Episode 54: Jim Phelan & Alison Booth — Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father”

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Alison Booth discuss Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father,” first published in the New Review in 1972 and then republished in her 1974 collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Alison Booth is the Brown-Forman Professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to narrative theory, Booth has expertise in the digital humanities, Victorian fiction, women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, travel writing, and biography. For nearly a decade, Booth served as the Faculty Director of the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab, currently called the Digital Humanities Center, and in 2005, she served as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Booth’s books include Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, How to Make it as a Woman, and Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries. Booth’s projects in digital humanities include Collective Biographies of Women, an extensive database built from an online bibliography of more than 1,250 such collective biographies.