The amazing and irreplaceable Grace Paley died this week. Grace would certainly scoff at being called irreplaceable, but so be it; she was and is.

I never studied with Grace, though I attended Sarah Lawrence College (where they are hosting a memorial page for Grace) as an undergrad where I got to know her and she became my teacher in so many ways. We struck up a friendship back then more over debating politics and Jewish identity and Israel than over writing, though in those days I was writing poetry and Grace was an amazing reader of the stuff. Each short story was a prose poem and her own poems always cut immediately to the essence.

We didn't really agree politically--she called herself a "combative pacifist" and I never understood how pacifism could hold up as an overarching ideology, but we shared a belief in fighting for a better world and in using the power of words to make that happen.

Plus, she showed me, especially when I was just out of college, in my first year of work when I was employed at her publishing house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the power of politics and art when they intersect. And the need for communications to make a political dent.

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