Hilary Zaid, Forget I Told You This (and new books by Joan Silber, Marisa Silver, and David Haynes)

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Hilary Zaid, Forget I Told You This (and new books by Joan Silber, Marisa Silver, and David Haynes)

Upstairs, twinkle lights garlanded the doorways of makeshift lofts, thin walls draped with heavy carpets to muffle noise. The floor felt solider up here, at least, and I was only half-alarmed by the sight of a piano—a black, squat baby grand, like my mother’s—under the scales of a wire-frame dragon. Around us, pressing close against our skin, all the warmth of the warehouse gathered like a thick blanket, heavy with weed, cut with the sharp tang of electricity and Blue’s midnight scent.

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Joan Silber on Grace Paley's "Mother" and "A Conversation with My Father"

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Joan Silber on Grace Paley's "Mother" and "A Conversation with My Father"

(Guest post by Joan Silber)

Grace Paley was my teacher, senior year at Sarah Lawrence. People have asked me ever since what she taught me, and I don’t know that I’ve ever answered this right. What I’ve said is true: she told us fiction was all about character, she emphasized voice, and I once heard her say she could write stories when she understood they could be organized like poems. This last bit made perfect sense to me at the time—story as a pattern of emotion—though people are confused when I say it now. I wanted to be a poet then—it was a mixed genre class—and Grace’s first fiction assignment for me was to write in the point of view of someone I was not in sympathy with.

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