IN MEMORIAM

Grace Paley’s death on August 22, 2007, at age 84, bereaves the Provincetown arts community, as it does all who knew her.

From 1976 Grace was a mainstay of the Fine Arts Work Center’s writing program, giving readings, critiquing Fellows’ manuscripts, serving on the writing jury, and being sociably in residence in Provincetown for extended periods, available to all. She taught and gave readings in the Summer Workshop Program, from its inception in 1995. In 2000 she received the Fine Arts Work Center Medal for Distinguished Service in the Arts, presented to individuals of national stature who have provided exceptional guidance and inspiration to emerging visual artists and writers.

Nearing death she carried on her work, her life’s message, knowing no other way. She read at the Work Center on August 3rd, frail but resolute. She always lacked a capacity for resignation.

The only writer ever invited by the Fellows to read twice in one year, Grace was beloved in a way absolutely unique and pure. She always filled the house to overflowing, because people felt an instant, intimate relation with her– beyond art and literature– as mother, grandmother, sister, comrade, friend, sage, one distinctly of the human race.

An original stylist of the vernacular, "historian," as she said, "of the everyday,"strongly Jewish, humane, pungent, plain, funny, delightfully droll sometimes, inclusively rueful at herself, but serious withal.

Known to everyone as Grace, as Kunitz was known as Stanley and Dugan as Dugan, she gave an immediate impression of sympathetic intelligence. She attended to one with all her faculties, the central presence, where ever she was. What seemed extraordinary, and did not change with the years, was how completely herself she was, at the podium, on the street, always, everywhere.

Of most people there are at least two, if not more, especially public figures. And how can it be otherwise? People need privacy, armor for their psyches. Persona and performance are part of the writer’s trade.

But not the thinnest sheet of onion skin could ever have been slipped between her face and the one behind it, because there was only the one, and that was her consuming work– through writing or through political action– the struggle for sanity and justice world-wide, simple understanding and fairness in things immediate. It lifted her out of herself, to a higher focus, and while she was here it summoned us to see with her.

For thirty years, at the Fine Arts Work Center, the name Grace was in people’s mouths so often and with such love and respect, that it is now a permanent part of the everyday history and mystique of 24 Pearl Street. She loved it here, and here, as everywhere, loved her.

— Roger Skillings

In 2004, to honor her longtime commitment to the Fine Arts Work Center, friends of Grace Paley established the Grace Paley Endowed Fellowship for Creative Writing at FAWC. Contributions in memory of Grace may be made to this fellowship, which supports the residency of one FAWC Writing Fellow each year.

GRACE PALEY MEMORIAL READING We will present a reading in memory of Grace Paley on Saturday, August 9, 2008, at 4 p.m., in the Stanley Kunitz Common Room. Grace was a mentor and friend to our Fellows since 1976, when she first came to the Work Center as a Visiting Writer. Until her death in 2007, she remained deeply involved in the Work Center as a member of the Writing Committee, a Visiting Writer, and a faculty member in our Summer Program. Year in and year out, her workshops and readings were among the most admired. Please come to this final reading in her honor.

DWIGHT WILLSON (BILL) WEBB (1918-2007)

Bill Webb died on November 7, 2007, of Alzheimer’s disease, a sad irony to those privileged to know a mind that for so long had so gracefully kept the Library of the World always open for one’s enlightenment, pleasure or use. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he graduated from Andover and Harvard, worked for Time and the Pullman Herald in Pullman, Washington, then headed the Russian War Relief in Portland, Oregon. During the war he served in the Pacific as an army intelligence officer.

He met his wife, Nancy Locke McIvor, in 1947, in Provincetown. He was there to finish a novel; she was studying painting with Harry Engel. Their union produced three artists– Alex, a photographer; Patrick, a painter; and Sophie, a biologist, ornithological illustrator and writer.

In 1952 he joined the poet Cecil Hemley as co-editor of Noonday Press, which had a distinguished list of authors, but eventually had to be sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bill then started a small press of his own, Webb Books, in Cambridge, which produced two important books, The Painter’s Companion, by Reed Kay, and Artists at Work, by Bernard Chaet.

In 1977 Bill was elected to the Fine Arts Work Center Board of Trustees, and then to the Writing Committee, quickly becoming a mainstay of both. The consummate man of letters, for whom ideas were the substance of reality, a brilliant editor and critic with a gift for easy rapport with the young, he was a lasting boon to twentyeight generations of Fellows. His perspective as a publisher of classic authors made him a unique and invaluable member of the fiction jury. As Trustee he gave wise counsel, was always a moderating influence, always a staunch defender of Work Center scripture, That writers and artists had the right of absolute rule in all things pertaining to their competency– the Fellowship Programs. He served for four years as Writing Committee Chairman (1987-1990), a period of crisis and strife, from which the Work Center emerged with its bedrock principles intact.

Throughout his life, alongside the business of publishing and his many cultural and intellectual pursuits, what most deeply, personally engaged him, though few were aware of it, was the writing of fiction. Whether blocked by his reverence for high art or bent on future perfections, he published nothing, sought no readers, rarely mentioned that he wrote, and then only in the most offhand way, as if it were of no moment.

Shortly before he died, Nancy published for their children and his friends a book called Selected Prose, which gathers four stories and an excerpt from a novel, False Pretenses, based on his Russian War Relief work in the 1940s. The stories treat the psychology of sexual relations and power. His postwar themes– the aftermath of the Holocaust, the "loss of the religious dimension" and the rise of psychoanalysis, business and the brute rule of money, the girlishness of women, the buffoonery of men– all fed his classic mode, which barred sentimentality or mitigations. Comic in action, together they shed a somber light. His lifelong silence, now broken, shows him to have been a writer of originality and distinction.

For cover, Selected Prose has one of his photographs – nearly bare, black branches against a white sky. He did not know his name, but held a copy in his hands and seemed to take pleasure in the feel of it. A book. — Roger Skillings When Bill passed away, his wife Nancy asked that donations in his memory be made to the Fine Arts Work Center. This request led to over 40 gifts to FAWC in Bill’s name. Building upon this generosity, Nancy and her family have established the Bill Webb Endowed Fellowship for Creative Writing at FAWC which, like Grace’s, will support the annual residency of one FAWC Writing Fellow. Contributions in memory of Bill may be made to this fellowship.

NORMAN MAILER (1923-2007)

On November 5, 2007 the Fine Arts Work Center honored Norman Mailer, Michael Mazur and Dr. Theodore Landsmark with the Gilbert Franklin Medal for Distinguished Service in the Arts at the Hotel Marlowe in Cambridge. Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, writer and psychiatrist and longtime friend of Mailer, presented the award to Norman and read the following remarks sent by Norris Church Mailer on behalf of Norman. "The Fine Arts Work Center has always meant a lot to Norman and me. To us, it was the lively center of the artist and writers’ community in Provincetown, and we were so proud when occasionally, in our travels, we met someone who had been a Fellow there. It was always an instant bond between us. I, myself, rented space in the bins years ago to paint, when birds still roosted in the rafters, and those were some of the happiest times of my life, being part of a group of artists, whatever their focus, all working together in the warm summer air, all feeling as if we were making the world a more beautiful place to live. I know Norman would have had a great speech to make about the Work Center; there was never a single time in my memory that he didn’t have a great speech about whatever he was talking about, and I do with all my heart wish he were here to give it. So, as he likes to say - Cheers to the Fine Arts Work Center. May you live long and prosper." Norman Mailer was a friend and supporter of the Fine Arts Work Center from its earliest days. His commitment to fostering generations of artistic talent came from the same vision that gave rise to the founding of FAWC. We honor him and we will miss him and his passion for creative work.