Buy Ann Patchett's The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life for $2.99.

In my junior year of college, I studied with Grace Paley. The fact that I even met Grace Paley, much less sat in her classroom for an entire year, is a wonder to me even now. There was no better short story writer, and very possibly no better person, though she would smack me on the head with a newspaper were she around to hear me say such a thing. (Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.) The lesson that Grace taught was a complicated one, and I will admit I had been out of her class for a couple of years before I fully understood all she had given me. I was used to Allan Gurganus, who was as diligent a teacher as he was a writer. He was where he said he would be at the appointed minute, our manuscripts meticulously commented on in his trademark brown ink. He gave assignments and picked readings that spoke directly to our needs. But when we went to Grace’s classroom, there was often a cancellation notice taped to the door: GRACE HAS GONE TO CHILE TO PROTEST HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS or something of that nature. Or I would be sitting outside her office for our scheduled conference but the door stayed closed. I could hear someone in there, and frequently that someone was crying. After half an hour or so, Grace would pop her head out, telling me very kindly that I should go. “She’s having troubles,” she would say of that unseen person who had arrived before me. If I held up my poor little short story, a reminder of why I was there, she would smile and nod. “You’ll be fine.”

Oh, Grace, with her raveling sweaters and thick socks, her gray hair flying in every direction, the dulcet tones of Brooklyn in her voice: She was a masterpiece of human life. There was the time she came to class and said she couldn’t return stories because she had been robbed the night before. A burglar had broken into her apartment and tied her to the kitchen chair. She’d then proceeded to talk to him about his hard life for more than an hour. In the end, he took her camera and her bag full of our homework. I’m sure I was not alone in thinking how lucky that guy was to have gotten so much of Grace’s undivided attention. Another time, she came to class and herded us all into a school van, then she drove us to Times Square. We were to march with the assembling throngs to the Marine recruitment offices chanting USA, CIA, out of Grenada! It was crowded and cold, and after we were sent off down Forty-second Street with our signs, we never did find Grace or the van again. I once heard her read her story “The Loudest Voice” in a small room at Sarah Lawrence where we all sat on pillows. Somewhere in the middle of the reading she stopped, said her tooth was bothering her, reached into her mouth, pulled out a back molar, and kept on going.

Like most of my classmates, I was young and filled with a degree of self-interest that could rightly be called selfishness. Nothing was more important than the stories we wrote, the Sturm und Drang of our college lives. Grace wanted us to be better people than we were, and she knew that the chances of our becoming real writers depended on it. Instead of telling us what to do, she showed us. Human rights violations were more important than fiction. Giving your full attention to a person who is suffering was bigger than marking up a story, bigger than writing a story. Grace turned out a slender but vital body of work during her life. She kept her editors waiting longer than her students. She taught me that writing must not be compartmentalized. You don’t step out of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life, and who you were as a mother, teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person. People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say. I would not begin to know how to teach another person how to have character, which was what Grace Paley did.

The last time I saw Grace was at a luncheon at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was being treated for breast cancer. Her hearing was bad and she didn’t answer my questions about how she was doing. She gave me a hug instead. “You wouldn’t believe all the nice people I’ve met at chemotherapy,” she told me.

Buy Ann Patchett's The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life for $2.99.