Grace Paley's fiction is hugely influential–it echoes in当代短篇小说无论你读到哪里。
但是这个夏天，in which the intersection of parenthood and political activism is at theforefront of many of our minds,her life is as much as an example to us as her art.While researching Paley for 苹果beplayKveller's video about her life,我发现了一些关于她如何成为一个母亲的非常惊人的引述，a writer and an activist,and I thought I'd share them with you.
Scroll past the video to read her full words on how motherhood affected her art and activism.
关于女权主义和她的写作：
You see,nothing happens without political movement.Now it just so happens that when I started writing prose,妇女运动正在联合起来。我不知道。What happens is that you're part of something without knowing it.黑人权力运动有一种文学与之共存，支持它。ios下载beplay妇女运动开始发展。Tillie Olson and I didn't know it,but we were part of a movement.I became more and more interested in the lives of women,我不能用诗歌来写这个。我不知道如何用诗歌来写这些材料。我现在可以,但那时我做不到。So I had these stories,and I began to write them,she said in aninterview with Poets & Writers.
On "having it all":
当波士顿评论问到: " You are a writer,teacher,政治活动家，妻子和母亲。How do you manage so much?" her answer was funny and perfect.
"I remember somebody once asking that and I gave my usual wise-guy remark: pure neglect.你知道的，something like that.但真的，I think that any life that's interesting,lived,has a lot of pulls in it.在我看来，我很自然会被这样的方式吸引。When you've got children,you don't want to just hand them over to somebody.It's interesting how children grow and you deprive yourself if you give too much of it away.I don't mean that you don't want to be free,你这样做，you want all that.But that's again a pull,you're pulled,and it's only one life for Christ's sake.你有幸尽你所能去做。我不会放弃任何一个……我认为一个好的贪婪是接近生活的方式。"
On parenthood and activism:
“首先，you fool yourself if you think that you're so goddamn important,you know?You're just not that important.You're important,但是全世界都在培养他们nd insofar as the world is bringing them up—so that if you have a boy,he's liable to be sent off and murdered in Africa or someplace like that—you better pay attention to the world too.一切都是相关的。”
On how being a mom influenced her work:
When theParis Reviewstaff asked her"What were you doing before you became a published writer?她说：“我26岁的时候有了孩子，二十七。I took them to the park in the afternoons.感谢上帝，我懒得在华盛顿广场公园度过所有的时光。I say lazy but of course it was kind of exhausting running after two babies.Still,回首往事，我看到了它的乐趣。那时我对女人和同事都很了解，真的？I had a part-time job as a typist up at Columbia.In fact,when I began to write stories,我在上面打了一些，and some in the PTA office of P.S.41 on Eleventh Street.If I hadn't spent that time in the playground,I wouldn't have written a lot of those stories.That's pretty much how I lived.And then we had our normal family life—struggles and hard times.That takes up a lot of time,hard times.Uses up whole days."
如果你很好奇，buy the recently-released Grace Paley reader,which selects from her fiction,poetry and essays and gives you a full measure of her contribution.
