(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.