Alice Hoffman’s Keynote Speech at the PEN Hemingway Awards at the John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA
March 30th, 2008

It’s a privilege to be introduced by Lois Lowry – a writer I so admire and someone I consider a valued friend. I knew Lois’s books long before I met her, and have always been a huge fan of her timeless classic fiction. Thank you Lois so very much.

It’s an honor to be here with you today. Many thanks James Meredith of the Hemingway Foundation, to Tom Putnam and to Amy MacDonald of the JFK library, to the Hemingway family, and to the board of PEN New England for inviting me to be part of this glorious day when we celebrate writers and the importance of a single voice in literature and in the world.

PEN is dedicated to freedom of expression. Since it was founded in 1922, it has been an organization which has worked tirelessly in a fight against censorship and brutality and to defend the rights of journalists, writers, and activists not just in this country, but around the world. This philosophy of oneness is predicated on the idea that the writer is a citizen not just of his or her own city or state or country, but is a citizen of the world. The belief that one’s literary life can be combined with a life devoted to social action is a long held-position at PEN. For me, personally, it’s a lesson I learned from my two literary idols, literary godmothers to a generation of writers, both of whom left us recently, and with their absence have left the world a much sadder, much less humane place.

These two great writers taught me not just the importance of a personal voice in the work and craft of writing, but also the importance of adding one’s personal voice to the communal voice of humanity, as a writer who is part of the larger web of the world.

Today, as I stand here before you, in this wonderful library, I would like to honor two women who changed my life as a writer and as a human being, who clearly affected every woman who as a writer followed them, whose voices were unique, beautiful, singular, compassionate, generous, fearless — as many women around the world who dare to write and tell their stories are today. I would like to honor my literary Godmothers: Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen.

Grace, who died at her home in Vermont this past August at the age of eighty-four published three volumes of extraordinary short stories which changed the shape of the short story just as surely as Ernest Hemingway changed that genre forevermore. Grace was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer – both of which she should have won – she was elected to the National Academy of Arts and letters and Mario Cuomo chose her to be the first official New York State Writer. Her stories have a unique rhythm, almost as though the words on the page live and breathe. Her characters are so real they seem to sit beside you on the couch.

Grace won many honors for her fiction and was constantly asked for more by her publisher and her readers – more stories, more books — but she didn’t have time to meet all of their demands. She was equally dedicated to her other life as a political activist, in the 50’s working against nuclear proliferation, joining the war resister’s league in protest against military action in Viet Nam, being arrested for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn. She was jailed several times and worked endlessly for women’s rights. She continued to protest till the end, voicing her opposition to the war in Iraq. In one of her last interviews when asked what her dreams for her grandchildren were she answered: “It would be a world without militarism and racism and greed – and where women don’t have to fight for their place in the world.”

When writing about Grace after her death, The New York Times reported that she was “among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women – mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers – in all their dailiness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.”

Tillie Olsen left us in January of 2007, at the age of ninety- four. Born to Russian Jewish immigrants she grew up in Omaha and worked a waitress and domestic worker. She was a political activist in the socialist community, briefly a member of the American Communist party, and spent her adult life in Berkeley California. Her collection of short stories, Tell me a Riddle was a seminal feminist work, especially the story I Stand Here Ironing one of the most beloved, anthologized, and famous stories of our time. But perhaps her most powerful work was the non fiction volume Silences, her analysis of the silences in a writer’s life, particularly in a woman writer’s life, written while she was at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. She was concerned with why women publish less frequently and why they receive so much less attention – and so many fewer prizes – than do their male counterparts (Although thankfully not today!!!)

About Tillie Olsen’s small output, the novelist Margaret Atwood wrote of the “grueling obstacle course” of being a wife and mother. “She did not write for a very simple reason. A day has 24 hours. For twenty years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have brought both.”

The balancing act between being an artist and being a citizen of the world as an activist is further complicated by being a woman and a mother. Add to that trying to make a living and you have many silences all over the world.

Like Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen I grew up a working class girl raised by socialists who were involved in the union movement and the anti-nuclear proliferation movement. My world was made up of women – New York Jews from Russia who prized story-telling, personal histories, folktales, good deeds, social action – who believed that doing good in the world was the responsibility of every Jew. We owed charity and kindness and compassion and action. My mother was a working single mother, a social worker for the state of NY in foster care and protective services, helping families that were unable to function due to poverty and violence. My mother’s obstacle course was the same as Grace’s and Tillie’s, without the escape and joy of creating art and literature. As a girl I watched that struggle. I admired that struggle. But I didn’t know that struggle could have a voice.

As a girl, I was a fanatical reader. I read the science fiction and fantasy my father left behind when he left us – wonderful writers such as Ray Bradbury and Phillip Dick. I read the great literature on my mother’s bookshelf – Hemingway’s brilliant stories, Faulkner’s mesmerizing novels, Salinger’s thrilling one of a kind The Catcher in the Rye. But in school and at home, I could not find a voice I could relate to as a writer. In high school the only women who ever appeared in the curriculum were British and dead.

We read Jane Austen, though people snickered at the “smallness and domesticity” of her world. Her wonderful novels would probably now would be deemed too quiet to be published, or relegated to chick lit, that vicious category meant to devalue serious books by all women by clumping literature together with drug store fiction and thereby diminishing it all.

We read the Brontes – brilliant and challenging and with remarkable psychological insight, but deemed by critics to be overly domestic-- One with a heroine who has a penchant for victimization – Jane Eyre -- the other a gothic melodrama that is often chided for being an over the top ghost story – which also happens to be my favorite novel of all time – Wuthering Heights. These books were never viewed as being on a par with those of those written by their male counterparts. As a woman who wanted to be a writer I heard that loud and clear.

When I was starting out as a writer I was fortunate to study at Stanford University with the greatest creative writing teacher of the past century, Albert J. Guerard. Professor Guerard, who was both a scholar and a novelist, believed that the most important aspect of being a writer was the writer’s voice, and that it was this unique aspect – so original and singular it was like a fingerprint – that made for great writing. The writer’s voice was made up of childhood experience, childhood readings, adult reading and experience, along with dreams and desires. A writer often began to find his or her voice by imitating the writers with whom he or she felt an emotional connection. At Stanford, within a group which had included Raymond Carver and Scott Turow, many writers were most drawn to Hemingway and Faulkner. When Russell Banks spoke before you here at the library not long ago he noted that, “Like so many American writers of my generation, perhaps especially those of us who are male, my sense of the enterprise, my view of myself as a writer, my understanding of the writing process for better or worse… have been generated and shaped by the life and work of Ernest Hemingway.”

But as a New York woman, a working-class Jew who had grown up with a cultural pull toward the folktales of IB Singer and the novels of Kafka as well as to the family tales of life in Russia, but without female literary identification, I had no such models. The curriculum of our shared literature had painfully few women’s voices and close to no ethnic voices. In my room in Palo Alto, looking out at an alien landscape of palm trees, artichoke plants, and blue skies, I thought of the writers who had preceded me at Stanford – Ken Kesey, Robert Stone – and of the great western realists who were currently there and I fell mute. How could a woman write great literature? Wasn’t great literature by definition concerned with tackling the huge issue of war, specifically combat, something that, I as a woman of that time, I could never personally know.

I became lost, confused about the ways in which I could find my voice. Masculine voices defined greatness. The text that was used in our workshop at Stanford was called The Single Voice. A great anthology – but I noticed that what was missing from the text was the same thing that always seemed to be missing – women’s voices. Women’s stories. There were only two women included – Flannery O’Connor and luckily, wonderfully, fatefully for me – Grace Paley.

When I read Paley’s story In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All, I felt an immediate connection, a shock at both the uniqueness of her voice and rhythm and the deep bond between her world and mine. This is what great writers do: they allow their readers to connect to the inside core of a piece of fiction, to feel that we too have lived similar lives, breathed the same air, felt the same horrors, experienced the same delights as their fictional characters. Could domestic life, women’s’ lives, really be the stuff of great fiction? Grace Paley has stated that her stories did not meet with success when she began to send them out to magazines precisely because they were female.

“I had been reading the current fiction,” she has written, “fifties fiction, a masculine fiction, whether traditional, avant-garde, or – later—Beat. As a former boy myself (in the sense that many little girls reading Tom Sawyer know they’ve found their true boy selves) I had been sold pretty early on the idea that I might not be writing the important serious stuff. As a grown-up woman, I had no choice. Everyday life, kitchen life, children life, had been handed down to me, my portion, the beginning of my big luck, though I didn’t know it.”

That big luck is the ability to have compassion and empathy, to express the inner workings of family life, and that is important serious stuff. As feminists and activists, Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen were in touch with both the inner and outer worlds of what matters most. Love, loss, heartbreak, the scars of war and the violence and joy of every-day life. And yet then and now, it is a struggle to have the voices of women be heard and the stories they tell truly be valued.

Of her beginnings Grace writes: “I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women’s movement… Others like… Tillie Olsen, who was writing stories through the forties and fifties, had more consciousness than I and suffered more. This great wave would crest half a generation later, leaving men sputtering and anxious, but somewhat improved by the crashing bath.

Every woman writing in these years has had to swim in that feminist wave. No matter what she thinks of it, even if she bravely swims against it, she has been supported by it – the buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness.”

I think of the life I was fated to – as a woman and a mother – as my big luck. Although I don’t believe a writer has to personally live an experience to write about it or to emotionally intuit the feelings and thoughts related to that experience, motherhood – the process of giving birth and caring for an infant — enlarges and changes one’s view as a writer and as a citizen of the world. What we write about, what we vote for, what we protest against, what we work towards are all influenced by giving life, not taking it.

I found my voice in California, while reading about a woman who told her story while ironing and while reading a series of stories about wise-cracking free-thinking deep-loving women in New York. I found the freedom to tell my own stories, in my own rhythms, because I knew it had been done before, brilliantly, uniquely. That gave me faith, the hope that it was possible to tell a story that mattered to myself and to my reader. I wrote and I kept writing. This year, my 31st in publishing, I will publish my twenty-fifth book, The Third Angel. I haven’t exactly been silent. Tillie Olsen once put forth the notion that before the late 20th century all the great women writers in western literature had no children or full time help. Thankfully, for me, there was Hollywood. Being a screenwriter supported my novels for many years and for that I am grateful to Warner Brothers. And also to the women before me – the writers who showed me the effects of poverty on their work, along with my mother and my grandmother – both of whom supported their families and who always said to me – “Honey. Get a job.” One of the greatest gifts my mother gave to me was to never clean or cook – I have followed in her footsteps, however dusty they may be, which has afforded me many writing hours.

As proud as I am of the books I managed to publish in a difficult publishing world, I am also committed to what I was able to do because of those books. The advance from my novel At Risk went to Amfar and to PEN’s People with Aids Fund. The advance from my book Green Angel supported a year of after school programs at Girls Inc. in New York City and also at the Grand Street Settlement House, where my grandmother had found solace when she first arrived from Russia. My advance for my book of stories Local Girls was used as the seed money for the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt Auburn Hospital. Every year, many writers have given selflessly of their time to raise funds for that center so that women with cancer will have a supportive environment, a caring place where no one is turned away from treatment. Grace Paley was one of those writers – I was lucky enough to read with her several times – We were speaking of our politics on one particular night and not being as brave as she, I was nervous that there would be hecklers in the audience. I asked Grace’s advice. What should we do if someone began to berate us? “Honey,” she said to me with a huge grin, ready for the fight. “We’ll just sink to their level.”

I have learned from my both my godmothers and my grandmothers that what we give back is as important as what we publish. For a few selfless and amazing women such as Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, activism is at the very center of their lives, sometimes to the dismay of devoted readers who have always wanted more.

All the same a gift is a gift. A voice can use a thousand words or half a dozen. The story is what we carry with us, at the deepest level. Storytelling began with grandmothers telling the smallest children those tales that have been with us since the beginning of time. Fairytales and folktales are meant to give us a blueprint for how to be human. Today I’d like to end by thanking you for inviting me here with a beginning – from Grace Paley’s collected stories, a beautiful lifetime of work, here is a dedication to her dear friend which interweaves the everyday and the immortal.

“I visited her fifth floor apartment on Barrow Street one day in 1957. There before my very eyes were her two husbands, disappointed in her eggs. After that we talked and talked for nearly forty years. Then she died. Three days before that, she said slowly, with the delicacy of an unsatisfied person with only a dozen words left, Grace, the real question is — how are we to live our lives?”

This is the truth of the matter and the heart of what constitutes great fiction, domestic or otherwise. This is what we remember. Thank you to Grace Paley, to Tillie Olsen, and to you here today.