“Why should you hurry even through ugliness? You should come among beauties very gradually. Leave a comment ‘Romantic’ by David Constantine In The Collected Stories (Virago Press, 1994) Posted on JanuJby Jonathan Gibbs Posted in Holly Dawson Tagged Grace Paley. The story ends with Cassie launching into a bitter rant at Faith that seems to suggest Paley did not feel successful in this quest: “Why don’t you tell my story? Where is my life? Where the hell is my woman and woman, woman-living life in all this?” Cassie owns the last line – “I do not forgive you” – not just the final line of the story and the collection, but revealingly, the final line Paley ever wrote. Her contagious, funny, beautiful prose is organic and highly personal Paley was suspicious of plot and craft, preoccupied instead with how to be a good person, a good woman, a good citizen. Faith responds: “To everyday life, I said with a mild homesickness”. Her friend Cassie dismisses him as just a “bourgeois on his way home”. Faith watches a young man cross the road and muses about his vitality. The story presents the range of life choices opening up to people in the ‘70s and how this was both liberating and overwhelming – decisions on when to commit suicide, how to be a father, which arty sandwich to choose. Many centre on a loose alter ego, Faith Darwin in ‘Listening’, the last story Paley wrote, Faith’s sons are growing up (“trying the find the right tune for their lives”), her marriage is going through difficulty, she is involved with writing and activism, and is debating a new baby. If I could only read one short story writer it would be Paley, whose stories, rooted in the immigrant experience of life in the Bronx in the 1970s, explore (as her obituary stated) “what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow’s men loved and left behind”. ‘Oh man in the very center of your life, still fitting your skin so nicely… why have you slipped out of my sentimental and carnal grasp?’ As Paley says, “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the destiny of open life”.T Posted on JanuJanuby Jonathan Gibbs Posted in Holly Dawson Leave a comment ‘Listening’ by Grace Paley But now I keep people alive and let the surprise of kindness in. My characters used to die all the time they were voiceless, vulnerable, weird, and the world hated them. These stories made me a more compassionate writer. The desire to be truly seen or known, to have a voice, to be loved against the odds. I like authors who astutely nail the subtle tectonics of relationships, both between people and the relationships with ourselves, as exemplified by Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin. This has become more important to me than ever over the last few years, when I have begun to read for therapy as much as for research or pleasure. These selected stories are hymns to the persistence of life, from Levi’s uplifting memoir sketches to Ruth’s acknowledgement in ‘Romantic’ that “One thing in my favour is I am alive”. But as Flannery O’Connor states: “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored”. I’m interested in moments of connection and compassion – difficult to do well without being saccharine or disingenuous. A few years ago, I realised I was drawn to stories that manage to transcend these wretched parameters stories that offer some sort of redemptive moment, that keep characters alive and offer second chances. Happy marriages do not exist neither do happy endings. Worker's rights, feminisms, reproductive rights and marginalised bodies and their positions are all thought through in this startling and innovative voice.Short Story Land wouldn’t be a nice place to live: tragedies abound, trauma and misery are rife, everybody’s lonely and the body count is high. Combining a beautifully performed naivety with a profound intellect, this collection is a hugely original approach to a number of pressing issues. These poems interrogate and poke fun at the expectations of people in a commodified culture with a wry humour. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection of political resistance with both absurdity and seriousness. Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First CollectionComic Timing, Holly Pester's extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act.
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