EPISODE · Feb 27, 2020 · 24 MIN
Grace Paley Saves the World
from Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives · host Toronto Public Library
Works by Grace PaleyLater the Same DayJust As I ThoughtA Grace Paley ReaderThe Little Disturbances of Man Other Related Books or MaterialsGrace Paley, the Saint of Seeing by George Saunders (link opens a New Yorker article)Grace Paley’s Crowded World (link opens article in The Nation)The Value of Not Understanding Everything: Grace Paley’s Advice to Aspiring Writers (link opens Brain Pickings article) About the HostNovelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.Music is by YukaFrom the ArchivesWriters Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
What this episode covers
Though the audio has a few technical glitches and rough patches given the age of the recording, Grace Paley’s story within a story, which she performs herself on stage in 1994 in Toronto (a story she calls “Oliver’s Story,” but which was published under the title “The Story Hearer,” as part her 1985 collection, Later the Same Day), has many of the hallmarks that made Paley one of the English-language’s most original and intelligent short story writers. Starting around a dining room table conversation as a married couple compare their time off before the “hard time to come” (and in an nearly perfect opening paragraph), Paley’s narrator dives into the retelling of her day, moving from the humour of her domestic duties to her roundabout quest to buy greens while referencing Artaud and Surrealist French Theatre with the neighbourhood grocer. This charming and at times oblique story seems to cry out for multiple listenings as, with many of Paley’s stories, new images, new words, new ideas and new comic lines reveal themselves each time.
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Grace Paley Saves the World
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