SOURCE: “An Interview with Grace Paley,” in Conversations with Grace Paley, edited by Gerhard Bach and Blaine H. Hall, University Press of Mississippi Jackson, 1997, pp. 204-212.

The following interview was originally conducted with Paley in 1988, and was originally published in The Brick Reader, edited by Linda Spalding and Michael Ondaatje, 1991. In the interview Paley discusses her characters’ voices, her political interests, and the inspiration for several of her stories.

[Wachtel:] Why did you start writing short stories?

[Paley:] I’d been writing poems for a number of years—in fact for most of my life. But they weren’t doing the work I wanted them to do. So I felt I had to try to see what I could do with the story form.

When you say the poems weren’t doing the work that you wanted, what do you mean?

I mean a couple of things. I...