“What We Need Right Now Is to Imagine the Real”: Grace Paley Writing against War

Abstract

Hanover, New Hampshire. Another frigid winter day. I am walking to lunch. The dartmouth college green is covered in snow, and temperatures are dropping. It is January 1991, the day after Operation Desert Storm was launched in the Persian Gulf. “stop the war!!” A few people carrying large and small signs stand on the corner closest to Main Street; you can see their breath as they chant. “US out of Kuwait!” The war is so new that no lectures or teach-ins have been scheduled on campus yet, and I see that the protesters are neither students nor faculty members: they are people, many of them older, from surrounding New Hampshire and Vermont towns. Ahead of the academics, once again, I'm thinking. As on other such occasions, Grace Paley is here, wearing her blue parka, purple wool hat, snow boots, and mittens, holding her sign. The protests will continue every Friday at noon, in snow and ice, until the United States starts moving troops out of the Gulf in early March; I join when I can, but I often have conflicts on campus. Paley drives in from her home in nearby Thetford, Vermont, every time, without fail.