Mar 9-11, 2007
“All language has music,” said Grace Paley, whose fiction is deceptively casual. She speaks each sentence out loud while working, until her writing has a declarative elegance all its own. Called “one of the best writers alive” by Newsweek’s Walter Clemons, the possibility of hope permeates all her stories.
A gifted teacher, her workshop — for experienced as well as beginning writers — was planned to focus on creative writing, storytelling, poetry, and peacemaking, on the beauty of language, and our characters’ needs to make their own path in life.
Unfortunately, Grace’s health has not been well, as she was born in 1922, so we have asked Noy Holland to help with the teaching. As we post this, we don’t know whether Grace can make it at all, though it is our hope that she will at least come to do a reading. If she is doing well, we hope she can be our honored wise woman, presiding over us all. She is an exceptional human being and we are sorry to bring you this news.
Fortunately, the gifted writer and inspiring teacher Noy Holland has agreed to help with the workshop. Here is a statement she sent us:
“I believe, as Grace Paley does, that language is music, and that we are better off enjoying the confluence of the arts -- dance, music, poetry, prose -- than we are by deferring to their boundaries. Good writing startles us back into life. It expresses the neglected thought, the unseen, but seeable image. A powerful story or poem is aware of itself; it generates, through mindfulness, its own fierce and affectionate rules.
“I believe we can sustain Grace Paley's presence in our workshop, even in the hours she is not in the room with us. Grace lives in her work with great clarity and vitality; we need only to look to it. So let us look to Grace's work, and to the work each of you bring to the room, the work that is on and beyond the page, that keeps its head up in the confluence of life and art.
“I had the good fortune to teach with Grace two years ago, and it was fairly daunting to carry the workshop forward happily in her absence, to sustain her presence in her absence. But we did so, and I think pretty much everyone went home feeling nourished.”
Noy Holland has written two story collections, The Spectacle of the Body and What Begins with Bird. She is, in the words of New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, "more poet than storyteller...wondrously new and strange." Holland's short fiction and