{"href":"https://api.simplecast.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwritersoffthepage.ca%2Fepisodes%2Fgrace-paley-saves-the-world-V48c0TYj","width":444,"version":"1.0","type":"rich","title":"Grace Paley Saves the World","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_url":"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/d08fb21e-6028-44f9-9263-d34bf5e6de11/3da6bacd-9fdb-4e2c-930a-08cd18054568/writers-off-the-page-2.jpg","thumbnail_height":300,"provider_url":"https://simplecast.com","provider_name":"Simplecast","html":"","height":200,"description":"Though the audio has a few technical glitches and rough patches given the age of the recording, Grace Paley’s story within a story, which she performs herself on stage in 1994 in Toronto (a story she calls “Oliver’s Story,” but which was published under the title “The Story Hearer,” as part her 1985 collection, Later the Same Day), has many of the hallmarks that made Paley one of the English-language’s most original and intelligent short story writers. Starting around a dining room table conversation as a married couple compare their time off before the “hard time to come” (and in an nearly perfect opening paragraph), Paley’s narrator dives into the retelling of her day, moving from the humour of her domestic duties to her roundabout quest to buy greens while referencing Artaud and Surrealist French Theatre with the neighbourhood grocer. This charming and at times oblique story seems to cry out for multiple listenings as, with many of Paley’s stories, new images, new words, new ideas and new comic lines reveal themselves each time."}