness, and fierce intelligence came through with every class. Most days she'd enter wearing a big Vermont down vest, sit down at the head of the table and let her feet swing back and forth like a little kid while she thought about how to begin. The class had a couple of students in it who liked to debate and argue, often around heated political issues, much of the time about Israel; Grace was expert at cutting through all of the unimportant stuff, managing to silence everyone with a perfect few wise words. All semester I took notes on the little gems about life and writing she'd sometimes say, between discussions on Isaac Babel and Kafka and others. I looked back over my notes the other day and found so little moments of giving that still resonate strongly, and really sum up Grace's presence and style: "Part of writing is our longing to do justice." I can recall her also talking much about community, and the meaning it adds to one's life. This was certainly true of her, and at the end of the semester, she invited all of us oddballs to her house in Thetford. At the beginning, we stood nervously around her garden, but Grace managed to make everyone feel at ease.

Most of us, being frequently self-absorbed undergrads at the time, were too out of it to recognize what a truly fabulous gift we were being given; we'd show up to class fretting about our own personal disasters, while Grace was out protesting, inspiring, and being engaged; she was a true model. (During one class, Grace gave us a great Babel quote: "A person with courage should always find the inner resources to overcome sad thoughts.")

I ran into Grace here and there at different events in NYC in the years after graduating, and she was always surrounded by a number of young writers who-- like I still was-- were too tongue-tied and nervous to say much of anything intelligent to her, other than how meaningful her stories were in our lives. Grace was, of course, unwaveringly kind and humble in the face of compliments and fawning, and her gentle way of smiling and giving my shoulder a little squeeze during every short hello was just as comforting as her wise words those days back in seminar. She is truly missed, her work and her force of life cherished.

Remembering Grace Paley

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Ahh Grace! dear friend. How I wish I could still talk about about you in the present tense. You always seemed so vividly present even as your attentions swooped like humming birds.from one thing to another. When I was seated with you at a table for two I came to realize how the whole restaurant was actually your table You were an admitted eavesdropper with eyes and ears everywhere as we readers know from your stories. In your own kitchen too your loving interest darted from grandchild to newspaper item to your poem in progress on the dining table and to your soup on the stove. All your favorite enameled pots.and pans came to have burned bottoms in consequence of your excitement with everything around you and your impulse to help parent the wide world. It was an impulse that took you from family, typewriter and friends to Vietnam and to Chile and to Nicaragua as well as so many meetings and sites of vigil and protest; a cot in the Womens' Prison in NYC, a sleeping bag on the ground at Seabrook, N.H’s. projected Nuclear Power Plant and a demo in Moscow's Red Square. But it was always and always back again to family, typewriter and friends. We who knew you well remember how, in your constant round of attentions, you lost keys and mixed up your papers and alarmingly juggled stuff ( and joked) till the last minute. But you made it all work. It is just beautiful how you paid attention to so so much and most particularly to each and every word,comma and space needed to tell, to warn, and to praise. At the end you were worried that you couldn’t get to it all yet you stuck with it through your illness as long as you possibly could. I think of you in your flannel nightgown longing for bed but still altering lines in two of your late poems.
So Goodbye And Good Luck Grace. We feel you very very near to us and there is so much still to be learned and savored of you and your jokey spunky and so generous way of doing life

I feel very sorry for the world that Grace is no longer in it, though glad for the world that her work still is. She was my hero long before I ever met her, and she was the least disappointing person for a slavering young writer to meet in person: she lived up to every expectation and then some. I once saw her whack someone with her collected stories because his introduction for a reading was too worshipful. To be in her company was to live a little while inside her work. If only all of life were like that.

One measure of Grace's great spirit was that, no matter the occasion, she (and Bob, too) was always the most interested in the least important people in the room.

I met Grace Paley in 1977. She would come to a poetry program on West 46th Street in Hell's Kitchen that started at 10 or 11 pm and was often in search of an audience. She was very supportive to the poets, and on one occasion was the only person besides me in the audience, but her smiles and comments charmed us, filling the house with her presence.

One evening, a few days after a poetry reading, I was walking along 6th Avenue just below Eighth Street with a friend (an elder bohemian born in 1899). A voice from behind me, greeted us. Grace was walking with a group of younger women and she paused to say something that was really dear to me. I'm still not sure whether she was referring to my quixotic efforts at running the weekly poetry readings or my friendship with a man over 50 years older than me. But, the memory and warmth of her greeting has stayed with me these many years.

9/1/07 12:30 pm

I read and was therefore in awe of Grace when I first met her. It was at some crowded affair and I didn't know if she actually noticed me when we were introduced. A little later I was in Hanover, NH for some event at Dartmouth (it was during a stay at MacDowell), after which I went into a shop in the village for something. Grace was there and when she saw me her face lit up and her greeting was a hug-and-kiss one. She had an all-encompassing warmth that made me feel so special that I glowed for weeks after.

We were both at a Feminist Press Gala about a year ago. I told her I was born in the same year as she. I knew she was battling cancer, but she looked fine. "Well," she said, "we've had a pretty good run, haven't we?" Her run was fabulous!

I had the privilege to meet Grace Paley a few times, which is to say I was in the same room with her, awestruck by the passion and compassion of the great writer I had read and reread, taught and retaught. She was lovely to me and others, kind and sincere, and I could barely find my voice to speak back, so moved by the immensity of the person, the politics, the poetry. May she live among us forever. Let me rephrase that. Grace Paley does and will live forever. That's a pledge.

I never had the fortune to meet Grace Paley nor to hear her read. But the sound of her voice I knew well, well enough to find my way back to her poems and essays year after year. Much of her work I know by heart. The rhythm of her words, her eye for details, hold keys for touching the human condition. Her modest direct wisdom invited her readers to feel. She made politics a human subject, not an idealogical one. She was an unrepeatable voice that rose above so many others. Justice. Mystery. War. Family. Love. She showed us with grace how writers can change the world by seeing and caring about others.

There are few contemporary voices that I have admired as thoroughly as I admired Grace Paley. She was my hero too. I feel really lucky to have passed a couple of nights in her company. I always learned something and I always felt something.

I was privileged to visit Grace in Thetford in the fall of 2003. When I walked into the house, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor, converting Stop the Violence Against Women picket signs into Stop the War in Iraq picket signs. She wasn't no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh than she's been these last years. She served homemade vegetable soup for lunch, along with stories of her travels, worries about her new Mac, and hopes for her and Bob's Glad Day Books. The soup was slightly unthawed in the middle but zesty, and Grace herself was nourishment enough for a lifetime, that day and always, in her person and her works.

Thank you, Grace, for all those years of fighting the fight and writing the poems and articles and pamphlets and books. Thank you for showing us our best selves.

Grace and I were token women on RESIST in the 1960s and also part of the group who formed Teachers and Writers Collaborative--all before The Feminist Press in 1970. But from the first, Grace was a supporter who signed fundraising letters and cheered us on. When I was depressed in 1978, she called me every day, urging me to write a poem about the blue jays I had named. And when she went to Israel and Vietnam, among othre places, she asked, "Where are the women writers," and told people about the Feminist Press. We were pleased to be able to put into her hands--at the last--the Vietnamese Defiant Muse she had written a Preface to, and the small volume called by them Here and Somewhere Else, in which her voice and Bob Nichols' are joined. Grace was the inspiration not only of the staff and Board, but of the hundreds who attend our Galas each fall, where she has always, until now, appeared and read a story. It is hard to bear a world without Grace.

I was very saddened to hear of the passing of Grace Paley. Though I did not know her personally, I often heard her read and speak during the years. I felt like she was a member of my family, one of my older relatives, from the Bronx, who would relate to everyday matters in a knowing, wise and smart-alecky voice -- always authentic and caring. I remember seeing and hearing her at the recent convocation in New York where she was a recipient of The Marshall Meyer Risk-Taker Awards given to progressives who display an extraordinary amount of spirit, courage, productive activism, and "chavanah" --- heart and soul, all of which Grace embodied. I remember being bolstered by her writing years ago when I took a writing course with John Gardner who despised "women's writings" particularly urban, Jewish writing about urban Jewish life, the complaint often given that nothing happens in stories about everyday women's lives, and as I read Grace Paley's work --- one could see that "everything" in life happened in these supposedly simplistic tales of women talking, shopping, caring for children, being betrayed and abandoned, carrying on.
Rest in peace Grace.

Grace was the perfect name for her. She wore it perfectly and at all times. It was always a delight to be around her to listen to her words of wisdom. She will greatly be missed.

Bruno A. Quinson

I had the tremondous privilege and pleasure of taking a week-end writing seminar with Grace in 1980. She opened the first class by saying, "We write because the world is a cold place. Someone has to warm it up."

I last saw Grace when she read her short story about her father at the Whiting Awards. The ceremony was held at the Council on Foreign Relations. The host gave a lengthy introduction listing her many accomplishments and describing her work in detail. He'd done his homework. Then Grace appeared on stage and motioned for help. Obviously, the Council on Foreign Relations is a venue for folks (mostly guys) who top out over six feet in height. Grace needed a boost. Someone produced a box. Not exactly a soap box, or a bully pulpit, but up she stepped, and read with her usual fierce and funny mastery.

The email from a friend alerted me to yet another local demonstration yesterday evening against the war in Iraq. I did not want to go. It was a beautiful time for a kayak ride, and I didn't kid myself that this demonstration would make any difference. Then I recalled the outpouring of sentiment about Grace Paley, and I got out the poster board and started making my sign. The kayak could wait. The gathering was larger than expected and very heartening. And I spoke about Grace -- whom I would often encounter at the Jefferson Market when we both lived in Greenwich Village -- to many of the activists I saw. Her life and her stories are an inspiration.

Grace was a friend (and to many), bright, tough, uniquely voiced, gifted as a storyteller, not so much witty as humorously wise (irony was her metier), a kind of secular saint, for whom writing was not an obsession or even a career (“There's a lot more to do in life than just writing!”), only an occasionally active part of the larger life lived around it. We first met in a divided Berlin, partying on both sides of the wall, and she was the cheerfully outspoken Belle of whatever ball she found herself in. It’s no wonder that she and Angela Carter (“Nothing Sacred”) got on so well for they were made of the same metal. Much to be loved, much to be missed. I would quote her story title “Goodbye and Good Luck” as an epitaph, but she would reply: "What? Are you kidding?"

When I read of Grace Paley's death in the TIMES, I went to my files and pulled out the review that I wrote for THE REPORTER of her first book of short stories almost fifty years ago. I was happy to discover that I was as enthusiastic about her work then as I am now. When I wrote the review, I had only recently been introduced to her work when Harvey Swados steered me to a story of hers--the first published one, I think--in ACCENT. In the years since then I continued to know Grace Paley through her writing although I never knew her off the pages of her books. She was a marvelous writer--all those voices of hers (particularly that of Rose in "Goodbye and Good Luck")--and, as the tributes above show, a wonderful woman.

Grace was my writing teacher my junior year at Sarah Lawrence, but it is probably fair to say that I learned as much from her about how to live as I did about how to write. Her boundless energy and commitment to the causes she cared about woke me up to possibilities I had never before considered.

I saw her rarely over the years, but each time our paths crossed she threw her arms around me as if I were exactly the person she was hoping would round the corner. I'm sure there are hundreds of people who felt that way because her attention to each of us was so special, so individual, so generous.

I particularly loved listening to her do a reading. She would step up to the podium, acknowledge the applause with that wide smile while she dropped her papers and tried to calm that wonderfully wild cloud of white hair all at the same time. The audience might wonder whether she would be able to settle down, find the right page and the one after that, but then miraculously she would start to read and everybody, including her own bustling, busy self, would go still simply because her story had grabbed each one of us by the throat and refused to let go. You had entered the world of her creation and you didn't want to leave until you knew what happened to the people on her fictional stoop.

The world feels smaller and less human without Grace in it.

I first met Grace Paley in the wings of the bare stage of the Donnell Library auditorium in October 1994, where Poets House was presenting a tribute to the poet Jane Cooper. I was introducing the program and was really nervous until this little compact person, whose incomparable voice I had already heard on tape, flashed me that marvelous smile of hers that seemed to say, "What's to worry about?" Well, it came out during the course of the evening that she and Jane Cooper, separately and together, had worried plenty about plenty during their long lives, and Grace wasn't going to stop trying to fix the world even now, when she was famous. You could detect this determination in her eyes if you looked carefully. But whenever I saw her after that, and the last time was on an evening when she addressed two hundred or so people at an outdoor reading in Battery Park City's Rockefeller Park last summer, she always looked fully alert and engaged, sure of finding something interesting or new or challenging around her to make being there worthwhile. She read her concise, humane, seemingly artless poetry many times for Poets House and each time the poetry and the person made me gasp with admiration.

Grace was an extraordinary woman and generous to young writers beyond what could be expected. As a young arts writer newly relocated to New York I was at a loss as to how to find my feet. Grace held out a helping hand and introduced me to some wonderful people. She offer her opinions on my writing freely and with such kindness that I never felt put down or made smaller because of my blind spots.

Grace's own writing was the heart and soul of grace. She told of lives that weren't celebrities but just people getting up in the morning of their lives and some how finding the courage to get through them despite the many challenges they had to meet that would have broken lesser folks.

What can I say she was herself, down to earth and a warm and complex blessing.

It was always a lovely irony being with Grace in a room and standing there talking with her about politics, about literature, about New York, about growing tomatoes, you name it, to feel just how towering she was, this powerfully wonderful person, this great and gifted and brave writer and activist--so diminutive in stature against my slouching, attentive and affectionate tallness--towering in her graciousness and her firmness about what she thought of everything. That gravelly Bronx voice, that woman who always seemed squared with life, harboring a gravity of her own, so often right about things--unforgettable. She defined the idea of gravitas. Grace, so well named.

In 1986, Terry McMillan and I were in Dick Humphreys' fiction workshop at Columbia. Terry finished her first novel, MAMA, and sent it cold to Grace, praying for a blurb. She didn't know Grace, but like all of us, loved her stories. Grace gave MAMA a wonderful blurb. Last week, I mentioned Grace's generosity to a friend who'd studied with her. "Oh, Grace never said 'No' to an emerging writer," my friend said. The freshness of Grace Paley's language gave me whiplash. Anyone reading her work should wear an orthopedic collar.

I called her Gracie, she called me Sweetheart. We met at Yaddo some 40 years ago. Finding her (and, of course, her inimitable poems and stories) irresistible, I made a point of sitting near her at meals. Nobody could ask for a more engaging companion. Our paths crossed again twenty years later when I moved into the Unadilla, on West 11th Street, where she lived, and where some of her characters clearly lived. Every time we met in the lobby--"Hiya, Sweetheart"--I got a lift. I was on the Pulitzer jury that enthusiastically nominated the collected stories. The jury is precluded from indicating preferences among its three nominees; in my heart I wanted her to be chosen. The Columbia trustees, for their own reasons, selected Carol Shields. Prizes and honors seem singularly trivial now; Grace's wise and pitch-perfect stories will be read as long as there are readers. I pinned on our co-op's bulletin board some photos of Gracie, looking feisty, at a PEN benefit a couple of years ago, and was touched to see flowers on the landing of the second floor, down from her apartment. I will always cherish memories of this brave and brilliant friend.

I think Grace Paley was maybe the best U.S. short story writer of her generation; you'd want to know her characters. Her understanding, humanity and maybe a lack of compromise was necessary to the New York literary/antiwar scene which in the Sixties/Seventies was kind of exclusive but she wasn't. I helped her carry groceries up to her apartment once - she was just back from a visit to Vietnam I think and a little nervous about it, and when she was opening the cupboards there was a bottle of daily vitamins. We looked at it maybe thinking the same thing. She said well I should probably throw that out, and I said oh it's probably okay, and she said well you try one then, so okay I did - and we went for a long walk in Washington Square talking literary things. Not easy to be a political writer in America. She was a constant and good.

I loved Grace's voice in her stories for her miraculous precision and concision--an amazing combination. I also loved her for her directness in political discussions. I remember in particular a dispute in which she and I were on one side in wanting to condemn both the US and the USSR for something or other (this was in the '80s) and Denise Levertov was insisting that it was incumbent upon us to shut up about the USSR and limit our disgust to the US. Grace was wonderfully diplomatic and at the same time convincing and overall caring, to use an overused word. Damn it, I wish I'd known her better.

Grace Paley was a great writer, a passionate and committed activist, and a truly humane human being. She has been my hero for more than two decades and I was sad to hear of her passing. But the light that she left behind in her work and by the example of her life will brighten this world for a very long time.

Not only was Grace Paley the most important, most liberating voice for American women writers of my generation, she was also the best voice to hear in person. She was an extraordinary reader of her own work. Whatever the story she read, the wise-cracking, rueful, street-smart NewYork-by-way-of-Jewish-Eastern-Europe voice was often the star. Once she read at Wesleyan and in the Q&A session afterwards, a student asked her, "What percentage of your work gets published?" Grace's reply, which I've always remembered as expressing her exactitude, economy, honesty, and kindness was: "At first, zero. Now, one hundred."

These are such beautifully and deeply felt homages to a great voice in American letters and the finest of hearts. I had the privilege of working with Grace in her last year, she edited and published my novel, "Edges" herself , with her own money and efforts under her imprint "Glad Day Books". She even designed the cover and lugged it herself to the printer. That was so Grace, these details and I think this is among many poignant examples of how she was towards the smallest and least known voice among us. I sure did fit that description! She was unstinting in her support for this work which was about Palestine and Israel, subjects very close to her. She used to say" I will judge a society not by how its honors the strongest and famous among us, but by how it treats its smallest members."

She lived by her word.

I would like to say that The Washington Post graciously published an article I wrote about Grace this morning. I hope I paid her tribute. She will be there always inside me, yelling and scolding, and but holding me still. The link is here: GRACE PALEY A WOMAN OF HER WORDS"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/

Grace Paley’s literary voice was at once adamant and relaxed, and her work illuminated some of the great paradoxes of responsible adulthood –how you needed to stop the war and make sure there was lunch meat for sandwiches for the kids, how you were a member of a family and a class, how life can be so painful and so humorous. I always feel a kind of tribal sadness when a writer dies, but losing Grace Paley is particularly difficult. On top of her immensely attractive qualities as a human being, and her celebrated talent as a writer of stories, she was a keeper of the flame –the great quasi-utopian flame of American socialism –and without her here it must now fall to others to make certain that it is not extinguished.

I did not know Grace Paley well enough, but whenever I ran into her I found Grace to be a warm, friendly, accessible and straighforward human being. I loved her stories. Rest in peace, Grace - you fearless writer and activist, you lovely and passionate human being!

Grace was one of my closest friends. There are probably hundreds of people who could say this because Grace had the gift of intimacy. She not only made everyone she met feel she valued them; she really did value them.

Grace and I became close during the PEN Congress of 1986, during which we organized a meeting to protest the inadequate number of women speakers, which took over the ballroom of the Essex House Hotel and led to the formation of a Women's Committee in PEN American Center. Grace and I were co chairs of that committee until she moved to Vermont and she became Chair of Women's WORLD when we started it in 1994.

Grace was the kindest and most generous person I have ever known. This is unusual in a writer, especially one of her quality, because writers tend to husband their inner resources for their work, but Grace had so many inner resources that she could afford to be generous. She gave unstinting love to her family and friends, took speaking engagements at any whistlestop, often without pay, organized antiwar and antinuclear and women's demonstrations, worked endlessly against nuclear armaments, did draft counseling, protested on behalf of the environment, free expression, and a just peace between Israel and Palestine.

Despite her devotion to causes where stereotyped language is the norm, she always spoke in her own voice, candid, idiosyncratic, Bronx-inflected, deeply personal and rooted in family experience. More than anything, I will miss the sound of her voice.