A Young Writer's Diary Entries From Mid-March, 1984 | Thought Catalog

A Young Writer's Diary Entries From Mid-March, 1984 | Thought Catalog

A 29-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early February, 1981 | Thought Catalog

A 29-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early February, 1981 | Thought Catalog

A 29-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Late January, 1981 | Thought Catalog

A 29-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Late January, 1981 | Thought Catalog

A 28-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early January, 1980 | Thought Catalog

A 28-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early January, 1980 | Thought Catalog

A 26-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early June, 1977 | Thought Catalog

A 26-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early June, 1977 | Thought Catalog

Richard Grayson's THE EIGHTIES DIARIES published as Amazon Kindle E-book

Dumbo Books today published Richard Grayson's The Eighties Diaries as an e-book available at the Amazon Kindle store for $1.99.

The promo stuff says in part:

Richard Grayson has been keeping a daily diary compulsively since the summer of 1969, when he was an 18-year-old agoraphobic about to venture out into the world -- or at least the world around him in Brooklyn. His diary, approximately 600 words a day without missing a day since August 1, 1969, now totals over 9 million words, rivaling the longest diaries ever written.

Despite the crackpot nature of his lifelong project, the diarist actually did become a writer of sorts. Starting in the mid-1970s, he began publishing his stories in literary magazines and anthologies, and later in webzines. His articles have appeared in PEOPLE, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE MIAMI HERALD, THE SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS, THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC, NEWSDAY, THE NEW YORK POST, THE ORLANDO SENTINEL, and many other newspapers and magazines. He won four state arts council grants for his fiction writing, and in addition to being a lawyer and political activist, has taught writing in colleges in six states since 1975.

ROLLING STONE called Grayson’s first short story collection, WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK (1979) “where avant-garde fiction goes when it becomes stand-up comedy,” and NEWSDAY said, “The reader is dazzled by the swift, witty goings-on.”

LIBRARY JOURNAL called LINCOLN’S DOCTOR’S DOG (1982) “excellent” and said of I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ (1983) that “Grayson is a born storyteller and standup talker.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW said Grayson’s I SURVIVED CARACAS TRAFFIC (1996) was “entertaining and bizarre” and “consistently, even ingeniously funny.”

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY called Grayson’s THE SILICON VALLEY DIET (2000) “compulsively talky and engagingly disjunctive,” and THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, reviewing AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET (2006), said, “Grayson has a fresh, funny voice.”

THE EIGHTIES DIARIES runs nearly 300,000 words, chronicling his life and the lives around him from 1981 to 1989, in Manhattan and Miami and a few places in between.

It includes all of six volumes previously published separately: SOUTH FLORIDA WINTERS, 1981-1984; LATE SPRING IN SUNRISE, 1982; WEST SIDE SUMMERS, 1984-1987; INDIAN SUMMER: PARK SLOPE, 1985; SPRINGTIME IN LAUDERHILL, 1986; and EIGHTIES’ END: AUTUMN, 1987-1989.

Grayson has already published his first book of diary entries, BOY MEETS BROOKLYN: 1969-70, and the next six volumes of the diaries of his late teens and twenties as THE BROOKLYN DIARIES, featuring SUMMER IN BROOKLYN: 1969-1975; WINTER IN BROOKLYN: 1972-73; SPRING IN BROOKLYN, 1975; AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN, 1978; MORE SUMMERS IN BROOKLYN: 1976-1979; and A YEAR IN ROCKAWAY, 1980.

Five volumes of THE NINETIES DIARIES published include SUMMER IN NEW YORK: 1990, LAST SUMMER IN ROCKAWAY: 1991, FIRST FALL IN GAINESVILLE: 1991, SPRING IN GAINESVILLE: 1992-1994, and AUTUMN IN GAINESVILLE: 1994-1996.

Richard Grayson's "SOUTH FLORIDA WINTERS: 1981-1984" Now Available as Paperback or eBook on Amazon Kindle

This week Superstition Mountain Press published Richard Grayson's South Florida Winters: 1981-1984. It is available in a 228-page trade paperback edition for $12.99, as well as an Amazon Kindle edition published by Art Pants Company for 99 cents.

The promo stuff says in part,

Richard Grayson, author of such acclaimed short story collections as WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK, I SURVIVED CARACAS TRAFFIC, THE SILICON VALLEY DIET, HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES and AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET, has kept a daily diary for 42 years, since the summer of 1969, when he was an agoraphobic Brooklyn teenager.

In the six volumes of THE BROOKLYN DIARIES (Summer in Brooklyn: 1969-1975, Autumn in Brooklyn: 1975, Winter in Brooklyn: 1971-72, Spring in Brooklyn: 1975, and More Summer in Brooklyn: 1976-1979, A Year in Rockaway: 1980), Grayson published selected entries from 1969 to 1980.

Now, in South Florida Winters, the first volume of THE EIGHTIES DIARIES, Grayson describes his move, at age 29, from his native New York City to South Florida's sunny and warm winters.

In the years 1981-1984, Grayson publishes several books of short stories (LINCOLN'S DOCTOR'S DOG, EATING AT ARBY'S, I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ), runs for the Davie Town Council, becomes a community college professor and a celebrity getting his photo in People, USA Today, and national and local newspapers and magazines, and appearing on dozens of radio and TV shows. SOUTH FLORIDA WINTERS contains his entries from the days of the Mariel boatlift, the condo commando and the cocaine cowboy in Miami/Fort Lauderdale during the age of Reagan.

It will also be available on Scribd and Lulu for free online reading.

American Voter '96 Guide Page for Candidate Richard Grayson in Florida's Eighteenth Congressional District

Richard Grayson reports on Legislators in Love Scandal in Miami Herald's TROPIC Magazine

Richard Grayson reports on his involvement in Florida's Legislators in Love scandal in the Miami Herald's TROPIC Magazine this Sunday (August 7, 1994).

South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports on Richard Grayson's appearance at the Miami Book Fair International

In the South Florida Sun-Sentinel today, Sunday, November 14, 1993, book editor Chauncey Mabe reports on the Miami Book Fair International and the local authors, including Richard Grayson, appearing there.

Miami Herald reports on Richard Grayson's Radio Free Broward

The Miami Herald reports today (Saturday, June 9, 1990) on Richard Grayson's Radio Free Broward protest, mailing copies of 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be to South Florida, where a federal judge has declared it obscene.

MIAMI SOUTH FLORIDA MAGAZINE Reviews Books by Richard Grayson

MIAMI SOUTH FLORIDA MAGAZINE is featuring an article on Richard Grayson on page 32 of its current (August 1984) issue:

CUTTING EDGE

Richard Grayson is a young writer who experiments with the short story form. His stories don't necessarily have the traditional beginning, middle and end. Some are extremely brief but intense sketches. Some jump radically in time or place. Others are stories in the form of notes, questionnaires and interviews. They are all stories which uncover a person who must deal with the shallowness, anonymity and pain Grayson finds in today's life. Grayson deals with that subject with poignancy and humor.

A four-year resident of South Florida, Grayson lives in North Miami Beach, teaches English at Broward Community College in Davie, and has had more than 125 stories published, most in exceedingly outre magazines. Some of these stories have been compiled in three hardcover books. Others are gathered in two chapbooks, which are thin, softcover collections. His latest publication, I Brake for Delmore Schwartz (Somerville, Mass., Zephyr Press, 1983) contains, paradoxically, much of his earliest work. In many of these stories, he deals with his personal vision of his Jewishness. His characters face loneliness and alienation with little loving absurd gestures. "Reluctance," the opening story, is about the love he felt for, and the pain he caused, his great-grandmother. "She told me," he writes, "she would make cookies when my own son was born, and when I said that would never happen, she just grabbed me up to her mammoth breasts and shook me until I laughed and said okay, I will have a son."

"By now," claims Grayson, "I've forgotten which work is autobiographical. Some of it is."

He also plays with perception, challenging the way we take the appearance of things for reality. "One of my feelings is that we live in a time when the perception or the so-called appearance of things is more important than what is real. Good writers always challenge our society. I hope to get people stirred up and even angry and outraged," he says. "I don't like telling people what they want to hear because they get enough of that on television."

And he does outrage, especially in his "press releases," a black comic part of his fictional work. As part of his experiments iwth perception and the way the media shapes ours, Grayson sends out press releases for his make-believe organizations like Future Fetuses of America and The Devil Broadcasting Company, which has "non-programs" like Satan Place, Route 666, and I Love Lucifer. He and his mother ran as delegates to the Democratic Convention on the platform of the Committee for Immediate Nuclear War. The publicity they received via the press releases garnered the pair more than 10,000 votes.

The surrealist Latin American writers Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges are his literary models, so it is not surprising that Grayson produces such stories as With Hitler in New York (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1979). He portrays Hitler as nothing more than an ordinary, likeable person with ominous undertones to his personality, thus asking and telling the reader how Hitler was able to reach his stats in the first place.

What makes Grayson's work outstanding, though, is that he mixes conventional narrative styles and subject matter with experimental games and unconventional material.

True, some of his experiments don't work, such as the tiresome and cliched Eating at Arby's (Brooklyn, NY: Grinning Idiot Press, 1982) but when I read the opening lines to the title story of his latest book, I know I am communicating with a person who is not afraid of looking down toward reality:

"Sometimes when I wake up in my loft bed in the mornings and I see the bars on the windows, I remember I am in prison. I try to feel repentant for the awful crimes I have committed, but then I remember that this memory is a false one and that the bars on my windows are only to protect me from other people . . . . Other times I decide that I really am in prison."

---Ann Reaben Prospero

________________________________________

Richard Grayson at Waldenbooks, Books & Books, 296 Aragon Avenue, Coral Gables, and Bookworks, 6933 Red Road, South Miami.

Miami News reports on Richard Grayson's $1,000 Loan to Attorney General Designate Ed Meese

The Miami News today (April 13, 1984) reports on Richard Grayson's $1,000 loan to Presidential adviser and nominee for Attorney General Edwin Meese in furor over Meese's accepting loans from men who later received jobs with the federal government.

Miami News reports on Richard Grayson's campaign to make El Salvador the 51st State

The Miami News today (Saturday, August 13, 1983) reports on Richard Grayson's campaign to make El Salvador the 51st State.

Gargoyle Magazine reviews Richard Grayson's EATING AT ARBY'S: THE SOUTH FLORIDA STORIES

The Washington, D.C.-based literary magazine Gargoyle reviews Richard Grayson’s Eating at Arby’s in issue 22/23 (1983):

___________________________________________
Eating at Arby’s: The South Florida Stories,
by Richard Grayson, Grinning Idiot Press,
P.O. Box 1577, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11202,
1982, 24 pp., $3, saddle-stitched.
___________________________________________


In this short collection, Richard Grayson has found a style of daffy unreality to make his experience of anomie in South Florida. In one-page vignettes, he writes of such diverse subjects as Haitian refugees, Cubans, Blacks, gays, “crackers,” old people, and the proliferation of malls, guns and Colombian dope through the eyes of a Looney Tunes duo, Manny and Zelda. They and their friends talk in Dick and Jane sentences about these subjects. Always they react with zany blankness, sometimes with hilarious “logic,” as in this example:

“Guns can be fun,” said José. “Guns can be fun and help you if you own a clothing store like I do . . . Guns can be your friends.”

“It is important to have friends here in South Florida,” said Zelda. “Manny, I want to shoot that gun. That gun will become our friend, just like José is our friend.”

“Nuestro amigo,” Manny said, as José handed him the gun.

Some pieces zing, as “A Long Boat Ride,” in which Manny mistakes Haitian refugees for newly arrived tourists. Correcting him, Zelda says:

“Soon they will be happy. . . Now that they are in South Florida, they will be very happy."

“Everyone is happy here,” said Manny. “. . . Let’s make friends with those Haitian refugees. Let’s take them with us to eat brunch at the Rascal House.”

“Oh Manny!” cried Zelda. “You are so silly. Haitian refugees do not come here to eat brunch at the Rascal House. They come here for freedom. You cannot get freedom at brunch at the Rascal House.”

Other piece deliberately court banality, as in “At the Beach,” where Chip says:

“. . . It is beautiful here. . . My gay friends and I like it very much. We have fun here. People are nice. The weather is good. We can enjoy the beach and make friends.”

The repetitious style of first-grade primers is surreal; its deliberate flattening suggests vacancy, diminution. Words like “nice,” “happy,” “fun,” clone themselves with dizzy inarticulateness. The satirist’s spleen, though clearly present, is muted. The grand style as in Swift is here deliberately monochrome and reductionist. There’s a buttoned-down quality, a muffling, even evisceration of content in places. Grayson’s too hip, maybe too pessimistic, to breastbeat. For his method, he appears to have taken literally, for humorous effect, a quotation from Emerson:

“Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business. . . Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find without question.”

And of course Zelda and Manny do just that. The vacation mentality, the weather, the wardrobe choices (“I like to see people wearing pink pants and white shoes”)—all point to a dreamland emptiness gussied up—or down, in Graysonstyle—as if for the Saturday morning cartoon crowd. It’s a method of despair.

Grayson’s deliberate lightness, though, is flawed by the final “Some Sad News,” where we learn José has been murdered. Though “murder is not fun”—virtually the only thing Manny and Zelda say isn’t fun in South Florida—the heavy-handedness spoils the Disneyland feeling. I would have preferred to have the collection end with the wonderful “A Chanukah Party.” A skewed United Nations gathers at Manny and Zelda’s: Bob the bisexual (who says he’s not bilingual), José the Cuban, Chip the gay, gramps and grandma, and Lois, the black chiropractor from Liberty City who wears Sasson jeans. Lois brings Hassan, her Palestinian friend, to the Chanukah party. Zelda says:

“You will be our Palestinian pal, too.”
“Thank you, Zelda,” said Hassan. “I will be glad to be your pal. I like your Sasson jeans and the food you have brought in from Arby’s.”
Zelda smiled. “In South Florida we are all friends. We are lucky to be here. We have malls and condos and happy, friendly people.”
“I love it here in South Florida,” said Manny. “Every day is like a Chanukah party here.”

Much current writing is decidedly casual. Big deals are out. This is an age of burnout. Grayson follows this trend here with his stylish vacancy, his deadpan blankness. Moreover, the discontinuities that flourished in her earlier fiction are tethered down here. Eating at Arby’s is a seamless collection of virtually the same encounter repeated eighteen times—the two innocents making happy-face babble as if they’re playing dolls. (Maybe the repetition of the encounter itself is a discontinuity, one which suggests hopeless stall.) Reading this collection is a little like finding Clark Kent when you’d hoped for Superman. Eating at Arby’s goes down easy: it entertains, it disturbs, but not too much. It’s a little like a sitcom, where the same joke gets repeated week after week. You like it but you look around uneasily and say, is this all?

—Maryl Jo Fox

Coda: Poets & Writers Newsletter features Richard Grayson Report on Literary Activity in South Florida

In the September/October 1982 of Coda: Poets & Writers Newsletter, Richard Grayson reports on literary activity in South Florida.

Miami Herald publishes feature story on Richard Grayson

Today's Miami Herald has an article about Richard Grayson, "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog's Author," on the front page of its Living Today section:


The Miami Herald

Sunday, April 4, 1982

Living Today

Section G, Page 1



Lincoln's Doctor's Dog's Author


'Giving It All Up for Computers, and Other Stories'

By MIKE WINERIP

Herald Staff Writer


Thirty-year-old Richard Grayson was sitting in his furnished Davie apartment, six months into his eight-month lease, rereading the New York Times Book Review from March 14:

"Richard Grayson's first book carried the title, With Hitler in New York. Some reviewers liked the book, at least one detested it, and readers ignored it in droves. It sold only about 500 copies, according to the author, who teaches English at Broward Community College in Davie, Fla.

"When it came time to compile a new book…he decided to appeal to a broader constituency. Having heard that books about Abraham Lincoln, doctors and dogs usually sell well, Mr. Grayson is calling his new hardcover book…Lincoln's Doctor's Dog, and Other Stories."

Except for an extra sentence or two and a couple of adjectives, that was the whole thing in a nutshell.

A friend who is into Eastern culture called Grayson and congratulated him. A lady from Queens with a handicapped kid wrote asking for Grayson's autograph if he wasn't too busy.

He wasn't, though he is considering taking up computer programming this summer at the community college.

*

Richard Grayson, who has published 150 short stories in dozens of obscure literary magazines, recently was teaching a Compare and Contrast lesson to his beginning English class at Broward Community College. Something about the American Revolution versus the Russian Revolution. Only one student knew what a Bolshevik was.

Grayson was making the point that a good Compare and Contrast didn't have to be one paragraph about Russia followed by one on America (although that was one way to do it). You could have both revolutions in the same paragraph. It wasn't clear if anyone was getting this concept.

There is no other way to put it: Broward Community College does not feel like the kind of place anyone one would be doing serious writing. It feels like a place where future pharmacists, computer programmers and dental technicians will learn to write sentences without comma splices if they pay close attention. It feels very clean and scrubbed, very healthy and wholesome. Lots of tanned young people wearing very little clothing hurry up and down geometrically pleasing stairwells. You could cast Brave New World here. Almost no one looks fat or excessive or impolitic. It's the kind of place that might make one of Richard Grayson's elderly characters say: "So many sensational young people and nice teeth, too."


Graffiti from radio


The graffiti covering desks in Grayson's classroom are not literary. They're mostly from the radio. A sample desk in Grayson's class says: "Styx…Trash…For Sure…Lou Reed…Rock and Roll Forever."

More than once Grayson has thought that were Melville or Hardy around today he might go electronic.

"I know most of you, when you get the urge to read, lie down until it passes," he says, though not in a mean way. The tone is of a man being left behind.

Still, Grayson remains faithful to the course curriculum. He talks about comma splices.

"I once had a student who said, 'Don't you put a comma every fourth word?' We're going to have a very animated discussion on commas Monday…We'll have a real good discussion on the dash. The dash is wonderful. When all else fails – use the dash."

*

Richard Grayson, whose favorite food is the hamburger, likes life in Davie. He is making the most money ever in his life, $14,000 from the community college, plus a $3,000 grant from the Florida Fine Arts Council. And there are perks: Teaching at the college entitles him to take computer programming at a reduced tuition rate.

This is his ninth college teaching job. To make ends meet he has worked at places like New York City Technical College, where, his resume says, he was a substitute adjunct lecturer.

He does not consider any of this noble.

His fiction has never paid much. Taplinger Co. gave him a $500 advance for the first short story collection, With Hitler in New York. The book didn't sell enough copies to cover the advance. Nor does he expect to make anything on Lincoln's Doctor's Dog, scheduled for release in May. There was no advance for that one.

Most literary magazines that publish his stories count circulation in the hundreds, not thousands: Apalachee Quarterly, City, Writ, Shenandoah, Texas Quarterly. The big ones pay $50. The small pay nothing. Welter, the University of Baltimore's literary review, just accepted one of his stories. His compensation will be two free copies.

The story is about a painter who becomes a computer programmer.

*

Richard Grayson started writing regularly at 18. He had just spent a year in his room, scared to come out. Grayson didn't know it then, but he was suffering from agoraphobia, a fear of mixing with crowds. It was a nervous breakdown of some sort. When he reappeared in the spring of 1969, everything seemed fresh. It was a classic case of being rehatched.

"I wasn't the best in my creative-writing class. I was maybe in the middle of eight. But I kept at it. I'd keep sending my stuff out when it was rejected. I sent out the same story over and over. Others gave up."

*

The absurd is on Richard Grayson's mind.

He takes major historical figures and drops them into mundane American settings like his native Brooklyn. There's absolutely nothing funny about Hitler, right? Grayson's Hitler flies into Kennedy on a Laker flight, smokes a joint on the Belt Parkway, eats Szechuan in Brooklyn Heights.

Constipation is sad and private, right? Richard Grayson wrote this about one of his characters:

"When he was very young, he was constipated. Sometimes he did not go to the bathroom for weeks. His grandmother would cry that the boy's appendix might be on fire…In the summer, people would come into his grandmother's bungalow to watch him straining at the stool. The bathroom door would be open wide and sometimes people would bring their guests for a weekend barbecue….

"When there was a bowel movement his grandmother would make a party. It was more for the adults than him."

*

His stuff is autobiographical. At times he doesn't bother to disguise it. In the middle of a short story about a lawyer he interrupts the narrative: "The 'I' of this story is really me, Richard Grayson, and not some literary device….Please, you can see I'm a sick person. What would it take, a few pages in your lousy literary magazine, to make me happy?....If I can't have your respect I'll settle for your pity."

"Pitiful," wrote Kirkus Reviews.

"I used to get rejections saying, 'Grow up.' Truly cruel ones. The kind that level with you: 'You have no talent. Give up.' They discourage you for a couple of days."

The Los Angeles Times thought he was funny; Newsday said he had a wild sense of humor, yet some telephone company official stringing reviews for the Minneapolis Tribune almost had a nervous breakdown:

"This is the worst book I ever read in my life," he wrote, "a cornucopia of crap."

The telephone review man said he planned to give Grayson's book to someone he despised.

*


In his spare time Grayson cooks up minor media events. It amuses him and brings a little of the recognition you don't get when you're trying to do something enduring in Davie. He started a campaign to run Burt Reynolds for U.S. Senate.

Burt refused.

Grayson ran for Davie Town Council as a lark last month, saying horses should be given the vote and the council should be abolished because it didn't do much. This offended local newspaper editorial writers, who have a genuine concern about the quality of leadership on the Davie Town Council.

Grayson lost.

When his grandmother, Sylvia Ginsberg, was lonely and depressed last year, he sent out press notices saying she was a superstar and that he was starting the Sylvia Ginsberg Magazine and fan club.

She died.

*

Grayson expects ts to be famous.

"I have a feeling I'll be discovered in my 70s. I can't really say why. I just feel that's the way it is. It's fate.

"I've done things a lot of people tried to do and couldn't. I've had books published by a commercial publisher. I'm young, too. Maybe I'll go on for 10 years without having a successful book, and all of a sudden I'll have one.


Wilder slept there

Two years ago Grayson was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. A small group of promising writers, composers, painters and sculptors spends the summer at a wooded retreat. You work in your cabin all day and gather for discussions in the evenings.

"You're treated so well," Grayson remembers. "Like you're important. I wasn't used to being treated well."

He lived in the same cabin where Thornton Wilder once worked. At the desk where Grayson sat, Wilder wrote Our Town.

Each year, when the summer's over, the fellows write their names on the wall of the cabin where they stayed.

As he added his to the long list, Richard Grayson scanned the other names. A few were familiar.

*

"Of course sometimes it hurts me that I have friends who make $70,000 doing what I might call trivial things.

"My best friend Linda I've known since first grade. She's the editor of a magazine. She owns two houses in Washington, D.C., as investments. She's written a book. But I have things she doesn't have. Her book's about roller skating. She's doing a story about travel in Costa Rica. The magazine she runs is for weight watchers. I don't think she has the same feeling toward her material that I do. I have the freedom to write what I want."

A couple of years ago Richard Grayson was depressed about not being known. Then a Mount Holyoke professor sent him an English 234 paper. It was a detailed analysis of "Summoning Alice Keppel." A short story. By Richard Grayson. That kept him going a couple of extra days.

And there is more:

"Linda has a friend who taught high school in Wisconsin. He was going around the class, asking everyone their favorite writer.

"And one kid said, 'You've probably never heard of him, but Richard Grayson.'"

Hollywood Sun-Tattler publishes article on Richard Grayson's winning Society of Professional Journalists First Amendment Essay Contest

The Hollywood (Fla.) Sun-Tattler today (Friday, April 10, 1981) has an article on Broward Community College English teacher Richard Grayson winning the First Amendment essay contest sponsored by the Greater Miami Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi. It also reprinted Grayson's winning essay, "Liberals and the First Amendment."

Miami Herald Feature Story on Richard Grayson & His Superstar Grandmother Sylvia Ginsberg

The Miami Herald today (Wednesday, February 4, 1981) has a feature story on Richard Grayson and his superstar grandmother, Sylvia Ginsberg.

The Miami News: Front Page Story on Richard Grayson & His Superstar Grandmother, Sylvia Ginsberg

The Miami News today (Monday, February 2, 1981) has a front-page story on Richard Grayson and his superstar grandmother, Sylvia Ginsberg.