Grace Paley

man standing on glass platform on top of building looking down on ground at daytime
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Long and Short of It

In the term short story, “short” is a little baggy. You might find, within a collection of short stories, some that are a few pages, some that are thirty or more. Compared to a five-hundred-page novel, of course, neither of these is a long piece of writing. Both are compressed worlds. But the very short…

Grace Paley’s “Wants”: Activism and Civic Involvement for Writers

Grace Paley’s “Wants”: Activism and Civic Involvement for Writers

After years of dodging PTO meetings and volunteer opportunities, I became involved in a school overcrowding issue in my town because I didn’t want my children’s class sizes to become enormous. The problem seemed simple at first, but soon enough I was attending school committee meetings, spending hours writing emails, and holding forth at a…