Charles Dickens’s classic 1843 holiday novella, A Christmas Carol, has been adapted into a new BBC television drama. The three-part fantasy miniseries is directed by Nick Murphy, and stars Joe Alwyn as Bob Cratchit, Jason Flemyng as the Ghost of Christmas Future, Stephen Graham as Jacob Marley, Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge, Charlotte Riley as Lottie (the Ghost of Christmas Present), and Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past.
“Child, we move through graves / like eels, delicious with our heads first, our mouths / agape.” In this Ours Poetica video, Jane Wong reads her poem “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly” published in the November 2018 issue of Poetry magazine. Wong’s second poetry collection, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2021.
“When you think you’re getting good, be humble. There’s no end to the learning.” In this video, Arthur Sze visits his high school, the Lawrenceville School, and offers advice from his years of experience as a poet. Sze is the recipient of the 2013 Jackson Poetry Prize and won the 2019 National Book Award in poetry for his collection Sight Lines (Copper Canyon Press, 2019).
“When I did not feel anything, I begged you for mercy, for myself, a form of forgiveness that always comes in muscle memory.” In this Write About Now Poetry video, Christopher Diaz performs his poem “again” at AvantGarden in Houston.
“I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.”
—Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
I met Ernest J. Gaines, who died on November 5 at the age of eighty-six, at the Louisiana Book Festival a couple of years ago. After a talk he gave from his wheelchair, I introduced myself and told him I was trying to be a writer. “Keep trying and reading,” he replied. It was said with the kindness and warning of an elder that knew trying (i.e. many bad drafts and rejections) is a precursor to being a writer.
Gaines represented a pride in the South and the African American experience of his rural Louisiana childhood through his writing. Born in Oscar, Louisiana, the son of sharecroppers, Gaines graduated from San Francisco State University and attended graduate school at Stanford University. He was the author of eight novels, including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Dial Press, 1971), A Gathering of Old Men (Knopf, 1983), and A Lesson Before Dying (Knopf, 1993), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1993. In addition, Gaines was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur “Genius” grant.
If you’re ever in Louisiana and have some time on your hands, stop by the Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines donated his early papers and manuscripts through 1983 there, and it is expected that the center will acquire the remainder of his papers.
Ernest J. Gaines. Kelly Harris is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in New Orleans. Contact her at NOLA@pw.org or on Twitter, @NOLApworg.“Some prisons taste like / salt, copper, sludge / when you bite and crunch down / to the marrow…” In this video, Cortney Lamar Charleston reads Jevon Jackson’s poem “All of Us, In Prison” at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery for a 2019 Brooklyn Book Festival event. Jackson’s poem won PEN America’s First Prize in Poetry in the 2019 Prison Writing Contest.
“What is under the earth followed them home. / The branch broke. It broke by itself. It did break, James.” In this 2014 video, Alex Dimitrov reads his poem “Together and by Ourselves” at the Radar Reading Series in San Francisco. Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky’s Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac, an astrological guide that expands upon their popular Twitter feed, is out this week from Flatiron Books.
“The very act of reading is an empathetic act.” In this Aspen Institute video, Adrienne Brodeur talks about her writing process and reads from her debut memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
All Metro Detroit writers looking for a quiet space to write should be aware of Trinosophes. This spacious gallery and café is conveniently located just outside of the clatter of Downtown Detroit, and has been a haven for me, my friends, and a number of my mentors to write. Tuesday through Saturday the café offers a variety of vegan and gluten-free brunch options and good coffee. The art space has a gallery and an elevated stage equipped with a piano and more than enough space for a small band (or some poets eager to read their work!). Speaking of music, next door there is a record store for those interested in musical nostalgia. And across the street is the historic Eastern Market, which offers immediate access to local vendors, coffee shops, and more.
When it comes to literary events, Trinosophes is home to the Urban Echo Poetry Slam series and the Detroit Youth Poetry Slam series, and hosts book release parties (Franny Choi celebrated the release of her poetry collection Soft Science last April) and readings. On October 12 and 13, Trinosophes hosted the Detroit Art Book Fair, bringing together dozens of independent publishers, artists, writers, and collectors who presented their books, zines, and prints to the public. Whether you’re looking for a place to write, listen to poetry or live music, or get inspired by artwork, Trinosophes is a great place to visit.
The Detroit Art Book Fair at Trinosophes. Justin Rogers is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Detroit. Contact him at Detroit@pw.org or on Twitter, @Detroitpworg.The stories of the debut authors featured in our fourth annual 5 Over 50 trace the unique, sometimes long, and often winding paths that lead to publication. “There’s rarely an easy path to success,” writes seventy-year-old debut memoirist Peter Kaldheim. “But as I can testify, without persistence there’s no path at all.” And while much attention is paid to how long it has taken (“What kind of nut keeps at it for twenty-seven years without success?” asks fifty-six-year-old debut novelist Julie Langsdorf), it’s important to consider that these first books would not be what they are without the experience—the joys, sorrows, struggles, and achievements—that their authors picked up along the way. These books are special for many reasons, not least of all because of the time—and patience—that went into writing and publishing them.
In our November/December 2019 print issue you can read essays by each of these five authors about their paths to publication and below you can read excerpts from each of their debut books.
White Elephant (Ecco, March 2019) by Julie Langsdorf
Ridiculous Light (Persea Books, April 2019) by Valencia Robin
Cornelius Sky (Kaylie Jones Books, August 2019) by Timothy Brandoff
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (Milkweed Editions, July 2019) by Margaret Renkl
Idiot Wind (Canongate, August 2019) by Peter Kaldheim
Julie Langsdorf, author of White Elephant, published in March by Ecco. (Credit: Robin B. Langsdorf)
AUGUST 31—MORNING
Allison Miller lay in bed in the dim light of early morning thinking about sex. It was the hammering on the new house being built next door that was responsible, the rhythmic pound, pound, pounding that ought to have chipped away at any nascent amorous thoughts instead of inspiring them. She slid her hand across the sheet, touching her husband Ted’s thigh, but it was clear from the set of his mouth that sex was not in the offing this morning.
“Do you know what time it is, Al?”
The question was rhetorical. Their digital clock was of the large-numeral variety, designed for people like them, in their forties, eyes just beginning to go.
“We hardly need the alarm clock anymore, Cox is so loud,” Ted said. The revving of a chain saw made him leap out of bed as if stung. He opened the window—with effort. The Millers’ house was old and its parts had settled.
They’d lost the battle for the trees. Ted couldn’t accept it. Nick Cox, neighbor and builder, had been given the go-ahead to cut down more trees on the property next door. The town only had jurisdiction over trees that were twenty inches in diameter or more. There were a surprising number of these junior, cut-down-able-size trees on Cox’s property, a small forest that had sprung up over the years—trees not strong enough for climbing or genetically programmed to offer fruit or flowers, but still welcome for providing a little buffer of green between the Millers and the adjacent property.
Allison watched Ted with fond familiarity, the gentle curve of his rear end and the rush of red in his neck from the effort of opening the window. She waited for him to yell, to open his mouth and to really let loose. He’d threatened so many times.
She imagined Nick Cox in his jeans and hard hat, his blue eyes sparking as he yelled back. She pictured the two of them engaging in a twenty-first-century duel, fought across the yards, a battle of words over the fortress Nick was building to their left, a four-story monolith complete with battlements and a double front door that begged for attending knights in armor. It was even bigger than the faux stone castle he’d built to the right, with its many turrets and spires, where Nick, his wife, Kaye, and their two pretty blond children lived. One half-expected to see fireworks shooting into the sky above the house—if one could see the sky above from inside the Millers’, which one no longer could. Allison and Ted’s little house was wedged between the two, a pebble amid boulders.
In the meantime Tunlaw Place was in disarray, the air tinged with the stench of diesel. A construction truck and a dumpster were parked along the curb, along with Nick’s little yellow bulldozer, which looked like a brightly painted toy.
Allison closed her eyes and stretched her arms and legs toward all four corners of the bed imagining that she—not the neighborhood—was the one at stake, she the damsel in distress, she the one for whom Ted would slay Nick Cox. Or vice versa. The winner would bed her. She was ready to make the sacrifice.
Ted stood at the window, on the verge of shouting. Allison waited, excited at the prospect. Today, it was finally going to happen. Today, blood would be spilled. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs, waiting, waiting—but Ted seemed to think better of it. He slammed the window shut and stomped off to the shower.
The alarm beeped then, an unrelenting tone that increased in volume until Allison silenced it with the flat of her palm. She set off to face the last day of August. A day that was neither summer nor fall. A day neither here nor there. A day that promised to be nothing more than betwixt and between—just like she was, Allison thought. Just like her.
From the book White Elephant by Julie Langsdorf. Copyright © 2019 by Julie Langsdorf. Published on March 26, 2019 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
Valencia Robin, author of Ridiculous Light, published in April by Persea Books. (Credit: Jennifer Walkowiak)
Crash
What she hates is when there’s a form
that asks his name, how
without warning,
she’s no longer the sleepy driver
of her life, how that one word,
Father,
will muck up the autopilot,
a red light where there wasn’t
even a stop sign, a head-on collision
with, of all people, herself, how
even now, knowing his name,
she leaves the space blank.
Semester Abroad
A room in a house just outside of Paris,
no idea I’d be sharing the bath with José, a little Brazilian
who could’ve passed for one of my cousins, that particular mix
of African, Cherokee and empire. I couldn’t understand a word he said,
French poured through a Portuguese accent, plus the landlady
didn’t like him, all I needed to justify my annoyance
of the bathroom situation. But weeks in and the landlady en vacance,
the power went out, so José lit candles, invited me to share
his pasta with crème fraiche. He’d never met his father
either, though his mother’s boyfriend bought him art supplies,
paid for drawing classes. I was surprised he was vegetarian,
too, that French was his third language, that I was the provincial.
Nothing happened between us, not even after the bottle of Beaujolais,
not even though I’d been looking for someone to save me
from being bored and lonely in Paris of all places,
only our shadows touching across the walls of that tiny kitchen,
city lights blinking through the foggy window and the realization
that I was no longer translating each word he said, that I understood
him, but even stranger, us—our faces, our very names
the spoils of conquest—our passports and the languages
we spoke and why, our fathers and fathers’ fathers, the back story
of millions whittled down to a few pages in high school,
the cowboy and Indian movies my mother refused to stop watching,
that I’d rent for her years later when she was dying,
flying across the Atlantic over the bones of God knows how many Africans
and forgetting to even look down, to remember them if only for a few seconds.
Yes, the unimaginable absence and lack and yet the unknown alive
in that kitchen, too, its contradictions, its silences
and hysterics, the blackness in our voices as we laughed
and talked through the night—a keening, but also a kind of space,
a clearing we could move through.
From Ridiculous Light by Valencia Robin. Copyright © 2019 by Valencia Robin. Used by permission of Persea Books, Inc. (New York)
Timothy Brandoff, author of Cornelius Sky, published in August by Akashic Books. (Credit: Reuben Radding)
He sat alone in the dark, save for the snow on the television screen. He got to his feet and considered this question: how does a nonalcoholic get ready for bed? He decided to brush his teeth. He reserved toothbrushing for the morning as a rule, but given the night’s events he thought he’d brush before bed as a demonstration of his nonalcoholic nature. People of an alcoholic nature go to bed without brushing, he figured, and given the fact that he was not an alcoholic, he probably should brush. And then he thought, What else does a person who’s not an alcoholic do? His mind drew a blank. Then he thought, I know what I can do, I can prepare my clothes for the morning. I can lay my clothes out so when I wake up I know what I’m going to wear. People of nonalcoholic natures do such things. If I’m not an alcoholic, he thought, and I’m not, I can lay my clothes out like a nonalcoholic in preparation for tomorrow’s nonalcoholic day. Granted, I like to drink. Vic Morrow probably enjoys a drink himself. He got up and looked at his clothes in the closet and thought, What a strange thing to do, and decided against it. I’m not going to put my clothes out for tomorrow just to prove I’m not an alcoholic. If I’m not an alcoholic, why do I have to prove it? I don’t have to prove my nonalcoholic nature to anybody. And who would I be proving it to anyway? And even if I am an alkie, whose business is that?
They had tried to help his father, those men in suits. They came up to the house, spoke to his mother, the half-heard conversations lodged in Connie’s memory. A strange word when you’re seven years old: anonymous. Their clean-shaven faces, their pressed suits, a lucidity in the eye. Whispered words between his mother and those men, seeping through fabric hanging from doorway curtain rods, one doorless doorway after the next in those railroad flats, curtain after curtain through which muffled words floated.
Did they know Connie’s father killed himself? Of course they knew. They came to the house, tried to help, prior to the move uptown. They knew Sammy. And then, back in Chelsea, after the six-month nightmare that was Harlem, they paid Connie and his siblings special attention. They bought out Connie’s stack of newspapers nightly, tipped him heavily, gave him cold bottles of Coca-Cola from the red machine that tasted so good. Those men in suits, that AA clubhouse right there on 24th, they tried, didn’t they?
Motherfuckers at that diner, and David playing dumb. Go ahead, David, keep playing dumb, see what happens.
He decided on some light housecleaning like a nonalcoholic might. He picked up the ashtray, escorted it across the room, and was going to dump its contents out the window—but caught himself about to perform the act of an alcoholic. Your first night in the house and you want to dump your ashtray directly over the entranceway?
He laid down and prayed aloud: “Lord God Father, please hear my prayer. Bless Maureen and Artie and Stevie, grant them peace and watch over them, Father.” He called his god Father because he liked it that way. He never did have too much of an earthly father.
That man for a time up in Harlem, after Sammy and Edward passed, the man who taught Connie how to find the constellations in the sky. From that spot in St. Nicolas Park, surrounded by the night, away from the streetlamps (to let the stars shine more bright, the man said). The man’s breath on Connie’s neck, crouching behind him, the heaviness of an arm on Connie’s shoulder. The smell of talc on the man, a porkpie hat on his head. Did the man show Connie care and concern—was he really about astronomy? Holding Connie in a specific manner by the arms, directing his body to face a certain angle, to line up a constellation in the sky. The guy had his hands on me quite a bit: like that priest who taught me how to make free throws. They always position themselves behind you, these short eyes. They sure know how to pick out a fatherless kid, let me tell you. Eagle eyes for the fatherless ones. See a kid with no father coming a mile off, a short eyes can. The special talent of any moderately gifted pedophile.
I cannot picture life without it. He tried to feel out in his mind for an image of himself as a person who did not drink, and nothing came. The construct of a character named Connie Sky who lived a sober life eluded him, terrified him down to the ground, made him shudder.
An alcoholic walks into a bar.
He felt his consciousness abandoning itself, the gears of his thoughts slipping, failing to catch altogether, and his last internal ramble came as a refrain, a fervent appeal tinged by the martyrdom of his suffering.
Let me go, Connie’s heart cried, let me go, let me go.
Excerpted from the novel Cornelius Sky, by Timothy Brandoff. Used with the permission of the author and Akashic Books (akashicbooks.com).
Margaret Renkl, author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, published in July by Milkweed Editions. (Credit: Heidi Ross)
BIRMINGHAM, 1968
It was already dark outside but not quite suppertime, late in the year we moved to Birmingham, and I don’t know why I was alone with my mother in the grocery store. If my brother and sister weren’t tagging along too, then my father must have been at home with them, but if Daddy was home, why did I come along with Mama to the Piggly Wiggly at the very worst time of day, when the store was swamped with husbands stopping on the way home from work to pick up the one missing item their wives needed for supper? I might never have been in the Piggly Wiggly at night before, but I knew that men did not understand the rules of the grocery store, did not understand which direction to push the cart to stay in the flow of traffic, did not recognize that standing perplexed in the middle of the aisle is bad grocery store citizenship, especially right at suppertime.
My mother was surely in a hurry. Maybe I was slowing her down as she tried to zip around the bewildered men standing despondent among the canned goods, and maybe she sent me off to pass the time in the corner of the store where books and toys were displayed. Or maybe I wandered off on my own, in those days of retail on a human scale and no thought at all that kidnappers could be lurking in the Piggly Wiggly.
The toys were a familiar, paltry offering—dusty cellophane packages of jacks and Silly Putty eggs and paddleballs and green army men—but the books were mostly new to me. The few children’s books at our house belonged to an old-fashioned era of read-aloud classics, fairy tales and nursery rhymes and Bible stories and my own favorite, Poems of Childhood. The Piggly Wiggly display featured what seemed to be a vast array of Little Golden Books and early readers. I reached for a green book with a picture in the foreground of a dog wearing a cap turned sideways between its floppy ears. We didn’t have a dog ourselves. I had not yet made friends in our new city, and I wanted a dog more than I wanted anything.
I scanned the rest of the book jacket, pausing at the picture of boys in baseball uniforms. I had heard of baseball, but I’d never seen a game, in person or on TV, and did not recognize the outfits the boys were wearing. Why were these boys wearing pajamas outside on the grass? I only glanced at the words at the top of the book jacket. I was learning in first grade the sounds that letters make, but I could not yet read, and words in a book meant nothing to me.
But then, as I stood in the bright light of the grocery store with darkness pooling outside, unable to reach me, the letters on the cover of that book suddenly untangled themselves into words: Barney. Beagle. Plays. Base. Ball. Barney Beagle Plays Baseball. Oh, I remember thinking. Oh, it’s about a dog who plays baseball, and opening the book to see what happened. And only then did I realize I was actually reading the words. I was reading! I went racing to find Mama, dodging despairing fathers peering at can labels, to show her how I could sound out all the words on every page and understand each one. And she was so happy about my happiness that she told me we could bring the book home, even though we had no money at all, and it had not even crossed my mind that she might buy it for me.
From Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Margaret Renkl. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.
The debut authors featured in our third annual 5 Over 50 have all demonstrated the patience and resilience that is required of anyone who is devoted to writing as a lifelong art. What makes them special is not simply the quality of their first books, but also that they’ve already achieved so much, including obtaining the wisdom and perspective that comes from living a bit of one’s life.
In our November/December 2018 print issue you can read essays by each of these five authors about their paths to publication—as well as the inspirations, obstacles, and truths they discovered along the way—and below you can read excerpts from each of their debut books.
All Happy Families (Harper Wave) by Jeanne McCulloch
Graffiti Palace (MCD Books) by A. G. Lombardo
Meet Me at the Museum (Flatiron Books) by Anne Youngson
Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press) by Maw Shein Win
For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors (University of Iowa Press) by Laura Esther Wolfson
Jeanne McCulloch, author of All Happy Families, published in August by Harper Wave.
Part I
August 1983
A woman walks into the sea. It’s a mid-August day. Early morning. The sky is clear. A mid-August day on the beach near the end of Long Island and it’s the summer of 1983. Seagulls idle on the wet sand, and far out the fishing boats from Montauk patrol, small as dark toys against the horizon. It’s a perfect late-summer day. The woman on the shore is my mother. She wears the iconic headdress of her era, a floral bathing cap with brightly colored petals. She walks cautiously, hands out for balance, because even in a calm surf you can’t be too careful walking into the sea. She always taught us that. Respect for the sea. The latex petals of the cap flutter about her head, almost festive as she moves. It’s early morning and my mother walks into the sea. Behind her is our house, a long, gray, sea-weathered Clapboard house, stretching along a sand dune like a giant sleeping cat. My father bought this house years before the area became known as the Hamptons—back when it was still considered a long way from New York City, known mainly for artists and potato fields and the fisherman who made their living trawling off Montauk Point. The house had a shabby grandeur to it that time forgot. No air-conditioning (“The sea is our air conditioner!” my mother would proclaim) and no pool (“The sea is our pool”).
Every August when I was young, it was a giant slumber party in the house by the sea. My sisters and I would fall asleep against a tumble of cousins in quilts, listening to the steady refrain of waves gliding along the shore—the moonlight outside our bedroom spackling a silver route to the horizon.
August 13, 1983, was the day of my wedding. I was twenty-five, a messy splatter of freckles across my nose the final badge of childhood. Just before sunset that afternoon, I would put on a vintage lace dress that swooped gently off the shoulder in a style I saw as reminiscent of Sophia Loren in her glory days and my mother saw as suggestive of the sale rack at a yard sale. In the house that morning, they were talking in various rooms. In the pantry, the boy delivering flowers, sprays of lilies of the valley and a basket of rose petals for the wedding cake, was being bossed around by Johanna, the Irish cook. Johanna never got to boss anybody in the household; everyone, the housekeeper, the gardener, everyone disregarded her. She was a small woman in a hairnet, whose wisps of dry black hair nevertheless escaped and were often found floating in the vichyssoise. She stamped her foot, a white orthopedic shoe. “Get out of my kitchen,” she was telling the delivery boy from the florist’s shop, “I’m too busy,” she scolded him. “Go.”
In the sunroom, my half-brothers, three men in their early forties, sons from my father’s first marriage, huddled in conversation. They all had beards and ready laughs; they—in addition to my half-sister—had come for the wedding with their spouses and their children from the far flung places where they lived lives of their own. Half siblings, and the term was apt; I half knew them, and I half didn’t. Scott raised llamas in New Mexico; in Florida Keith painted lush floral landscapes, some with naked women; in Colorado, Rod was engaged in investment strategies for a business no one understood. Mary Elizabeth, called MB, was an Arabic scholar in Paris. In my father’s sunroom, the morning light angled across the sisal rug, dust motes played in the air, and my three half-brothers were talking together, shoulders hunched, coffee mugs in hand.
The gardener, Vincent, in yellow protective earmuffs and a fishing cap, drove his seated mower in even rows up and down the sloping lawn, as he did every morning of summer, this day steering around the large white party tent erected earlier in the week for the reception. My wedding was scheduled to take place at five in the afternoon. It had been timed and debated for months, the proper moment for a wedding. The ceremony was to be situated by the garden up by the house, with a view giving out to the sea. “Situated”—that was the term used by Ruth Ann Middleton, the professional wedding planner my mother had hired to marshal the wedding to perfection. A white wire gazebo has been placed there, and the florist would wreath the lattice in garlands of pink roses. Five in the afternoon was the time the light would be the rich gold particular to late summer. A bagpiper in a kilt had been hired by my mother, so at the ceremony’s conclusion, he’d guide the guests from the garden down to the tent—braying the union of husband and wife as the setting sun burnished rose through the trees.
“You know, men in kilts don’t wear any underwear,” my half-brother Keith had told us the day before the wedding, as we drove to visit our father. “Seriously, not a stitch. Just a pink ribbon tied around the big fella.” My siblings and I were in the family station wagon when he told us that, on our way to Southampton Hospital. Our father lay in a coma in the ICU, having had a massive stroke two days before the wedding, leaving our home for what we suspected might be the last time strapped to an ambulance stretcher—the strap a thin, final harness to our life. He had had the stroke following an abrupt withdrawal from alcohol after a lifetime of drinking, having gone cold turkey at my mother’s insistence so—in her words—he’d “sober up” for the wedding.
On the way to the hospital, Scott had insisted we stop at the fried-chicken place off Route 27, in case we got hungry, and as we stood watching our father breathe, the bucket of chicken sat unopened at the nurse’s station of the ICU, filling the air with its irrelevant fragrance.
We had bowed to my mother’s insistence that the wedding should go forward, despite our father’s condition. Because, she claimed, it’s what Daddy would want. “Besides,” she added, “all my friends are already en route.” And so a man with no underwear, in a plaid skirt, was going to bray on our front lawn at sunset as my father lay in a coma over in the next town.
The morning of my wedding, an easy breeze blew down the beach. My teenage nephews sat on their surfboards just beyond the break. All was calm and serene from the lilting vantage point of the sea. Occasionally a swell would captivate them and they angled their boards toward the shore, riding in on elegant curls of foam.
Later that afternoon, my mother would pin the family veil on my head. She’d mutter about how I should have let her get a proper hairdresser to tame my wild beach hair. Then she’d call the hospital and instruct them that no matter what happened that evening to her husband, they were not to call our house. Because, she’d go on to say, we were having a party.
The morning of August 13, 1983, the day settled into a steady rhythm near the tip of Long Island. Taking her swim before breakfast, which, she believed, was de rigueur in summertime, my mother walked into the sea.
From All Happy Families by Jeanne McCulloch. Copyright © 2018 by Jeanne McCulloch. Published by Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission by the publisher.
A. G. Lombardo, author of Graffiti Palace, published in March by MCD Books.
The sky is burning. A vast plain of scintillation. But it is only sun set, another rehearsal for some future promised holocaust. The dying light silhouettes towers of iron in rust’s glow: great stacks, ziggurats of steel cubes, shipping containers wedged and balanced on pier’s edge above the crimson diamonding of the Pacific.
Karmann Ghia turns away from the copper light drowning into the ocean, each lapping wave a sputtering flame that sparkles, dies. The world is a funeral pyre without him—when will he return? She walks along this upper Matson observation deck, her fingertips caressing, tracing a rail of rebar Monk welded last year. White plastic chairs and a table shift in sunset shadows. Below, some of the old cargo containers still advertise faded logos glinting from networks of rust, salt, and desiccated barnacles: SEA-LAND, PACIFIC, MATSON, WESTCON, YANG MING, RAMJAC, EVERGREEN, PAN-IC (INTERNATIONAL CARRIERS). A city of iron cubicles latticed along the harbor, piled like a giant’s stairway in gravity-suspended steps rising toward the burnished sunset, or skewed in angles and intersecting layers; some pitched, half toppled by long-ago-extracted cranes and ship’s booms. The steel hulks loom like a metallic warren on the precipice of Slip Thirteen , an abandoned cargo depot jutting out into the smoggy dusk of Los Angeles Harbor. The shuttered facade of the Crescent Ware house Company along the East Channel obscures most of the old containers; beyond the protection of these warehouse buildings and the toxic, oiled patina of the channel waters is the city: only scattered buildings and glimpses of knotted freeways shift be neath the haze.
She descends the iron steps welded diagonally down the rusted side of the container, gripping the handrail of old, thin pipeline that Monk looped and welded around the crude stair case. Dim corridors snake through the labyrinth of the steel boxes, created by confluences of gaps amid the containers, or shipping doors ajar, or crawl spaces through torched holes or peeling iron sides. There are ropes, ladders, stacked crates, purloined boat ramps, illegally welded rebar rungs and handholds, ingress and egress, but these signs of human habitation have been care fully hidden from the city to the northwest.
Karmann disappears through an open cargo door, down a ladder through a blowtorched portal, into the darkened nexus of the iron chambers. Electric bulbs strung on wires hanging from freight hooks and eyelets wash her black skin in dark rainbows of blue, yellow, green; she’s changed some of these lights with colored bulbs, hoping for a festive aura here, but lately it seems to her the effect is garish, carnival; maybe that’s just her soul of late.
In the main rooms now, a series of chambers extended by gap ing cargo doors, containers torn open and welded together at dis concerting angles. Windows torched through iron reveal views into other containers or sometimes the smoggy blue continuum of the channel waters and sky. An old sofa, tables, dusky lamps. Black-and-white shadows flicker from the Philco TV—Elizabeth Montgomery twitching her nose in Bewitched—hung with baling wire from a ceiling hook high in the corner, silent, volume down, its jangled antennas looped with wire snaking up corrugated iron walls for patchy reception. Some of Monk’s friends mill about, drinking Brew 102 or Pabst or some of Karmann’s Electric Purple lemonade from a glass bowl on the dining table, smoking cigarettes—although Slim-Bone over by the old fish-crate shelves splayed with crumbling paperbacks has just lit up a joint—the babble of conversations echoes, reverberating inside the steel walls, everyone’s voices metamorphosing into a kind of amplified clang that has seeped into her head, one of those migraines that will take a day and a bottle and a pack of cigarettes to muffle away. Atop a converted old crab trap is the hi-fi, the turntable playing a scratchy Miles Davis riffing on “Boplicity.” Cheap portable fans waft smoke up through vent flaps sheared open in the ribbed walls or through welded windows and opened hatchways. More guests appear now, like pirates storming a besieged vessel, men and women swaying up or down from planks and ladders, twisting down knotted ropes, appearing at the bases of staircase crates, laughing, talking, bearing bottles of wine and plates of chicken and ribs and corncobs. Always a rent party somewhere in the ’hood, and tonight it’s Karmann and Monk’s turn, sharing food and drink, even stuffing a few Washingtons—if you can spare them—in a fishbowl on the table next to the pile of green for-money rent-party invitation cards, just enough to get a soul through another month, though Monk doesn’t pay any rent, since no landlord knows about Box Town, but the money bought food and gas and wine and cigarettes and records and bail, maybe a few bills stashed in the reserve for any needy soul’s emergencies. “Hey, Slim-Bone,” a new arrival, a young man in a purple silk shirt, calls out as he tosses another green rent card on the table’s pile:
Don’t move to the outskirts of town
Drop around to meet a Hep Brown
A social party by Monk and Karmann
Saturday. Latest on Wax. Refreshments.
The rent party ebbs and flows through several levels of iron lozenges: couples caress on backseat divans torn from gutted cars, dance to Motown blaring from radios, rise toward observation containers to toast the sunset or descend into sublevels where old mattresses and piled pillows and hammocks tucked away in shadowy metal corners wait like silent confidants for the new scents, pressings, and stains their lovers will bring. The electric bulbs blink and sputter with voltage stolen from surrounding harbor grids, feeding into shipyard transformers and underground vaults and through portals and under gangplanks of dry-docked, decommissioned navy ships: a discotheque effect, strobes of rain bow lights flashing, illuminates faces beaded with sweat, clear plastic cups sloshing dark wine, glistening black Afros, silvery strata of cigarette smoke, purple eyeliner, silver and gold chains webbed in moist chest hair glinting from open silk shirts.
Excerpted from Graffiti Palace: A Novel by A.G. Lombardo, published in March 2018 by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2018 by A.G. Lombardo. All rights reserved.
Anne Youngson, author of Meet Me at the Museum, published in August by Flatiron Books.
Dear young girls,
Home again from the deserts and oases of the Sheikdoms I find your enthusiastic letters on my desk. They have aroused in me the wish to tell you and many others who take an interest in our ancestors about these strange discoveries in Danish bogs. So I have written a “long letter” in the following pages for you, for my daughter Elsebeth, who is your age, and for all who wish to learn more about ancient times than they can gather from the learned treatises that exist on the subject. But I have all too little time, and it has taken me a long while to finish my letter. However, here it is. You have all grown older since and so perhaps are now all the better able to understand what I have written about these bog people of 2,000 years ago.
Yours sincerely,
P. V. Glob (Professor)
August 13th, 1964
An extract from the foreword to The Bog People, by P. V. Glob (Faber and Faber, 1969): Professor Glob responds to a group of schoolgirls who have written to him about recent archaeological discoveries. The Bog People is dedicated to these schoolgirls.
Bury St. Edmunds
November 22
Dear Professor Glob,
Although we have never met, you dedicated a book to me once; to me, thirteen of my schoolmates, and your daughter. This was more than fifty years ago, when I was young. And now I am not. This business, of being no longer young, is occupying much of my mind these days, and I am writing to you to see if you can help me make sense of some of the thoughts that occur to me. Or maybe I am hoping that just writing will make sense of them, because I have little expectation that you will reply. For all I know, you may be dead.
One of these thoughts is about plans never fulfilled. You know what I mean—if you are still alive you must be a very old man by now and it must have occurred to you that what you thought would happen, when you were young, never did. For example, you might have promised yourself you would try a sport or a hobby or an art or a craft. And now you find you have lost the physical dexterity or stamina to take it up. There will be reasons why you never did, but none of them is good enough. None of them is the clincher. You cannot say: I planned to take up oil painting but I couldn’t because I turned out to be allergic to a chemical in the paint. It is just that life goes on from day to day and that one moment never arrives. In my case, I promised myself I would travel to Denmark and visit the Tollund Man. And I have not. I know, from the book you dedicated to me, that only his head is preserved, not his beautiful hands and feet. But his face is enough. His face, as it appears on the cover of your book, is pinned up on my wall; I see it every day. Every day I am reminded of his serenity, his dignity, his look of wisdom and resignation. It is like the face of my grandmother, who was dear to me. I still live in East Anglia, and how far is it to the Silkeborg Museum? Six hundred miles as the crow flies? As far as Edinburgh and back. I have been to Edinburgh and back.
All this is not the point, though it is puzzling. What is wrong with me that I have not made the so small effort needed when the face of the Tollund Man is so central to my thoughts?
It is cold in East Anglia, windy cold, and I have knitted myself a balaclava to keep my neck and ears and head warm when I walk the dog. As I pass the mirror in the hall on the way out of the door, I notice myself in profile and I think how like my grandmother I have become. And, being like my grandmother, my face has become the face of the Tollund Man. The same hollowness of cheek, the same beakiness of nose. As if I have been preserved for two thousand years and am still continuing to be. Is it possible, do you think, that I belong, through whatever twisted threads, to the family of the Tollund Man? I’m not trying to make myself special in any way, you understand. There must be other people of the family, thousands of them. I see other people of my age, on buses, or walking their dogs, or waiting for their grandchildren to choose an ice cream from the van, who have the same contours to their faces, the same blend of peacefulness, humanity, and pain. There are far more who have none of these things, though. Whose faces are careless or undefined or pinched or foolish.
The truth is, I do want to be special. I want there to be significance in the connection made between you and me in 1964 and links back to the man buried in the bog two thousand years ago. I am not very coherent. Please do not bother to reply if you think I do not justify your time.
Yours Sincerely,
T. Hopgood (Mrs.)
Silkeborg Museum
Denmark
December 10
Dear Mrs. Hopgood,
I refer to your letter addressed to Professor Glob. Professor Glob died in 1985. If he had still been alive, he would by now be over 100 years old, which is not impossible, but is unlikely.
I believe you are asking two questions in your letter:
i. Is there any reason why you should not visit the museum?
ii. Is there any possibility you are distantly related to the Tollund Man?
In answer to the first, I would encourage you to make the effort, which need not be very great, to visit us here. There are regular flights from Stansted, or, if you prefer, from Heathrow or Gatwick, to Aarhus airport, which is the most convenient for arriving in Silkeborg. The museum is open every day between 10 and 5. Here you can see the Elling Woman as well as the Tollund Man, and an exhibition that looks at all aspects of those who lived in the Iron Age; for instance, what they believed in, how they lived, how they mined and worked the mineral that gives the period its name. I must also correct something you said in your letter. Although only the head of the Tollund Man is preserved, the rest of the body has been recreated, so the figure you will see, if you visit us here, will look just as it did when it was recovered from the bog, including the hands and the feet.
In answer to your second question, the Center for GeoGenetics at our Naturhistorisk Museum is at the moment trying to extract some DNA from the Tollund Man’s tissues, which would help us to understand his genetic links to the present-day population of Denmark. You will have read, in Professor Glob’s book, that the index finger of the Tollund Man’s right hand shows an ulnar loop pattern that is common to 68 percent of the Danish people, which gives us confidence that this study will find such links. Through the Vikings, who came later to Denmark but will have interbred with the existing population, there is most likely some commonality of genes to the population of the UK. So, I would say, it is quite possible that there is a family connection, however slight, between yourself and the Tollund Man.
I hope this information is helpful to you, and look forward to meeting you if you visit us here.
Regards,
The Curator
Bury St. Edmunds
January 6
Dear Mr. Curator,
It was generous of you to reply to my letter to Professor Glob, and to try to answer what you understood my questions to be. But they were not questions. The reason I have not visited has nothing to do with the problems of travel. I have passed my sixtieth birthday but am nonetheless quite fit. I could go tomorrow. There have been few times in my life when that has not been so. Leaving aside child birth and a broken leg, I have always been physically able to climb onto a plane, or indeed a ferry, to Denmark.
This being the case, I am forced to consider what might be the real reasons, because your answer to an unasked question has made me want to be honest with myself. Please be aware, I am writing to you to make sense of myself. You do not need to concern yourself with any of this. I do not expect you to reply.
My best friend at school was called Bella. This was not her given name and is not the name in Professor Glob’s dedication: it is a nickname, based on her ability to pronounce Italian words. She was rubbish at languages, as far as learning to use them to communicate was concerned, but she could act them beautifully. Her favorite word was bellissima. She was able to put a level of meaning into each syllable that varied according to the context, so the word seemed to mean more, when she said it, than it actually does. In fact, everything she said had more meaning, more intensity, than the same words used by anyone else.
We were friends from the first day we met, which was our first day at school. She was more colorful than I was; adventurous, alive in the moment. She brought me energy and confidence, and I loved her for it. What she loved about me, I think, was the steadiness. I was always there, always had a hand ready to hold hers. We were friends all our lives. All her life, for I am still alive, as you know, and she is not. And all our lives we talked about the time when we would visit the Tollund Man. We were, you see, always going to do it, but not yet. To begin with, we did not want to use up this treat before we had savored the looking forward to it. We were maybe, also, a little afraid that it would not be what we had hoped. We hoped it would be significant in some way—we could not have told you in what way—and there was a risk it would not be. Our school friends went, helterskelter. As soon as The Bog People was published in translation, if not before. They came back with an even stronger sense of ownership of the Tollund Man and Professor Glob and all things Danish than they already had. Bella and I thought they were superficial and unworthy and that the experience they had had was trivial, in comparison to the experience we would have. One day.
From Meet Me At the Museum by Anne Youngson. Copyright © 2018 by Anne Youngson. Reprinted by permission of Flatiron Books.
Maw Shein Win, author of Invisible Gifts, published in April by Manic D Press.
Are You in the Room With Me Now?
My therapist asked why I never cry.
I ask myself the same, closing my eyes.
A small sty in my vision.
As hard as I tried not to cry,
I was shy as a child. As I crossed the street
with mother, I hid behind her lab coat.
My throat taut and
tight. I thought I might cry.
The other night I lost my sight.
I could hear a couple on the crosswalk.
A man doing a handstand.
Two kids making plans.
Perhaps a chance to dance
in another place. I could cross the state
line. Cry at the sight of a shimmering lake.
My therapist asked:
What are you thinking?
How does that make you feel?
Where did that come from
and are you in the room with me now?
In Rio, there is a majestic cross on a
cliff. People live in pink paper shacks below.
I danced and I drank there.
I thought I might die there.
I crossed myself although I didn’t believe.
You sweat silver tears.
You see through pink paper walls.
You think your body might be crying now.
Dust and Smoke
He doesn’t know I’m in the den. I am 12. I face his back. He sits in the chair. He smokes Kent 100’s. He drinks. His rack of top twenty singles on the wall. He has headphones on. I smell the smoke. It hurts my eyes. I am barefoot. This is his room. The brown vinyl loveseat. The records on the shelf: Joni, Bob, Carly. My hair is short. I have bangs. The blinds are closed. The light coming through. Trail of smoke is a fairy wing.
Her father alone. In a studio. A door to a hut. Some white dust from the street. The white dust comes through the openings in the walls. He waits for the phone to ring. Dust on the photo of her sisters, her brother. Dust on his white hair. His belly protrudes but his arms are sticks. Hershey’s chocolate bars from Sav-On in his fridge. Chicken curry with potatoes in plastic container. Dust on the table. Phone without sound. The street with the voices. Heads that don’t look up.
Flower Instructions
i.
Blanket streets with plum blossoms.
Rest body against warm concrete.
Find rose petals on sidewalk.
Glimmer of the memory garden.
ii.
Follow the trail of invisible bees.
Nectar guides for the lost ones.
Fling lasso into summer darkness.
Hear whistles and megaphone.
iii.
Hold body close to body.
Breathe in the greenhouse.
Wear wet glitter and silver hose.
Lick salt on skin.
iv.
Catch whispers in libraries.
Greet strangers with acorns and grapefruit.
Remember eyes, ghosts, smoke.
Watch brothers as they disappear.
v.
Imagine a new world.
Keep sisters close.
The Misfortunes of Guan Yin
i.
an oyster, still, in brackish waters
sound of fallen blankets, di sotto in su
three-chambered heart pumps transparent blood
the misfortunes of Guan Yin
her eleven heads and thousand arms
eat up the master
the daughter captive in the enclosed porch
father hides in the bushes
a scar on the girl’s arm from a willing branch
ii.
calcified valves shelter fleshy
matter bony tongues and coffinfish encircle
the sea stars and spat
strangers and pilgrims offer snapdragons
and chocolate coins wrapped in gold paper
the mangrove roots have lost control
the sound of watermen scraping the
sound of beating cilia holding
containing opening closing
iii.
nacre covers grit: mother-of-pearl
the evolution of an irritant
Russian blue, milk white
iv.
emerald green sash across her reedy
frame mottled skin across neck, shoulders
a girl dancing in the garden of her mind
You Will Be With Me in a Town Called Paradise
The sound of horns and bells, the sound of
round crowns and brown birds, blue bells.
You will be with me in a town called Paradise with a slice
of cake, cluster of cherries, champagne on ice.
The night we met, a New Year’s Eve party, a talent show.
Someone pretends to be a stork, another pop of a cork.
Your clear eyes and warm head. I couldn’t hear your eyes,
but I could see your voice. Is paradise this bed?
Two cotton blankets and a comforter on my side,
a light sheet on yours. Bluebells on the dresser.
You touch the cat’s fur, orange beneath the chin,
she leaps off your chest. We rest for a while.
From Invisible Gifts by Maw Shein Win, published by Manic D Press. Copyright © 2018 by Maw Shein Win. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Laura Esther Wolfson, author of For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors, published in June by University of Iowa Press.
Fait Accompli
I wore my flannel nightgown with the tiny lavender flowers. Aleksandr had on his beige briefs with the blue pinstripe, he said. I filled in the rest—ruddy hair, hazel eyes, slim form. He murmured to me over thousands of kilometers of telephone wire from his home, far to the south, in Tbilisi. His voice was warm.
In 1988, no one called it phone sex. We had discovered it on our own. We were making the best of our separation.
I was sprawled on a bed in the October Revolution Hotel, gripping the receiver. Outside, a massive ship the color of lead stood at anchor in the Neva River. An enormous lamp on deck sent a beam through my window, providing practically the only illumination in all of late-night Leningrad.
“And one day, when we make love,” he was saying, “it will be different from the other times, because we will make a baby.” His voice turned gravelly with desire. “We’ll create life. And you will become—a mother.” A detailed how-to followed.
I was in the USSR working on a cultural exchange project and polishing my college Russian. I was twenty-two. Aleksandr was twenty-five, a rising star at a research institute specializing in honeybees. He inseminated the queens, artificially, using his own patented device. The bees adored him; he rarely got stung.
He had never been west of Montenegro. Inviting him to meet the folks was an undertaking. After I returned home to upstate New York, we waited eight months for the Soviet government to grant him an exit visa so he could come out for a visit. In those days, before email, cell phones, and Skype, I spent hours upon hours pressing redial, waiting for one of the four international phone lines serving his hometown to open up so that we could bellow to each other, at two dollars a minute, through a staticky roar that sounded like a volcano erupting over and over.
Years would pass before we became husband and wife. During those years of waiting, he talked frequently about the babies we would make. Before conceiving, he said, we must develop healthy habits, ingest the right minerals, avoid the wrong ones, exercise. His health-consciousness was impressive, considering where he came from: a part of the world where liquor flows so freely that it takes real effort to become known as a serious drinker, a place where the mention of lung cancer evokes a shrug and a smoke ring. After all, what is a demise at home, at your own pace, a death you choose yourself, compared to the midnight knock at the door, disappearance, interrogation, the gulag with its attendant frostbite, starvation, execution, all still part of recent memory? With that as the alternative, dying at home is a pleasure, a luxury, an assertion of free will.
Aleksandr was a nonsmoker; that alone made him remarkable in his world. He drank in moderation. By putting fishing line to novel use, he had independently discovered dental floss, a commodity unheard of in the Soviet Union.
And so, before we could become parents, we must be “ready.” Whatever that meant. But that was fine. My twenties and thirties stretched ahead. So far ahead that I could not see where they might lead. I listened to Aleksandr’s voice and I followed.
Three years after that telephone conversation, three years marked by extended visits and protracted separations, we were married near his parents’ home in Georgia. The next morning, the bedroom door flew open. We threw on some clothes.
In bustled Aleksandr’s chubby maiden aunt, Tamara, who lived in the apartment downstairs, pulling a little girl by the hand. The child was her namesake, and she went by the nickname Tamrico. She was one of the cousins, a ringleted five-year-old who often wore an enormous pink bow. We called her Tamrico the Terrible. During the wedding photos the day before, she had smashed her tiny fist through the lens of the only camera the family owned.
Behind the two Tamaras, other family members hovered. “There’s something little Tamrico wants to know,” said Tamara the Elder, laughing. We rubbed our eyes and blinked.
“Come on,” she said to the little girl. “What did you just say downstairs? Remember? Say it again.”
Tamrico took a breath. She recited: “Now that you’re married, when will you have a baby?”
A few years later, when Aleksandr and I were living in Philadelphia, his mother Nadezhda flew over for a visit. She set her suitcase down by the door, let her shearling coat slip off her shoulders onto the nearest chair, and set out on a circuit of the apartment.
“I’ve found the perfect place for the crib,” she said when she was done. The look on her exotic, youthful features was dreamy, yet practical.
Crib? “Where?”
“By your side of the bed,” she said to me. “So when the baby cries at night, you’ll be right there. And it’s far from the window, away from drafts.”
Similar comments followed in a steady stream. After a few days, Aleksandr and I shut ourselves in the bedroom to confer.
“We’ll say it’s my fault we don’t have a child yet,” he declared suddenly. “You want a baby, but I’m not ready.”
He had been born precisely ten months after his parents’ wedding day, so we were way overdue. I appreciated his willingness to take the heat.
I cannot pinpoint the moment when this story became the truth.
From For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors by Laura Esther Wolfson. Copyright © 2018 by Laura Esther Wolfson. Reprinted by permission of the University of Iowa Press.
All of the published authors who appear in the pages of this magazine have roads behind them—paths to publication that are as unique to each writer as their own poems, stories, and essays. Some of these roads cut a straight path, while others turn this way and that; some double back and crisscross, while others are under construction, redirected by detours and bypasses. Sometimes there are shortcuts, but other times there are long scenic tours through many of life’s most notable markers: births, deaths, loves, families, travels, careers. Periods of joy and contentment followed by episodes of darkness, difficulty. Achievements and failures—all of it informing, inspiring, delaying, or precipitating the writer’s work in some way, directly or indirectly.
The authors featured in our second annual 5 Over 50 have followed different paths as well, but their routes to publication are perhaps a bit longer—and, one could argue, more nuanced, often more complex, and even more, dare we say it, interesting—than those of “younger” writers who have the spotlight in today’s youth-focused culture. If our 5 Over 50 authors have one thing in common, it’s a sense of patient determination to create something meaningful, beautiful. And it really doesn’t matter how long that takes. As Peg Alford Pursell says, “There exists only one moment—the last—at which it’s too late for anything.”
Here, in their own words, we present five authors over the age of fifty whose debut books were published this year.
A Small Revolution (Little A, May) by Jimin Han
States of Motion (Wayne State University Press, May) by Laura Hulthen Thomas
Getting It Right (Akashic Books, June) by Karen E. Osborne
Ground, Wind, This Body (University of New Mexico Press, March) by Tina Carlson
Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow (ELJ Editions, March) by Peg Alford Pursell
Age: Fifty-one.
Residence: South Salem, New York.
Book: A Small Revolution (Little A, May), a novel that unravels the intertwined narratives of a hostage crisis on the campus of a college in central Pennsylvania, two young people finding love, and a student uprising in South Korea.
Editor: Vivian Lee.
Agent: Cynthia Manson of Cynthia Manson Literary Agency.
Recently I was invited to speak on a panel about literary friendships at the annual alumni festival at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. The panel was scheduled for a smaller auditorium than where the other events were being held, and one of the other panelists, my longtime friend Patricia Dunn, author of the novel Rebels by Accident (Sourcebooks Fire, 2015), joked that no one would show up. She was wrong: It was standing room only. I spoke about how important it is to find spaces to protect and nurture my writer self and that the most significant space for me is my writers group.
Alexandra Soiseth, author of a memoir, Choosing You: Deciding to Have a Baby on My Own (Seal Press, 2008), was the other member of our panel. Patricia, Alexandra, and I have been in a writing group with four other writers for nearly twenty years, ever since we left our MFA program. That small fact made the audience collectively gasp. A number of people asked how our friendship had helped us write and publish.
The answer wasn’t just about how we critiqued one another’s work, although we all had something to contribute in that department; we’ve all taught at some point and shared revision techniques and writing prompts in our weekly meetings. The answer also had to do with how we support one another, how we celebrate birthdays, pregnancies, marriages, divorces, new loves, anniversaries, graduations, new pets, and how we’ve leaned on one another through infertility, cancer, miscarriages, abortions, IVF, depression, menopause, restraining orders, deaths of parents, deaths of pets, job changes, surgeries, periods of drought and indecision in our writing, and periods of doubt when we thought we’d given up for good.
Four years earlier, at one of our Friday-night writers group meetings, at essayist Kate Brandt’s house (we meet at one another’s homes or at local cafés), it was my turn to announce I was quitting writing. The manuscript I’d been working on seemed to be at a dead end. Maybe it seemed so because my mother had recently suffered a stroke and I was preoccupied with what she needed. Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer, author of Informed Consent, End Days, and other plays, said that she’d write alongside me for as long as it took for me to feel connected to my book again. She meant it; she met me every day until the way seemed possible.
My writers group helped me realize I had to address the inner despair that got in my way—personal work that required a therapist. It took three false starts before I found the right one. We talk a lot about the future in our sessions. This is a simple truth: The future is unknowable. I never knew whether I’d have a book published, but I knew the act of writing sustained me. During one session, after I told my therapist that I hadn’t written that day, she replied, “Why not? If it helps you, why not? Who knows where it will lead?”
I was inspired by her question. I found myself feeling entitled to say what I wanted to say again in my writing. The therapist worked with me to unpack the origins of self-doubt that plagued me. It wasn’t easy, it still isn’t, but I was able to push through and complete the novel. Waiting at the end of that process was my agent, who was enthusiastic about my manuscript. She was able to sell it to an editor who loved it and understood what I was trying to accomplish. This last part—publication—is so much about luck. I’ve read many compelling manuscripts written by brilliant writers that have not been published. But that isn’t a reason to give up.
The only part we can control is writing and accepting that we don’t know where it will lead—which is all the more reason to keep trying.
(Photo credit: Janice Chung)
Age: Fifty-one.
Residence: Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Book: States of Motion (Wayne State University Press, May), a collection of vividly rendered stories set in small-town Michigan that follow characters broken by economic hardships, betrayal, and conflict in the mess of real life.
Editor: Annie Martin.
Agent: None.
The day my dream editor, Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press, called to reject the manuscript of States of Motion was the day I decided to give up on fiction. The no should have been business as usual. A writer like me works for many years before hearing yes to even a single story. My long stories shatter nearly every literary magazine’s word-count ceiling, so acceptances are rare. That this editor had read my collection at all felt like a one-hit wonder. I’d contributed to her press’s anthology, so she was a sympathetic, generous reader. Her rejection felt like the end of the line. Besides, real life was throwing one of its tantrums. My husband had lost his job in the recession. Our closest friends, too, were losing their jobs and homes. Writing fiction seemed…well, unaffordable. The editor extended a kind invitation to resubmit the manuscript when the stories did more than coexist. I wondered whether my life as a writer could continue to coexist with my life outside of fiction.
Several months after I stopped writing, I called my great-aunt Joan, who was dying of cancer. She’d always led a quiet life in her small New Hampshire town, but on the phone she recalled a grand adventure. In the spring of 1939, when she was five years old, Joan traveled with her mother on one of the Queen Mary’s last voyages before the ocean liner was retrofitted as a World War II troopship. A terrible storm outside New York almost swept Joan overboard. “The waves were sloshing the decks something wicked,” she said. “Then suddenly Mother lifted me up and held me out to the storm.”
“Wait,” I said. “By ‘held out’ do you mean she dangled you over the railing?”
“Oh, yes. The clouds were black and folding over each other like snakes. The ocean was crashing into the hull. The waves seemed to come right up to my ankles.”
As a protective mother, I was aghast. Who was this reckless great-grandmother I’d never met? A woman who decided to take her continental tour alone, with her five-year-old daughter in tow—when the continent in question was approaching war?
This was a woman who didn’t merely coexist with her life and times.
I saw then that abandoning my work was just a safety railing. I set aside the collection to write new fiction about Southeast Michigan’s troubles. I invited my dearest writing buddies to an inspiring DIY retreat at a cabin on Lake Huron. Years later, when my stories were no longer coexisting, but conversing, I resubmitted States of Motion to the dream editor.
The book came out just before I turned fifty-one, well after the hope for dreams you might achieve matures into the acceptance that you just might not. I have found, however, that not publishing earlier in life has been a gift. By hearing yes only rarely from editors and readers, I discovered how to say yes to my work, today, right now. I no longer seek the writer I should be, but the writer I am.
Several days after my great-aunt told me of her greatest adventure, Joan passed peacefully. Before we hung up for the last time, I had asked why she thought her mother had thrust her over that railing. “Laura, she just wanted me to be able to see,” Joan said. How courageous of my great-grandmother to show her daughter the terrifying beauty of risk, even when no one else is on deck to share the view.
(Photo credit: Ron Thomas)
Age: Sixty-nine.
Residence: Port Saint Lucie, Florida.
Book: Getting It Right (Akashic Books, June), a novel about half-sisters—one the product of an abusive foster-care situation, the other of dysfunctional privilege—who finally meet during their father’s final days.
Editor: Marva Allen.
Agent: Marie Brown of Marie Brown Associates.
Writing was always my dream. As a girl growing up in the Bronx, I told my friends stories I’d made up but pretended were true. I wrote my first short story when I was twelve. In middle school I’d submit book reports on my own stories with fake author names and receive As. Under my graduation picture in the Evander Childs High School yearbook, next to “Ambition” it said “Writer.”
Of course, I also read over the years, often consuming a novel a week in spite of a husband, two small children, and going to college full time. I squeezed in moments to read for pleasure, and every novel made me yearn to write my own.
For forty-two years, like the protagonist Kara in my novel, I suffered the consequences of childhood sexual abuse, before finding a therapist who helped me navigate a healing journey. During the years of gut-wrenching work, I freed secrets and worked through their aftermath. Along the way I met dozens of other survivors. I explored their narratives, motivations, successes, and setbacks. I learned the restorative power of gratitude, redemption, and forgiveness—major themes in my writing. But my goal for Getting It Right was to write a page-turner, not a book about abuse. One early reader described it as a “genre-bending mystery and family saga.” I kept the chapters short and the action fast, and I let Kara and her half-sister, Alex, lead the way.
My career as a consultant, executive coach, and presenter specializing in philanthropy, opinion research, and organizational management led me all over the world as I taught, spoke, and consulted with nonprofit leaders. Storytelling infused every engagement. In each city, in every new country, I jotted down scraps of thoughts, words, and ideas in small notebooks stashed in my briefcase. Writing on airplanes, in airport lounges, and hotel rooms, I finished the first draft in a year. It took a long time to rewrite.
Once I was finished—after I had shared the manuscript with trusted readers and revised and polished it—I took the next scary step: I sent the manuscript out in search of an agent. I networked, went to writing conferences, and took classes that included an agent’s review of the first ten pages. I sent it out and then sent it out again, and again.
Everyone says it because it’s true: Rejection is hard. I’m not sure which moments in the long process are the most memorable. The day my agent said she loved the book and wanted to represent me, or the day she told me that she had an offer from a publisher. We ate lunch and discussed the contract. I asked questions, took notes, thanked her, walked out of the restaurant—all quite professional. Once I hit the street, I cried all the way to the parking lot.
I held my book launch in Australia, at the open-air restaurant at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Sydney Opera House gleaming in the background. It was an intimate affair. My husband joined me, along with two women I’d been writing with online for fifteen years but had never met. We hugged, laughed, and celebrated. In the weeks since, my readings, talks, and signings continue to fill my heart with joy as I keep writing. So far I’ve written two more books, and I’m working on a fourth.
Another thing everyone says because it’s true: You’re never too old to realize your dreams.
(Photo credit: Robert Osborne)
Age: Sixty-four.
Residence: Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Book: Ground, Wind, This Body (University of New Mexico Press, March), a poetry collection exploring the vestiges of war and redemption as a traumatized soldier returns home from WWII carrying a legacy of violence and abuse.
Editor: James Ayers.
Agent: None.
I watched Lucille Clifton, well into her fifties, perform: “these hips are mighty hips. / these hips are magic hips / i have known them / to put a spell on a man and / spin him like a top!” She danced and swayed and made the words into music in a small auditorium at Pacifica University in the late 1980s. I did not yet consider myself a poet, but I could not forget the sensual power of her words.
Ground, Wind, This Body began with the last poem in the book, “Embryo of Light,” which consists of dream fragments from the two and a half years it took to adopt my daughter Mia from China. The dreams came feverishly and took the form of my “pregnancy” with her. A beautiful poet and mentor, Laurie Kutchins, encouraged me to let the language and poems be as strange as the dreams. That permission allowed me to begin the book. I was in my early forties and just beginning to feel I had something of value to say. I am amazed at younger poets who find their voices early and are so strong. My voice, like my life, was fragmented and numbed for much of my early adulthood. In order to find it, I had to begin the long hard work of trauma and substance abuse recovery. My daughter, with her fragmented history, encouraged me to look at mine, and I started to write about how the war that lived inside my father was a force in our family.
This book was written over many years. It was made possible by community and endurance. New Mexico hosts a vibrant and active poetry community, and through workshops, readings, and writing groups, the poems were born. I sent out poems and most were rejected, as was the manuscript, multiple times. It was the power of communal work and exploration that encouraged me to keep going. It is so easy to give up, especially as an older woman with little confidence. I honor my teachers: Joy Harjo, Laurie Kutchins, Joy Jacobson, Valerie Martinez, Margaret Randall, Lisa Gill, Hilda Raz, Lynn Miller, and many others both at the University of New Mexico and in private workshops who bore witness to my efforts and encouraged me to keep going.
Writing and publishing are not competitive sports. Writing is the most important, but reading aloud brings the writing to life and allows for an audience. Listen to and read as many other poets and other writers as you can. Join a group that will root you on through the muck. Keep working on the craft with good teachers. Submit to paper and online journals, newspapers, art shows. Find local presses by talking to poets you know, noting which presses are publishing the books of poetry you love, and doing online research. I was able to publish my first book through the University of New Mexico Press, which has an honorable history of publishing books related to the Southwest. Encourage other poets to publish, to read aloud, to be heard. Buy their books when they come out, go to their readings. We live in a culture that doesn’t read enough poetry, so invite those people who don’t know poetry to go with you to readings. Send them poems you love. Animate the world with your words.
Age: “Over fifty.”
Residence: San Francisco Bay Area.
Book: Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow (ELJ Editions, March), a collection of intense hybrid prose—flash fiction, prose poetry, and other forms that resist categorization—that pulls a world of almost terrifying beauty into laser-sharp focus.
Editor: Ariana Den Bleker.
Agent: None.
Recently I returned to the town where I grew up and where most of my family still lives. I went there to attend a wedding, to visit family, and to give readings from my first book in (somewhat) nearby Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. There is still no bookstore in my hometown, nowhere for a girl to window-shop and superimpose her reflection on a book jacket. I grew up knowing no one who made a living by writing, no one who wrote as a matter of course. Until college, I’d never been to a literary reading.
This experience, or lack thereof, isn’t particularly unique, but it may have a lot to do with why I didn’t take my writing seriously until later in life. I was in my late thirties when I thought about learning to write, seeking entry into a then-unconventional MFA program—Warren Wilson, the first low-residency program (and, I might add, the best in the country). I was a single mother who taught in the public education system. I stole spare moments, usually in summer, to write. And though I’d entered and won a prestigious short story contest, I still didn’t understand my need to write, or to publish as the necessary completion of the creative act.
During that recent trip to my hometown, I visited my sister and her husband, two lovely and gifted people who paint, play music, teach school—and, for the past year, have run the region’s playhouse. When my vivacious brother-in-law greeted me, he said something that took me aback. I didn’t register the exact words, but they had to do with his excitement about how we three are doing big things at an age when most people are supposed to be winding down—he and my sister taking over the theater and me publishing and promoting my book.
The surprise I felt was similar to the one that anyone over fifty has experienced when passing the plate glass of a storefront, say, on the way to the post office. You catch your reflection: Can that aged face really be yours? It can. It is. But you go about your business—collecting your mail, recycling junk flyers—and the image is gone, never to supplant the picture of yourself you hold in your mind’s eye.
Though it’s true that this is my first published book, giving readings, finishing a new book, and sending out work for publication are my daily activities—simply part of what it is for me to be in the world. I’ve come to understand the necessity. And I’ve come to understand that the act of creating follows its own imperatives. Writing—a story, a poem, a book—takes as long as it takes. To publish a first book over the age of fifty? I’m glad to say it doesn’t seem that unusual to me. I’m looking forward to the next one.
As for practical advice, I’d offer that the essential value resides in respecting your own process and creative imperatives, in pushing through the self-doubts that all art-makers experience—that advice isn’t age-specific, of course. For me it comes to this: Never stop. There exists only one moment—the last—at which it’s too late for anything.
From the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 program to the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, many organizations make a point of recognizing young, gifted authors at the start of their literary careers. In the November/December 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, we feature our second annual 5 Over 50—a selection of five debut authors over the age of fifty whose first books came out this past year. This year’s 5 Over 50 are Jimin Han, Laura Hulthen Thomas, Karen E. Osborne, Tina Carlson, and Peg Alford Pursell. Here, we feature excerpts from their debut books.
A Small Revolution (Little A, May) by Jimin Han
States of Motion (Wayne State University Press, May) by Laura Hulthen Thomas
Getting It Right (Akashic Books, June) by Karen E. Osborne
Ground, Wind, This Body (University of New Mexico Press, March) by Tina Carlson
Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow (ELJ Editions, March) by Peg Alford Pursell
A Small Revolution
By Jimin Han
1
A woman is running in a field of fallen leaves, and a man is running behind her. It’s early enough in the morning for the sky to be gray and the trees to be black, early enough for me to hear only the sound of her breathing and his breathing, except for that moment when he gains on her, makes contact, and tackles her, and she lets out a high-pitched sound cut short as she hits the ground. This is the view I have from my open dorm window into the quadrangle of Weston College in the middle of Pennsylvania.
2
You told me once about a neighbor who had a border collie named Pirate. One day, you were outside early in the morning and saw two wild rabbits in your neighbor’s yard, two small brown ones, and then you heard the back screen door slam and watched Pirate charge across the grass toward those rabbits. One took off for the bushes on the periphery, and Pirate pursued it while the other stayed absolutely still, like a statue, so still you questioned your own eyes. Was it a sculpture of a rabbit in the neighbor’s yard? Pirate trotted out of the bushes, having given up the chase. He had never paid much attention to you before. But you walked toward the dog, calling him by name, rewarding him with long petting strokes, and backed away as slowly as you could, leading him away. When you looked up again, the statue was gone.
3
I remain at the dorm window. I stay, even when I see him stand her up and drag her stumbling by the back of her coat. He turns, retracing his steps, searching the ground, and then picks up something he had dropped earlier. He hoists it up and begins to walk forward again, keeping his other hand on the woman’s coat and yanking her along. I stay, even when I know he is coming for me, even when I can see clearly that it is your friend Lloyd. I stay because the woman is someone I know well, and in his hand is a shotgun.
4
The screams in the hallway launch me toward the phone. I dial 911, and someone on the other end says, “What’s your emergency?”
I think I’m saying, Come now, please, but a voice on the other end says, “Is someone there? I can’t hear you. Can you tell me what’s happening?”
“Yoona!” It’s Daiyu shrieking in the hall. I drop the phone and run to the door and open it.
There are mud splats on her face. Her black hair a squashed nest. Daiyu Chu is a friend of mine from a dorm across campus. There are grass stains on the knees of her pink flannel pajamas. Her blue sweatshirt with the round Weston College logo is smeared with damp patches. Lloyd appears beside her. He’s got a leer on his face, and his hair is wet, as if he has been caught in the rain.
“Yoona, he’s crazy,” Daiyu sobs. I can’t help but step back, and he pushes her into the room. Daiyu scrambles toward the wall by my bed, moving as far from him as she can get, and hides her face in her hands. “What’s—” is the only word I can say as Lloyd turns, still in the doorway, and raises a shotgun into the hall. More screams, and people scatter, and I hear Heather’s voice. “Yoona, you okay?”
Heather Connelly has a room next to mine. Instead of fleeing, she’s coming. “Don’t!” I call out but Lloyd grabs her by the sleeve of her terry-cloth robe, and Heather reaches for Faye Taverson to save herself as if she is falling off a pier, and Faye is caught off guard, and Heather and Faye are reeled into the room.
Lloyd kicks the door closed. And someone pounds on it from the other side. A voice comes through, calling for me. It’s Joanna, the resident adviser.
GO AWAY I’LL KILL THEM ALL, Lloyd explodes. He shoots the gun. His shoulder jerks back. And it’s as if a grenade went off in the room. I crouch on the floor, my arms over my head. There’s ringing in my ears.
There’s no more pounding on the door after that. I’m aware of Daiyu wailing from the corner behind me and Faye huddled on the bed to my left saying, “Oh my god, oh my god,” over and over again and Heather telling everyone to be quiet from somewhere to my right. I’ve heard gunfire before, but something about this room, this space, is louder than anything I’ve heard.
The sirens, when they come, loop as if they’re fading and then growing louder. Are they coming to rescue us, or is it for someone else?
STOP. Lloyd shouts as if his words are coming out of a body that is itself a gun. STOP. STOP. WHATEVER YOU’RE THINKING, STOP. I’LL MAKE ALL OF YOU STOP.
5
“Wait, Lloyd? My friend Lloyd?” you would say. “What’s Lloyd got to do with this? He wouldn’t have a gun. He wouldn’t do this. I know Lloyd, our Lloyd from Korea? Lloyd, my friend Lloyd?” You wouldn’t believe it. You’d refuse.
And I’d tell you I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
“How’d he get to your college? What’s he doing in your room?” you would say.
I’m trying to tell you.
Listen.
6
My life was simple when I was a child. I walked to school with my older sister. I joined after-school clubs. I went home and did my homework. Some days, after dinner, my father beat my mother. Not often. But there were days when that happened, and in between were the days it was about to.
7
My mother said, “Don’t trust a man, ever.” My sister said, “Don’t trust anyone.” My father said, “No one understands me in this house.”
8
You understood me. You understood Lloyd and me. If you were here in this room, you’d know what to do. What am I forgetting? You said I was good at making lists. To-do lists, to-see lists, to-make-us-remember lists, to-figure-out-how-we-got-here lists. To-tell-you-why-I-could-never-see-you-again lists.
9
The sirens keep coming. Heather holds the palm of her hand to her cheek, and when she takes it away, there’s blood. Behind her in the wall is a four-inch gash as if someone pounded a clawed hammer into it with five circular punctures below it. Buckshot pellets. I know this because my father collects guns.
“Does it hurt?” I say, and she says, “Is it bad?” I remove a pillow from its case and hand it to her. Lloyd is kicking the door in a rhythmic way, shuffling and pacing and kicking, hugging the shotgun to his chest. Is anyone going to come through that door and rescue us?
“Jesus, he’s going to kill us,” Faye says.
He runs at her, the shotgun raised like an axe. WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING BEHIND MY BACK?
I stand up. “Lloyd, what are you doing? The police are here now.”
He whirls at me. OH, SO NOW YOU’LL TALK TO ME. NOW IT’S DIFFERENT, IS IT?
“Lloyd, you don’t have to do this, please don’t do this.”
I’VE GOT PROOF, YOONA. HE’S ALIVE. YOU CAN’T GO THROUGH WITH IT NOW. ADMIT IT.
He means you, and my heart drops every time I’m reminded that you’re dead.
“I don’t understand,” Daiyu whimpers. “What’s happening?”
I can’t explain. I don’t even know myself how Lloyd turned into this. Or is it I who turned into someone who could make him do this?
“What proof do you have?” I say.
I WON’T LET YOU LIE ANYMORE. I LOVED YOU.
Don’t listen to him. It’s not what you imagine love is. I never chose him over you. Don’t think I forgot about you. I didn’t. He doesn’t mean that kind of love, the one you and I had. He means something else. Something he imagined into being.
“Lloyd, you’ve got to accept it’s over,” I repeat. He acts as if he doesn’t hear me and points the shotgun at Daiyu. I hold my breath. And then he lowers the gun and takes a thick roll of gray duct tape out of his coat pocket. He waves it in Heather’s direction. AROUND HER WRISTS AND FEET. DO IT NOW.
When he throws the tape at Daiyu, she misses it. It hits the floor and rolls, and I bend to retrieve it.
He lunges at me, snatches the tape out of my hands, and shoves it into Daiyu’s. DO IT. NOW. He backs away, raising the shotgun at Daiyu’s head. Tears pour down her cheeks as Heather holds out her arms and says, “Do what he wants. It’s okay, it’s just for now, it’ll be okay, Daiyu.” I meet Heather’s eyes, and she looks over at Faye, and I see that Faye has moved toward the door. Lloyd is intent on Daiyu, watching her fumble, her fingers pulling the end of the tape. Faye maneuvers a little closer to the door.
“I’ll listen to you, whatever it is. Let the girls go and we’ll talk. Put the gun away. If you have proof, show me, and we’ll explain to the police,” I tell him.
He looks at me with hate, and I flinch. Without looking at Faye, he steps sideways and nabs Faye’s ponytailed hair. WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
10
I read a statistic that women who were abused as children have a higher likelihood of being in abusive adult relationships. Physical, sexual, all of it. This didn’t make sense to me. I thought it would be the opposite. I thought it was like what Willa’s friend Albert said about his sister, how she’d been raped and so she never sat on a couch with other people after that. She always chose a chair. A single chair, where no one could sit next to her. After the rape, she couldn’t stand to have a man close to her. Which was why, he said, she wasn’t married now and probably wouldn’t ever be in a relationship again. I thought about that. Did this apply to those who witnessed abuse too?
11
Daiyu has finished taping Heather’s and Faye’s wrists. They’re sitting on the edge of my bed. She’s working on Heather’s ankles. Lloyd has barricaded the door with my desk and chair. “You don’t mean to do this, Lloyd. Think about it for a second. This isn’t going to help Jaesung or you. How can you help Jaesung when you’re in jail?”
YOU SHUT UP. He grabs the tape from Daiyu and throws it at me. I catch it, an instinct to keep it from hitting me in the face. It’s a fat new reel, and it stings my hands. I put it on the desk. If I push it aside and then move the chair, I can open the door and escape. Except he will shoot me in the back. Except my friends will be left with him.
I SAID YOUR ANKLES.
I pick up the tape and loosen the end. It smells like plastic and gasoline.
“I’m not going anywhere, Lloyd,” I tell him.
IF I DIDN’T BRING DAIYU HERE, YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE LET ME IN. TAPE YOUR FUCKING FEET OR—
He takes a handgun out of his other pocket. What else does he have in that long wool coat? The handgun is a black square-nosed thing. He pushes the muzzle into Daiyu’s head.
“Yoona,” she whimpers.
I sit beside Faye and Heather. I tape my ankles together, but not completely, only the front where he can see. He sends Daiyu over to wrap my wrists. The sound of sirens is all around us. Still coming and fading, and now not fading anymore. With so many police cars outside, in a few minutes we’ll be free, won’t we? All I have to do is buy us some time. I hold out my wrists to Daiyu, who has not stopped crying. The tears will keep the tape from sticking, I think, and move my hands so her tears land on the sticky part of the tape, but she doesn’t understand and presses the tape down. I shake my head. “I’m so sorry, Yoona,” she sobs.
YOU’RE JOINING THEM. Lloyd pushes Daiyu next to me. In one swish he has bound Daiyu’s hands, and he hauls her to her feet and puts her on the other side of Heather. He hasn’t taped her ankles. My heart lingers on that small fact. The way she curls up, he won’t notice. Will that help us out of this situation somehow?
Then he returns to my side. And my heart sinks. We’re all in a row. Ducks in a row. And he’s too close. I can smell his sweat like rancid milk. He holds the handgun up in front of my face. TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT IT. YOU COULD HAVE BEEN WITH ME, ON THIS SIDE, THE WAY WE PLANNED. YOU’RE MAKING ME DO THIS. ALL YOUR LIES. I GAVE YOU A CHANCE.
The sirens suddenly stop. He runs to the window overlooking the parking lot, slams the window closed, yanks the left and then the right panel of the curtains. They’re the dark-blue blackout sort. Weston splurged this year. Suddenly it’s dark except for a sliver of light that Lloyd allows by pulling back an edge with a finger so he can see the parking lot. It’s quieter now in the room. I can make out the muffled sound of car doors slamming and low voices speaking. Someone whistles as if signaling to someone else. Gravel crunches underfoot. More cars drive up, and engines are cut off.
The phone rings, and Lloyd snatches the receiver and holds it up to his ear but doesn’t let it touch his head, as if he thinks the police can send poisonous gas through it.
THEY’RE FINE. UNLESS YOU DO SOMETHING STUPID. UNDERSTAND?
He thrusts the phone at me. TELL HIM I HAVEN’T HURT ANYONE.
I speak into the mouthpiece. “He hasn’t, but hurry.” Daiyu and Faye join in with their own “Hurry.” Lloyd snatches the phone away, and I can feel his breath on my cheek as he holds the phone between us. SHUT UP OR I’LL TAPE YOUR MOUTHS TOO. They stop.
A man’s voice is on the other end of the phone. He says his name is Detective Sax, he asks if we’re okay, and I look to Lloyd, who nods, so I tell him we’re four of us, four girls. “It’s going to be okay, I promise,” Sax says with such composure I think I might be dreaming this whole thing. “How many gunmen, did you say?” he asks.
“One.”
“Try to stay calm, we’re working on getting you out of there, I promise. If he has a list of demands, tell him to write them down, and I’ll try to get them for him, relax,” he continues.
“His name is Lloyd, Lloyd Kang,” I reply, and Lloyd removes the phone and slams it into its cradle. I DIDN’T TELL YOU TO TELL HIM MY NAME, he howls and holds the butt of the shotgun above my head.
Daiyu and Faye gasp.
“Don’t, Lloyd. If you hurt us, you won’t get anything you want,” I tell him, looking up at him.
He stares at me, and I can see his eyes are rimmed in red as if he’s rubbed them too hard. YOU DON’T EVEN CARE IF HE DIES IN A NORTH KOREAN SHITHOLE.
“But he’s not alive, Lloyd,” I remind him. I can’t make myself call you dead. “The accident in Korea, you remember, he’s gone. There’s no one to save.”
YOU LIE, he spits, lowering the shotgun. Where’s the handgun? Is it close to me on the bed? YOU DON’T EVEN LOVE HIM. I CAN PROVE HE’S ALIVE. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO THEN? HOW ARE YOU GOING TO EXPLAIN TO HIM WHAT YOU WERE GOING TO DO UNTIL I STOPPED YOU?
He waves the shotgun at all of us. YOU’RE GOING TO FREE HIM. HE’S WORTH A HUNDRED OF YOU.
12
Once, in my high school gym, I stepped off the bleachers from the top row, expecting to make my way down as everyone else was doing at the end of a school rally. As soon as my foot found air, I knew something was wrong. Instead of finding a foothold on the level below me, I was falling, and I told myself, I’m falling: I must have time because I’m aware of this, and here is air around me, space and air, I’m falling, I can move my arms, I can put out my hands and brace my fall. So move, now, I told myself, move your arms, get your hands ready. My mind told my hands, my arms, even my legs to adjust, and I was convinced I could still make this happen even as my shoulder slammed onto the polished wooden basketball court, even as my head followed suit, making contact with the surface—I believed I had a chance to affect the way I landed. Stunned, I couldn’t believe how fast the floor had risen to greet me. Hard, unforgivingly hard, and my body ached. I lifted my head. What had happened to my chance? My sister looked down at me from the fifth row, where I’d been moments before, and said, “You fell like a rock.”
13
We sit and wait. Why isn’t Detective Sax calling again? Faye leans into me, and I lean into her. Heather, on the other side of Faye, sits up tall. Daiyu leans into Heather. Lloyd paces, twitching and mumbling at something on his shoulder. From outside, in the direction of the parking lot, come sounds of car doors slamming shut and tires crunching gravel. Loud voices call to each other. I HAVE PROOF. I HAVE PROOF, Lloyd mutters as he paces. He jerks the gun around his body. He and the shotgun are one unit, and we are stuck in our places. I hold my breath. He levels the gun with his other hand, pointing it at each of us one by one. I‘LL KILL THEM. I WILL. YOU KNOW I CAN, he shouts at the ceiling.
It’s Heather who talks to him. “The police aren’t going to let you just kill us. They’ll come in any minute. Give up right now and save yourself.”
Excerpted from A Small Revolution by Jimin Han. Copyright © 2017 by Jimin Han. Published by Little A, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
States of Motion
by Laura Hulthen Thomas
Sole Suspect
The body in the road had become a reliable kindness. Tucked nimbly in the sharp dip on Judd Road just past the hairpin curve out of town, the body could be a trick, a blink, exhaustion’s shadow. A chalky moon lit the curve. Beyond the light’s rim, darkness poured into the hollow’s bleak drop. Just in time again, Perry swerved off the road. He parked under the near-headless birch and aspen, canopies shorn wide for the power lines. The shoulder was choked so tightly with brush that Perry’s rusted truck bed jutting into the lane became the obstacle the next motorist might see too late. Perry’s door swung open almost to the head, which didn’t, at first, flinch. Maybe this was the night someone else had finally hit the body.
A harsh wind cut through the bare branches. No buffer now against the chill. Perry’s jacket might as well be his skin. Had the lying in begun before the cold set and the leaves dropped? Perry couldn’t recall when he’d first come upon this body. After the girls had been discovered last month, this he knew. But he couldn’t say when exactly these encounters became routine, and then, necessary.
The body wasn’t waiting for him in that hollow every night. Perry never asked the questions he should ask; that if the body appeared on some nights, why not every night? What erratic calculus of despair determined a night’s decision to lie in wait for collision’s bliss?
#
Perry was awaiting positive identification, which the authorities told him might come tomorrow. A foregone conclusion, since he and the Other Family had immediately identified the girls’ clothes. Remarkably well preserved after twenty years underwater. Elsa’s dressy blouse was laid out on the authorities’ steel table, sleeves thrown out at right angles as if frozen in one of her impulsive hugs. Her denim cutoffs lay below the blouse, a strip of steel gleaming in the gap between hem and waistband like a prosthetic belly. The blouse’s frilly scallops were fringed with mud. Dirt blotted the sleeves. Mud stains dotted the pearly buttons. Not a single button was missing. Not a speck of the mud on the blouse or cut-offs turned out to be aged blood, so the authorities finally knew to rule out foul play. A technician would have removed this blouse delicately from his daughter’s skeleton. The cut-offs would have been pulled cautiously from her hips to avoid dislodging joints, shattering evidence. The silver glittering sandals with the Roman straps, now lake-bed brown with the buckles flaking rust, would have been carefully guided from each foot’s frail boney accordion.
The clothes were pinned and air-dried to stiff, unnatural shapes before Perry and the Other Family were summoned. The living knew that, like the DNA testing that would be compared against samples from their own bodies, identifying the clothes was a formality. The car, a ‘71 Mustang hauled up from the shriveled lake, was well known as the car Perry had given Elsa for her sixteenth birthday. The water level hadn’t dipped so low in a century. Drought had dried up the wells on his out of town properties but had given Perry his daughter back.
He didn’t know how the Other Family felt about closure but he wasn’t about to hand over last hope on a platter to the authorities. He’d studied the items as if he’d never seen these clothes, as if the unearthed car wasn’t his well-known ‘71 Mustang with two female bodies strapped in the front seats, a mangled rear tire that must have blown and hurtled the car off the bridge. He told the authorities he couldn’t positively identify this clothing. Hadn’t too much time passed to be certain? Some items were missing, too. Intimate things. Were the authorities keeping Elsa’s undergarments from his sight out of delicacy? The authorities hadn’t recovered her cheap silver earrings either, but Perry didn’t notice the baubles weren’t among these personal remains.
He was not present when the Other Family identified their daughter’s clothing so he never would know if they’d given up their hope easily, even gratefully.
#
Perry slammed the car door. The body stirred at the sound. Alive, still a man. Perry helped him to his feet. Wrapped his coat around the man’s gaunt shoulders, tucked him gently into the passenger seat. Hurrying for no good reason. If the man was in a hurry to live, he’d have risen on his own. If the man was in a hurry to die, he wouldn’t choose to lie on a road rarely driven after dark. But Perry felt the urgency of their time together. Moving the truck out of the next motorist’s way. Protecting the man from the cold and the country night’s sticky ink. Perry thought that regard for this man’s welfare made him hurry, but the rush was meant to beat the clock on Perry’s dead heart. He could kill this man as easily as he could rescue him, because, given time, didn’t reputation always become character?
This man was not yet Perry’s age, but not young enough to be reckless, to have not thought things through. But, too, not ready to die. He would take to Perry’s care, is how Perry knew. Put his fingers to the dashboard vents. Thaw out, smile a bit, relax into Perry’s coat. He would never begin a conversation and he didn’t tonight, either. Decisions could be made about what to find out and what to leave be.
Perry pulled onto Judd Road. The old F150’s engine rattled now like a lingering cough, but there wasn’t a thing wrong with it. Tonight the man couldn’t seem to get warm. He was fidgety, fretful. He kept rubbing his hands in front of the heater vents, then sticking his fingers between the seat cushions, or in his lap. His smile was one of those Perry envied, radiant and straight. A few facts, released stingily, during their first rides together. The man lived with his parents. They did not know of the roadway roulette. The man would prefer Perry run him over than take him back home.
Perry nursed assumptions: an alcoholic, an unstable, a man diverted from the course of reason. But he did not reek of poisons, did not appear drugged. Perhaps he was one of those users who thrived on fooling his family. Once Perry had looked up the Marion Road address to find the number unlisted, no name attached to the property. He’d poked a bit for the man’s identity. Hadn’t been too diligent. There were certain benefits to the man remaining a stranger.
Perry usually accepted the man’s silences, which he interpreted as invitations to fill, but there came a point when he wanted to crowbar some answers.
–If you want to die, why not choose a busier road?
–I don’t drive, the man told him.
–What’s that got to do with it?
The man blew air into his cupped palms as if about to whistle.
–Out here, where else could I walk to?
The wind picked up, whistled through the F150’s aging window seals. Moonlight shimmered on the pavement like an early frost. The man pointed out the way home even though Perry knew the route, a left down Marion, one of those narrow, single lane dirt roads. There the jarring washboards chiseled by long-ago summer rains would fragment their conversation, save Perry the burden of finding out why this man sought to die.
#
Denise was the other girl’s name. Perry didn’t know what she was wearing the night the girls disappeared. He’d barely spoken to Elsa on her way out, which was why, he told the authorities, he couldn’t say for certain about the clothes. Back when the authorities had questioned him—closely, Perry was the sole suspect—he described Elsa’s glittery sandals, which he remembered flashing on the drab living room carpet. He didn’t tell the authorities how he’d frowned over the cut-offs and dressy blouse. The clingy denim rode too high on her thighs. The Sunday Best top seemed like an insult to Sunday paired with those shorts, and she’d buttoned the blouse up tight to her slender neck. Not a trace of flesh until those long legs, as if she was low-balling the flirtation and he didn’t like her going to a teen party at the gravel pit in the first place. She was wearing earrings, silver dangling baubles that flashed like grins as she told him goodbye.
Should have driven the girls himself, he’d always suffer this guilt. A straight shot down Judd Road, across the bridge over the lake that had taken their lives. He’d have watched them walk up the gravel path to the ridge where the other kids were stoking the bonfire and pulling on beers, shadows against flames on a hot starless night. He’d have noted what Denise was wearing so he could keep tabs on both girls. Parked down the road within sight of the fire. All the way down the path, Elsa’s silver sandals would have twinkled on her slender ankles. He’d craved this vision over the years, her glittering feet like sparklers’ tails tethered to his vigilance. This vision sometimes relieved him from his doomed wonder about why she’d left, and where she’d gone, and when she might return to forgive him for some offense he wouldn’t know to call a crime.
Maybe Denise knew, and that’s why they’d grown close that year. Perry had known Denise only a bit, mostly by the loud laughing voice that overtopped Elsa’s quiet murmur. He’d wondered afterwards whether Elsa’s soft voice was not her natural tone after all, but muted so he wouldn’t hear what the girls were planning on that hot summer’s night. Pretend to go to a party and just keep driving down Judd, which bisected Moon, which doubled back to Michigan Avenue to I-94. Once on the interstate, the girls could vanish before anyone knew to look for them. It was a good plan. It could be done.
Over time, Perry grew to love Elsa’s flight as he loved her. So what if she’d never called? Showed her pluck. She’d made it to a better place, a place he wasn’t meant to find.
The Other Family was convinced that a killer had snatched the girls on Judd Road. After Perry’s arrest, the Other Family was convinced this killer was Perry. Maybe they’d thought him guilty right up until the moment the wheels unexpectedly crested the lake’s murky surface, so near the places that had been searched so methodically, and then hopelessly. Maybe they needed to identify Denise’s clothes and confirm the DNA match to see in Perry the father who had lost what they had lost, who suffered nightmares, spun wild stories, prayed and raged and wept dry as they had. He wondered whether they preferred their beliefs about Perry to the truth, as he preferred the fates he’d concocted for Elsa. Perhaps he would turn out to have been their last hope. Perhaps his killing of the girls would be seen, now, as more sensible than this discovery; the girls’ cruel suspension in gloomy waters, near to the bridge, near to their families, close and unfound until a freak disruption in the rainfall’s seasonal pattern had revealed them.
The grieving should crave closure. The grieving should be grateful the drought offered up to the light their dear ones belted dutifully in their last pose.
Perry’s daughter was thirty-six when she was found, had been dead longer than she’d been alive, and he did not want that corpse, he didn’t.
Excerpted from States of Motion by Laura Hulthen Thomas. Copyright © 2017 by Laura Hulthen Thomas. Used with permission of Wayne State University Press.
Getting It Right
By Karen E. Osborne
Alex was trying to understand. A love child, like in some sleazy romance novel? “Tell me.”
Her father shifted, the bedsheets caught between his legs. “It was years ago. Your mother didn’t like to travel and traveling was all I did. I mean, there were no kids, she wasn’t working.”
He sounded accusatory, the way he often did when he spoke about her mother.
“Anyway, in those days DC was one of my regular stops.”
His cough came back full force. Alex searched for something to help him, locating a cup of water with a straw and placing the tip against his lower lip. Several sips later, the coughing subsided, but a sour smell took its place.
He mopped his eyes. “The long and short of it is, I met someone and we fell in love.”
With his peripheral vision, he peered at Alex, who was trying hard to keep her expression neutral. This was not the sort of thing a child, even a grown one, should hear.
“I didn’t go looking, kitten. It just kinda happened.”
She gave him an understanding smile—it was fake, but it did the job.
“She was young and not sophisticated, not well-traveled, I guess I mean. But she was also smart, funny, the kind of pretty that grew on you. We laughed all the time . . .” He trailed off. “Not that I didn’t love your mother. I did. I do.”
Alex squirmed and plucked the corners of the sheet.
“She got pregnant, and she wouldn’t have an abortion.”
Again, he peered at Alex out of the corner of his eye, but she lowered hers.
“I begged her, but she was adamant—a church-going woman.” A mini shrug. “Adoption seemed like the next best choice.”
The silence felt awkward.
“Find her for me, Alex.”
She finally looked up. “Who, exactly?” The woman? Both of them?
“The girl.” His voice dropped an octave. “My other daughter.”
An unintended groan escaped.
“I know this is a lot to ask.” He made it sound as if it weren’t, as if he were waiting for her to deny the craziness of the request. “The last address I have is her grandmother’s in the Bronx.”
Find some kid he conceived while cheating on her mother? A childhood rage welled up. What she couldn’t understand then, and still couldn’t, was why her parents did this to her. What about her needs? What about Vanessa and Pigeon? How was he going to make it right for them? She pushed these thoughts down, swallowing an all-too-familiar bitter brew. New thought: her mother would go apeshit if she knew. If Alex helped him, she would have to keep it under her mother’s exceptional radar.
Her father sank back and closed his eyes. Alex contemplated what she’d just heard. Her mother had accused him of cheating with the regularity of the seasons, and apparently she was right.
* * *
Alex vividly remembered the first time her mother had threatened to kill herself. How old was Alex then, ten? Vanessa must have been six and Monica—known as Pigeon—would have been three.
A trip to France had stretched into weeks, and her mother was sure there was another woman . . . again. Wrapped in an old terry-cloth robe, her small hands peeked out of oversized sleeves.
Screaming into the phone, she held a serrated knife to her wrist. “I’ll do it right in front of your precious daughters—don’t think I won’t.” Blood oozed from beneath the knife’s teeth. “I know you’re with some whore. You think your girls don’t know? You think Alexandra is too young to understand your mongrel ways? Tell him, Alex.” She thrust the phone in her daughter’s face. “Tell him you’re with me and that I’ve cut myself.”
With shaking hands, Alex had taken the phone. “Mommy’s hurt,” she whispered tearfully. “Please come home, Daddy.”
“Don’t cry, kitten.” His voice sounded tired and sad. “I’m on my way. Mommy’s going to be fine.”
“She’s bleeding.”
“Call Aunt Peggy, and take care of the girls until she gets there. Okay, kitten? Can you be a brave girl for Daddy?”
Alex said yes and gave the phone back to her mother.
With a dish towel, her mother staunched the blood flow. Tears creased her makeup. She slipped to the floor, stringy hair damp with perspiration falling into her eyes, the knife and phone clattering on the tiles. That’s when Pigeon walked in.
“Why’s Mommy crying?” Her teddy bear tucked under her arm, she pulled a frayed blanket behind her.
“Everything’s okay, baby girl,” ten-year-old Alex had said. She gave Pigeon a hug, picked up the phone, and dialed Aunt Peggy.
Aunty Peggy and Alex were a tag team.
Almost a year later, Vanessa, who even back then seemed weary of the family dramas, had interrupted Alex studying in her room: “Mommy’s using bad words and littering.”
Alex composed her calmest expression and strode into her parents’ bedroom. The scene was comical today, but not at the time. Her mother stood in her silk nightgown with Pigeon by her side, frosty air rippling the curtains. Mouth agape, Alex watched her mother tear through her husband’s suits with a butcher knife, cutting off the arms of the jackets, slicing the legs and crotches of the pants, and then launching them out the window. Between each thrust, her mother lifted her thumb-sucking youngest daughter, and together they watched the garments sail down to the lawn below.
After her mother hand flung the last shreds, Alex grabbed Pigeon, hustled her sisters out of the room, put them to bed, and once again called Aunt Peggy. By the time Peggy arrived, dressed in a mink coat over a size-sixteen nightgown, Alex and her mother were sitting at the kitchen table pretending to eat canned tomato soup gone cold. Peggy nodded her head toward Alex and joined them—she neither asked a question nor offered a remedy.
Worth’s cough brought Alex out of her memories. She wasn’t ten or eleven anymore; she was thirty, with her own almost-successful marketing company. Saying no was an option.
“What’s this person’s name?” she asked.
“Kara Lawrence.” He lifted his body up on his elbows. “I don’t know her adopted name.”
He gave her our name?
“It shouldn’t be too hard to find her.”
Why should she do this?
“I told Martin Dawes to expect your call.” Mr. Dawes was the very proper family lawyer: hooded eyes, tight-collared shirts, subdued ties, sparse dark hair clipped short. “He can give you her grandmother’s name and address.”
“Why can’t he find her?”
“I need you to. I want her to be receptive, to know that I’m sincere. That I care.”
“I have to think about this, Daddy.”
Another coughing spasm wracked his chest. “Better not take too long.”
Alex walked out of the CCU, her head down and shoulders slumped.
“Well?” Her mother approached her. “What did he want?” She was already suspicious.
“To see you.” In truth, he had drifted into a fitful sleep, but Alex needed to speak with Aunt Peggy alone.
The moment her mother was out of earshot, Alex asked, “Did you know he had another child?”
Aunt Peggy’s lower lip quivered. “I knew.” She tugged at her suit jacket. “What did he tell you?”
“That he has an illegitimate child out there somewhere. He sounded sad and ashamed—well, maybe ashamed. In a way, I think he blames Mom.” Alex heaved her shoulders. “I think he was more embarrassed to tell me than about what he did.” She looked at Peggy for confirmation but she said nothing. “She was adopted and now,” her voice rose, “he wants me to find her.”
“I never heard any of this from your father. You’d think he would have told me something so important.”
“He was probably trying to protect you.”
Peggy snorted in disbelief.
“He made a mistake and did what he thought best. It’s not like he could bring her home to Mom.” As a kid, Alex envied her friends whose fathers were home every evening, who did what her dad did on those rare times he was around: kissed their children goodnight, read them stories, listened to their prayers.
“Wait, if Daddy never told you, how did you find out?”
“From your mother, of course.”
“Mom knows?” Alex was incredulous. She had thought her mother had no boundaries when it came to complaining to Alex about her father, but obviously she had kept something hidden.
“She said he paid child support for years. That’s how she discovered his grand deception.” Peggy pulled out a hankie and patted her throat. Specks of linen caught in the creases. “Evidently, she found e-mails between your father and that lawyer, Dawes somebody, trying to find evidence of some new misdeed, no doubt.”
“She never said anything to me.”
“Remember when she took a whole bottle of vitamin pills and ended up in the hospital with acute diarrhea?”
Alex closed her eyes for a second.
“You remember, you were maybe six. She had run out of Valium and tried to kill herself on One A Days.”
Alex sat down next to Peggy. She chuckled, but soon it blossomed into a full-throated, hysterical roar. She didn’t remember the vitamin suicide, but it sounded just like something her mother would do. “Oh, Aunt Peggy, what a mess we are.”
“Not so much.”
“A hot mess. Why can’t we be a normal family?”
“I’m not sure there is such a thing.”
“He wants me to find her, this other daughter, before he dies.” She quickly added, “Of course, he’s not going to die.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I don’t want to search for her.”
The two women sat in silence for several minutes. Every few seconds, Peggy patted Alex’s leg or rubbed her back. Then something else occurred to Alex. She peered at her father’s only sibling. “Did you say he paid child support for years?”
“A good deal of money.”
“I thought they put her up for adoption.”
“Oh, that was much later. No, he did the responsible thing and sent the woman money for the child’s education and upkeep. Your mother found the e-mails and called that lawyer.”
“Martin Dawes. He’s supposed to help me find her.”
“He was the one who explained everything.”
“But why adoption after . . . how many years?”
“The woman died.”
“Her mother died and Daddy thought adoption was best?”
“When you say it like that . . .”
“How else could I say it? Jeez, Aunt Peggy.” Alex stood up and paced. “What do you know about her, the kid?” From the expression on her aunt’s face, Alex knew she sounded angry again. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you. This is just so upsetting.”
“Of course it is. Shameful. Anyway, I don’t know anything more.”
“All he told me is that her name is Kara and she was born in DC. You have to know something else about her.”
“Your mother never gave me any details.” Peggy pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “It’s not like he didn’t have tons of affairs from the day they were married.”
“Tons?”
“I’m sorry, Alex.”
Other women from day one? Alex sat down. Did he ever even love her mother?
“I do know that the child was born the same year you were, and that infuriated your mother even more than the affair.”
How much worse could this story get?
Peggy pursed her lips and continued: “She’s black—African American, I guess I’m supposed to say, you know, to be politically correct.” She made air-quotes around the words.
Alex cringed. Both Aunt Peggy and her mother had a list of people they didn’t like. When Alex brought home friends from school who were Asian, Latina, or black, she lived in dread that either would say something stupid, and they usually did. After a while, Alex stopped inviting friends over.
The photograph in the desk drawer flashed into Alex’s mind; the one of the black woman and the little girl with honeyed skin and long braids. “Did Daddy visit them? Did he ever take me?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
That woman seemed happy in the picture, and her father was laughing. There was something familiar about the girl: her wide-set eyes, shaped like Alex’s, just a different color—Alex’s were violet like her father’s, Kara’s were brownish-gold. Even her eyebrows arched like Alex’s, and the high cheekbones were definitely a Lawrence trait, as if someone had snuck into a Native American’s bed back in the day.
Peggy cocked her head to one side. “What are you going to do?”
“Find her, I guess,” Alex replied, surprising herself. Then she realized her response was no surprise at all. “He’s counting on me.”
Excerpted from Getting It Right by Karen E. Osborne. Copyright © 2017 by Karen E. Osborne. Used with permission of Akashic Books (akashicbooks.com) and Open Lens.
Ground, Wind, This Body
By Tina Carlson
The Burial
My father buries the bird
in a bland field: a crow still glossy
with its memory of flight
and release. How he finds himself there in that brief
digging, fingering the dirt
of his children’s field, the small nest he
quarries there,
how gently he lays that
blackbird down as if it is the heart
he once carried in his own boy’s chest
before the war
and shock of his life
shot him down and placed him here,
burying what used to fly
in the fall weeds
and grave of ground.
Instead of Light
1.
The night is fat with cold and cloud,
the den a holy cave, gleaming
teeth and eyes, a hungry place,
a mouth. I arrive with my father
in my yellow pajamas. It is one a.m.
though my father’s eyes shine
blue like a dome of morning
sky. I was dreaming of birds
falling from a sky of milk—
The pornographer prays to the gods of stupor
and submission. Loves to open what has never
been opened, turned on by the camera’s endless click,
the sacred theft. Our child bodies lie on little
green tables with the metal taste
of a gun in our mouths. The small meat of our bodies
shared by the pack of parents and assistants—
I watch through a grimy window
the mirrored light of the moon, believe
a lamp. It shines back at me, across
the broad diameter of night where I am
the pain of not-enough-air.
TV commercials blare in the next room, the heater clicks.
The moistened mouth of a woman tells me I am nothing,
silence is my only currency. She is a bear
standing over my small perch where I learn
to unstitch myself from the harrow of bone and skin.
This becomes a definition of home: the infinite mouth of night,
air made of feathers.
Outside, snow falls quiet as a moth.
Settles over the town its cold white gift
of cover-up. My father pockets the money
he gains, spent by morning on milk and bread.
2.
Tiny rivers of blood in my ears
a pulsing tide, icy feet, mind made
of song and the sugary taste of words.
Like pale, crisp, luminous. Blood is a rose
on the morning snow. I shine an orange light
over the syllables, then play
with their shadows on the walls.
Glint, curve, ashen.
Hunger becomes soup, cold a warm bath.
The grime of my father’s hands, a milky solace.
I stand behind the innocent child he wanted to be.
Limbic, shorn, silent.
3.
Each night I die there again
on the little green table, fear the beds whose skins
I peel back to rest, the predatory breath
of night. Trees shudder their dry leaves
in a breeze. I dream the moon is a wide lit face,
floats to the ground and waits outside
our home. A man who loves plants opens the door
of her mouth and gathers up the child you were,
years ago, places you in my arms
like a bouquet.
4.
You too knew the teeth of that place.
You become a running star, the fastest legs
in town. You will race from your home to mine
and we will hide in a cave of tree branches,
sugar our mouths with licorice and the
green stalks of weeds. Speed is your balm,
you are mine, my first love, my mirror.
We never speak of the captive nights but fill
ourselves with sweets in the day’s free heat.
When you are grown, ready for your final
escape, you will remember the gun, harbor it
in your college dorm room for weeks. They will find you fetal,
wrapped around its unexploded body like a cocoon.
An empty bottle of pills under your last pillow.
No note, but I understand your message,
Only I can write that gun out of my own mad mouth.
5.
I love to lie on the ground
for her ballast of living green and holiness of dirt.
A valence of quiet, the undertow of magma
pulsing through. Her body is the dense memory of our histories.
Every moon of thought, every motion of kindness
and cruelty, transmuted.
I am buoyant lying there, on her whirling
heft, her lap a curve and horizon. Sum of loam
and fracture, we breathe in unison on cracked ground,
sea bottoms. I am a canyon cut deep, a list of fault lines.
She tames me with her touch.
I Wish You Were Here
The river is a woman singing of heartbreak
surrounded by birds and smooth
pockets of stone. I wish you were here
instead of blowing across the dry field
as dust. In the sleek fur of my dreams
you rustle up stories about
children who live in the sun.
I love everything
I remember and don’t remember
about you. In the wood of your chairs
live savannahs we might
have seen, full of animal scents
and the lovely emptiness of years
between my life now
and your hands, pointing the way.
Excerpted from Ground, Wind, This Body: Poems by Tina Carlson. Copyright © 2017 by Tina Carlson. Used with permission of University of New Mexico Press.
Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow
By Peg Alford Pursell
Day of the Dead
When I was a child, Day of the Dead meant sugar skulls, staying up past midnight, marigolds, burning copal, blazing votives. I didn’t recognize any of the faces in the photographs on the altar. Now I have my own dead—and no sweet bread, hot wax, or tequila to lure them, no fancy papel picado.
The dead come anyway, in fragments, perforated memories. My grandmother wearing a man’s fedora, a secret greeting card folded into her dress pocket. My grandfather, who burned basura in his basement fireplace sending obscene odors throughout the neighborhood, whose last act was to eat a bowl of strawberry ice cream in the middle of the night. The boy I smoked pot with behind the brick chimney in the attic of his parents’ home, wrapped up together in his sleeping bag. He confessed he had no plan for after graduation, and he laughed, and he never needed the plan. The stillborn girl, who looked like a baby bird with bulging eyes, curled in a nest under the acacia. The man I’d once thought was the one, who wasn’t, and whom I couldn’t live with once I understood that, who on a tear of amphetamines put a gun to his head.
The dead.
I want a belly of bravery. I want to know the kindness sent out of the cage of the heart. An eye that never becomes insensate to the invisible spectrum, an ear that never dulls to the song of the pulse. The night grows long until it’s short, and the sweetened tongue kisses the breath, and the breath is the breath is the breath.
Dislocation
The girl arrived in a wooden crate, fighting the space for air with moths. Her belly swollen, yet empty. Tiny mouth askew. I once loved the smell of sawdust. He takes her down the hall. His wedding ring glimmers. They retreat to the spare room with shelves of unlabeled green bottles, the high window of colored glass glinting like blood. I go outside to study. Broken pieces of language from the guidebook. Sit on the curb in the baking light. At my side the pocketbook he got me at the farmers’ market, a diamond pattern etched into the strap. I try to feel only my concentration, desire for success. In spite of the heat, my mind frozen. The bird’s white wings blur in the sun.
Petal, Feather, Particle
Show her a flower, a bird, a shadow, and she will show you what is simultaneously forming and falling apart. What is both witness and sign along the way on this rough earth, a shell already cracked. She’d thought she could raise a child with only minimal intercession but now, as she was being driven to the hotel, found herself looking up at the ceiling of the car, mumbling a quiet prayer. Her daughter was like her: too quick to do everything.
The girl’s father had been someone she once knew, or thought she had, a man who laid her in repose on the bed and gave her waist a tender squeeze before arranging her hands on top of her, placing the right over the left, palm over knuckles. He studied her in that corpse-like pose, letting his glass with the float of lime warm in his hand, before his mouth captured hers.
She’d come in from that life long ago, covered child rearing herself. To say that she had managed well would be to deny the truth of the flower, the bird, the shadow.
She would try to give her daughter a talk, though surely the young woman too understood there is nothing available to speech, no wild and strange language that can reveal the organizing principle that pulls the body toward its center. This trivial fact of human nature. Composition and decomposition. Of every petal, feather, and light particle.
But it was only kindness, necessary kindness, that she try. And so they were scheduled to meet in the hotel by the harbor, a place where she thought the sea would soothe her, where she would set out to speak in the way gondoliers push their boats away from the Venetian docks.
A girl in trouble: the expression implied that the girl was in danger, contained her own peril. She would make clear to her daughter that this wasn’t so. Now you won’t likely become a famous dancer in Russia, she would say to her girl, and they would share a small smile at the idea that her daughter might have ever entertained such an aspiration.
What her daughter had ever wanted she truly didn’t know, and that knowledge was contained within her, a small sunken place, heavy and aching.
It was not too late to learn, she reassured herself, but was this simply another beautiful idea she was still trying to believe? And if so, where was the love in that?
The car pulled up in front of the hotel with its grand façade. She wanted to cry out, fly toward the glittering ocean, a rose gripped in her hands, petals littering her shadow as it disintegrated over the deep waters.
She Wanted
to be the girl who came into the restaurant where her family waited to celebrate her and when she entered they each would say congratulations.
And many would mean it.
At least one.
I Should Let You Go
She phoned him at work just because, no real reason. It had simply occurred to her to give him a call like they used to do when they were new. To hear your voice, they’d say by way of explanation. The kitchen, early morning, was sunny, and lightened her spirits; she’d woken up in a mood, something wrong but nothing really. They had no real problems.
She dialed and poured a glass of water and stood waiting for him to answer, looking out the window at the tender magnolia blooms close to the glass, the sky behind so blue it could crack.
He answered, his voice sounding rushed and, when he heard that nothing was wrong, quizzical. He answered her questions. Yes, his morning was going fine, busy, too busy, he was glad she called. The searching tone infected his voice.
She said again, No real reason. Her eyes returned to the magnolia, a lump forming in her throat.
He gave a short laugh, evidently talking to someone nearby, and she said she should let him go, and he said, no, no, he was just walking over to the café for another cup of coffee to put down his gullet.
She wished they talked more kindly about themselves. To put down my gullet was an expression that had come from her mother. Get some food down your gullet.
Harsh, he agreed. She swallowed. She said she supposed there was some love in the words, as in reverse psychology. She tried to tease out the idea as she talked, and he laughed a little louder. Someone else on his end laughed, too.
She could try to explain that her mother wasn’t able to show softness, not even in her language, that her mother didn’t want anyone to know how much she cared. It seemed that this could be true; she wanted it to be.
His voice was loud, asking, What did you say, hello? Are you still there? When we met I thought, he said, lowering his voice, she is the biggest small person in the world. You walk into the room and fill it up.
This was catching love in words, a kind of contagion, because she wanted to believe what he believed, and knew it could grow and, if they were lucky, not like a sickness. She could go on with this thinking, her throat aching, or they could say goodbye. She filled her body with breath, and turned away from the window.
Human Movement
The coldest summer in forty-odd years, earthquakes in places there’d never been, and her mother dying in a hospital bed across the country. She bought plane tickets. He went to fill up the car. She waited by the curb for him to drive up and take them to the airport. Waxy juniper shrubs set in tired gray bark chips lined the sidewalk. Something about the bushes. They could sense lost causes. The car was waiting now, the impatient engine exciting the air, warming her legs. What would it be to get in and simply ride hour after hour, no destination?
They arrived in the middle of the night at the house of her sister who lived near the hospital. No one was awake, but on the phone earlier her sister had directed her to take the room with the unmarked black door just at the head of the stairs.
Inside smelled vaguely of cedar and cinnamon. On the bureau top rested a matchbook with an image of a pineapple on it above the name of an inn in Costa Rica. Next to the matches, an ancient volume of Mother Goose.
She knew she should sleep before it was time to see her mother. But she found an eyelash on her pillow and sleep felt impossible. She sat in the chair by the window, listening for snores, for any sounds that might mark the whereabouts of the others in the house. He stretched out across the top of the covers and propped his head on his hand. Let’s take a shower, he suggested, and because she ultimately could find no real objection, she agreed.
Divided, they didn’t understand the rules that kept them separate. It was something to do with the swirling waters of the world of the dead. Of the dying, he said. Steam rose and water slid down their bodies.
She stepped out from the shower onto the gold-rimmed mat, where he waited holding out a towel. Droplets of water clung to the hair on his chest above the towel wound around his waist. He made appreciative noises in his throat as he eyed her nakedness.
She avoided looking at his face to see what expression would win there. She didn’t want to share her body. She had shared enough of it already. Her mother’s body: isn’t that what it was saying?
He stepped away from her and finished drying. Light began to crack through the gap under the window blind. She raised the blind and saw a large bird leave the limb of the tree beside the glass, no doubt startled by her human movement.
The bird, species unknown, flapped his leathery-looking wings, perhaps in a panic, before it dropped. She opened the window and looked out.
At the sound she released he rushed to her side.
They stood, heads out the window, looking down at the patio bricks where the fallen bird lay still. They didn’t speak of what would happen next.
Excerpted from Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow second edition by Peg Alford Pursell. Copyright © 2017 by Peg Alford Pursell. Excerpted by permission of WTAW Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
From the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 program to the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, many organizations make a point of recognizing young, gifted authors at the start of their literary careers. In the November/December 2016 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, we feature five debut authors over the age of fifty—Desiree Cooper, Sawnie Morris, Paul Vidich, Paula Whyman, and Paul Hertneky—whose first books came out this past year, and who stand as living proof that it’s never too late to start your literary journey. Here, we feature excerpts from their debut books.
Know the Mother(Wayne State University Press, March) by Desiree Cooper
Her, Infinite (New Issues Poetry & Prose, March) by Sawnie Morris
An Honorable Man (Emily Bestler Books, April) by Paul Vidich
You May See A Stranger (TriQuarterly Books, May) by Paula Whyman
Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood (Bauhan Publishing, May) by Paul Hertneky
Know the Mother
By Desiree Cooper
The Disappearing Girl
My minivan churns impatiently as I wait in the long queue. Up ahead, it’s easy to spot my daughter in the gaggle of starched, school-crested shirts and navy-blue pants. She’s the only one with brown eyes and skin to match. She’s the only one whose thick, black hair is tamed into stiff braids.
She is standing apart, her eyes scanning the row of cars, a refugee on a hostile shore waiting for an airlift. When she finally sees our car, she shoulders her heavy book bag—too full of academic pressure for a fourth grader—and a smile lands on her face. She is not ashamed to show me the beautiful Wolof gap in her front teeth. She waves desperately, as if otherwise I might miss her, the lone black child in a sea of white.
Finally, she opens the door and jumps into the back seat. “How was your day?” I say brightly, swallowing the stress of having to pick her up from private school every afternoon. She buckles in and opens her daily treat—today it’s a bag of Doritos and bottled tea. No time to get to the store for apples. Bad mom.
She says nothing, but munches quietly and looks out the window. We pass the blond girls yelling things out of car windows like “Call me if you want to go riding!” or “Don’t forget your swimsuit!”
At ten, my daughter wants, more than anything, to be chosen. She has a crush on Henry Frank (the kids call him HankFrank, as if it were one word). My daughter has a chance with HankFrank because he is funny-goofy, already eccentric, probably gay.
I turn off the radio, which I always do when the kids are in the car, just in case something bubbles up from their mysterious lives. Lately, my daughter has become impenetrable. When I hug her, she stiffens. Even though I am her lifeboat, she will not touch me. She is the kind of lonely that cannot be explained, so it becomes someone else’s fault. Mine.
“Did you know that I am invisible?” Her words come in a scratchy little-girl voice, but she is too old for make-believe. She is stating a fact. My heart is a block of ice. I glance at her in the rearview mirror. She keeps eating Doritos vacantly.
Suddenly, I am six. It is 1967 and my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Houston, is so severe, every inch of me wants to please her.
I figure out after the first day that I am smarter than the other kids. The white kids. Every day, I want prove my worth to Mrs. Houston by giving her the right answers. She calls on the other children; I don’t understand why she doesn’t see me. I stretch my hand higher, accent my eagerness with a few “Ooh, oohs,” but still she gazes over my head to the dolt behind me with the ruby curls.
This is not what I had imagined when I’d longed to go to school. I’d dreamed of friends and books and scissors and the sweet smell of paste. I dreamed of chalk scraping on the board and gold stars on my homework. I never dreamed I would disappear.
My daughter finishes her Doritos and crumples the bag loudly. I stop the car in front of the manicured lawn of a stranger. I get out and open my daughter’s door. She tracks me wide-eyed, afraid that she is in trouble. I unlock her seat belt and pull her out of the car. Her classmates peer at us curiously as they drive by in their moms’ SUVs. She doesn’t know it yet, but after today, my daughter will never see them again.
I take her shoulders and gaze into her eyes. I look at her so long that the hard resentment of her spine bends toward me. Her anger softens to tears.
“I can see you,” I say, taking her into my arms.
Know the Mother
As I wash my mother’s back, her scent fills my nostrils. Already, she smells like a garden unearthed, a freshly dug grave. I soak the cloth in warm water and witch hazel; she sighs as I swab her shrunken thighs, her shriveled feet.
“Don’t leave me,” I plead beneath my breath. She twitches and my heart leaps—maybe she’s changed her mind and has decided to stay with me a little longer. But for the next three hours, she gives me nothing to hold on to—not one fluttering eyelid, not a wan smile of possibility. She is leaving me so easily, I wonder if her love ever rose above duty.
Two months ago, I was bringing warm sheets up from the dryer in the basement. As I reached the top of the stairs, I could hear Mother singing. I dashed around the corner, half expecting to see her remaking her bed, lifting the mattress to miter the corners.
But when I reached her room, nothing had changed. Her hair was still a thin layer of down. Her cheeks were still sallow. Her shoulder blades jutted beneath the summer blanket as if she were hiding her favorite book beneath the covers. Yet somehow as she slept, she was a young woman again, singing.
At her bedside, I doze without resting. I dream that my mother is dressed in a black taffeta gown. Her cheeks are rouged with stage makeup, her eyes shimmering. On cue, she makes her way to the curtain. I call her name three times, but nothing I say can make her look back.
Excerpted from Know the Mother by Desiree Cooper. Copyright © 2016 by Desiree Cooper. Excerpted by permission of Wayne State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Her, Infinite
By Sawnie Morris
Sunlight Hardens on the Bed
In the next room,
handmade cabinets open, shut. A crashing sound
and the man’s voice calls out glass. Scalene, obtuse,
with a generous curve. Another woman’s voice
from the speaker-phone enters. They are stringed instruments,
so events happen quickly. The spatula scrapes against
the body of the skillet. The brain rewires itself
tonographically, as though just being someplace warmer
could change the music. Fire at will, he says,
when they return to the house on the mesa
in a sky like ice water, stars tinkling. Shards
reminiscent of sails, and he carries the broken
in a box alongside the kitchen island and out
the back door, its window tracked by drippings
summer oil left. Nothing to protect either of them
from the heart’s investment. Divested of all else,
what she learns will be survival
without guilt. What he learns will be startled
dependence on the not mapped .
Inland See (II)
re: “Deepwater Horizon” catastrophic oil spill, June 2010
Grandmothers scoop up a light-net,
haul pelican (in the spirit world) like fish—
and fish. Or net the sludge,
thick ooze, and how-to
staunch a puncture. (Sometimes
we must protect ourselves, we said of television,
internet.) Our fingers
over dinner, splay—were we? Eating a bird,
we become it.
And Afterward, to Eat Oranges
—to dust off the dark spots of oil
and clean my face.
A draft, sinewy and luminous
wraps across our vision.
In a haven of smoke, cars throttled past.
¡Qué silencio en las iglesias! Someone
on a phonograph plays the cymbals, tapping them lightly
as in a dream when you kiss me awake.
The clamoring of spirits springs up inside the piano.
What are we waiting for, those of us who hear?
Already a waif with torn clothes and a finger,
I want you like a tight fit, like a swallow under eaves.
A Sand Trail w/ Stone Walls & Configurations
For a while I am walking along a path
next to a river. A sand trail
w/ stone walls & configurations.
I dream more prosaically at night
and for a while I am aware she is following.
Then she is no longer a poet, but a lion.
The house is bright and quiet when I wake,
and I hear water draining from the bath.
Some days I am a morning bedside chatterbox.
Others I am on my way south to see the
great whales. That’s the circumstance
in which she is at her best and most natural.
In a house made of wood, the main task
is making collages—she has a box-full,
though I think to myself, no thanks,
this life is not the circus for me.
At one point I go for a walk near the ocean.
At the stone dock a speed boat races past
and crashes into what is called a jetty.
I think surely there will be injuries and admit
there are moments I envy the alcoholics,
the way they do that disappearing act
into something else. A man shoots
a very old very loud gun in every
direction. It is a way of keeping time,
the equivalent of church bells.
She was so handsome I felt completely,
almost completely unworthy. And when she went
into the sand dunes and I heard a cry,
I was afraid. I raced to find her, but no
need to be distraught. She was content,
leaning against a large stone beside the river,
complicated, in the shade.
Excerpted from Her, Infinite by Sawnie Morris. Copyright © 2016 by Sawnie Morris. Excerpted by permission of New Issues Poetry & Prose. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
An Honorable Man
By Paul Vidich
WASHINGTON, D.C., 1953
Mueller stood at the apartment’s third-floor window and said to the FBI agent, “It’s been too long. He won’t show.” He ground his cigarette into the overflowing ash tray. “We’re wasting our time.”
“He’ll come. He can’t resist the bait.”
Mueller looked across the icy street at the dilapidated apartment building separated from the sidewalk by a wrought iron fence. Bars protected first-floor windows. There was no activity and there hadn’t been since he’d arrived. A streetlamp at the corner cast its amber glow up the block, but it didn’t reach the stoop. An unmarked car stood at Twelfth Street NE and Lincoln Park, and a black Buick was around the corner, in the alley, out of sight, but Mueller had seen it on his way over. Further up the block, an agent waited in the dimly lit phone booth, self-conscious with his newspaper.
“He’s been scared off.”
“He has no reason to believe we’re here.”
“He doesn’t need a reason. It’s instinct. Even an amateur would wonder why that man’s been in the phone booth an hour. For you it’s a job.” Mueller dropped the curtain. “It’s his life. He knows.”
Mueller glanced at his watch. “When do you call it quits?”
“There’s time. We spotted her making the drop at five. She’s Chernov’s wife. She went in the lobby with the package. She came out without it. He’ll come.”
“You’re sure it was her?” Mueller asked.
He waited for FBI agent Walker to respond. Mueller thought Walker flamboyant, enjoying his status as agent-in-charge, eager to hunt. He dressed the part: dark hair combed straight back, polished shoes, double-breasted suit, and thin moustache like a Hollywood leading man. Through the window street sounds spilled into the darkened apartment—a car’s honk, a woman’s anger. The agent raised opera glasses and scanned the street and then shifted his attention to the edge of Lincoln Park. Automobiles cruised single men sitting alone on wood benches. A giant mound of dirty snow from the weekend storm buried parked cars.
“We know it was her,” Walker said in his drawl. “We have surveillance. Two cars. She left the Soviet embassy, took a taxi to the residence, and walked here with the package. It’s still inside.”
Mueller waited. He looked at his watch again, and then without thinking, he did it again. Waiting was the hardest part. He moved to the center of the room. There was the rank smell of cigarettes in the small apartment, half-drunk coffee cups, and the wilted remains of a take-out dinner. All waiting did was give him time to be irritated. He took a tennis ball from the table and squeezed it, working out his tension, squeezing and resqueezing. At another window he lifted the curtain. The street was dark, quiet, empty. Walker didn’t understand that double agents lived in fear, chose their time, and that a cautious man wasn’t going to take an unnecessary risk.
Lights in the building across the street were dark except for a top-floor apartment. A big woman at the window pulled her sweater over her head and then reached behind to undo her bra. Mueller looked then glanced away. A light on the second floor. Had someone entered the building lobby? Through the window an older man stood in boxer shorts before an open refrigerator. He drank milk straight from a quart bottle and then he shuffled off to the kitchen table and sat by a console radio. Mueller looked back at the top floor, but the curtain was drawn.
How long should he stay? Walker and his men wouldn’t abandon the stakeout until long after it was an obvious bust. No one wanted to admit failure, or have to invent excuses. Mueller was officially just an observer.
He saw a young man with a notepad approach from across the room. Crew-cut, freckled face, no tie, boyish smile. Too young for this type of assignment.
“You the CIA guy?” the young man asked.
Mueller narrowed his brow. “Who are you?”
“The Star.” He lifted the press badge hanging around his neck.
Mueller confronted Walker by the fire escape window. Two men standing inches apart in the darkened apartment. Mueller snapped, “What’s he doing here?”
“He’s okay.”
“We said no press. No surprises. No embarrassments.” He didn’t hide his anger.
“I had no choice,” Walker said laconically.
Mueller gave the agent-in-charge a cold, hard glare and considered who in his chain of command had authorized a reporter. He held back what he wanted to say, that under the circumstances the best outcome for the CIA was that their man didn’t take the bait, didn’t show. “We had an understanding,” Mueller said. “This wasn’t it.”
“He’s a kid. He’ll write what he’s told to write.”
“What does he think is happening?”
“Vice squad got a lead on a State Department guy who cruises Lincoln Park. Security risk. We arrest him and book him. Metro Police give the kid the story. He’ll write what he’s given.”
Mueller headed to the apartment door.
“Where are you going?”
“A little fresh air.”
Walker raised his voice so that it carried to Mueller in the hall stairway. “He’s okay.”
Outside, Mueller stood hidden from view on the top step of the building’s stoop. He lit a cigarette. Habit. Then thought better of it and flicked it in the snow. His eyes settled on the empty street where he saw nothing to change his mind that the night was a bust. The Capitol Building fretted the tree line of the park, a gleaming dome in the night, a navigation point above the neighborhood’s sprawling poverty. In the distance Mueller heard the anxious wail of a police siren and then behind him, the soft click of the door closing. He saw Walker. They stood side by side without talking.
“I hear you’re leaving the Agency,” Walker said.
“Who told you that?”
“One of the guys.”
Which guy? Mueller nodded. “If we get him tonight I’ll be gone by the end of the month.”
“What’s next?”
“Fly-fishing.” A lie.
“That will last a while.”
Mueller didn’t indulge Walker’s sarcasm. He didn’t like Walker, but he tolerated him, and he kept him close to keep himself safe. Walker was too ambitious for Mueller’s taste, quick to take credit for success, quick to blame others for his own mistakes. Mueller didn’t like Walker’s having that detail of his personal life. He kept private matters away from his job, but the daily grind made that hard. Each morning he got up to face the endless urgency of ambitious colleagues inventing useful crises. Politics had taken over everything. He was tired of the double life, the daily mask, and he’d lost his ability to appear interested in a conversation when he was bored out of his mind. Walker bored him. But he knew Walker well enough not to trust him. Walker was a good weatherman of Washington’s changing political winds and he was a good spy hunter.
Mueller’s exhale came at last. “Where’d you get the tip?”
“The mailbox on East Capitol we’ve been watching. Someone left a chalk mark. This is the dead drop.”
“You know, or you think?”
“She left the lobby without the package. What else would it be?” Then, confidently, “He’ll come.”
The two men stood in the dark. “I don’t get it,” Walker said. “Great reputation, but your results stink. Vienna was a failure. So was Hungary. Last week you lost Leisz.” Walker paused. His breath fogged in the chilly night air. “Word is you guys got the news Stalin died by listening to Radio Moscow.” Walker flicked his butt to the snow. “Great reputation, but your results stink.”
“Piss off,” Mueller said. He thought about the damn fool Leisz. Ignored the rules after he’d been warned, thinking he wasn’t at risk, then got sloppy and paid for it.
“Someone’s coming.” A voice from the window above.
Mueller and Walker saw the young black woman at the same time. Blond wig, leopard-skin coat, stiletto heels, and a tiny rhinestone purse clutched in one hand. She had emerged from the tree line at Lincoln Park and glanced both ways before making a two-step hustle across the street. Mueller and Walker stepped back deeper into shadow.
When she achieved the opposite sidewalk she glanced over her shoulder. Mueller followed her line of sight to the streetlamp cleaving the darkness at the park’s edge. From the trees stepped an army enlisted man. Mueller saw the drab sameness of style of someone who sought to fit in, go unnoticed. Long khaki coat, a visor cap pulled down on his forehead, and a steady stride that didn’t bring attention to itself. She baited him with exaggerated hip movements and a calculated head nod. The start of another war had kept Washington filled with single men, and with single men came dreary bars with women who sold themselves.
“He won’t come with this sideshow,” Mueller said.
“They’ll leave. Hail a taxi. Go to a hotel.”
Mueller lit another cigarette and then regretted his choice again. He ground it under his heel. Drinking and smoking, two occupational hazards that had begun to wear on him.
The woman walked up the block, but slowed her stride to allow the man to catch up. The air was cold and crisp, sharp like flint. Suddenly she stopped. The two talked on the sidewalk. A bargain was struck.
“There’s something odd about him,” Mueller said.
“Odd?”
“The uniform. His shoes. He’s wearing loafers.”
The enlisted man opened the iron gate for the woman and then followed her up the steps to the apartment house lobby. He shot a glance over his shoulder before disappearing inside.
“What are you saying?” Walker asked. “It’s him?” Then a demand. “You think it’s him?”
“Not my call.”
Mueller saw Walker’s discomfort and he felt the torment of the decision he faced. Both men knew it would be impossible to recover from a bad call.
“So be it,” Walker muttered. He pulled on his glove, stretching his fingers deep into the leather, and clenched a fist.
Mueller watched the FBI assemble. Walker signaled his agent in the phone booth, who in turn placed a call. It took a minute, or less, for the Buick and two unmarked cars to converge on the apartment building. Two agents, handguns drawn, stepped from the first car and hustled up the steps to the lobby. Four other men took up positions at their cars, and one crouched agent scrambled toward the rear of the building.
Walker stood in the street barking orders to his team, and the sudden noise brought neighborhood residents to their windows. They saw black cars stopped at oblique angles on the street, doors flung open.
Mueller stayed out of sight, alone. He saw an FBI agent escort the army enlisted man down the stoop tightly gripping his arm. The enlisted man had lost his hat, his wrists were handcuffed behind his back, and his unbuckled pants rode down his hips. He looked dazed and embarrassed.
A second agent had cuffed the prostitute and guided her, protesting, toward a car. Her wig was gone and she was hobbling on one broken heel, shouting fierce baritone obscenities at the agent who hustled her down the steps.
“Don’t rush me,” the transvestite yelled, “I’ll sprain an ankle.”
Mueller waited until Walker emerged from the apartment lobby and then he stepped out from his hiding spot. They met halfway across the street, Walker agitated, his face twisted in a scowl. He waved a stack of bills at Mueller as he walked past. “Keep this farce to yourself,” he snapped. “Don’t say a thing. Not a word. Hear me?”
Walker slipped in the Buick’s front seat and slammed his door shut. In a minute the cars were all gone and Mueller stood alone. There was one orphaned stiletto heel on the sidewalk that he dropped in a garbage can.
He walked rapidly away. He didn’t bother to look behind to see if anyone noticed him, or to check on the curious neighbors. But at the end of the street he happened to turn. An instinct he’d acquired in Vienna after the war, the feeling of knowing when he was being observed. There at the corner in the shadow of a mature tree, a tall man in a gray homburg, hands shoved in the pockets of a long trench coat. There was something suspicious about the figure. Mueller read into every stranger the possibility the person was tailing him, and this man got his attention. Mueller stood there thirty feet away on the other side of the street, staring at the motionless figure, who stared back. Mueller couldn’t make out the man’s face, or the shape of his jawline in the hat’s deep shadow.
“Hey, you,” Mueller yelled.
He went to cross the street, but a garbage truck fitted with a snowplow lumbered by in a riot of noise. When the truck passed, Mueller looked for the man, but he was gone.
Excerpted from An Honorable Man by Paul Vidich. Copyright © 2016 by Paul Vidich. Excerpted by permission of Atria/Emily Bestler, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
You May See A Stranger
By Paula Whyman
Pogo wants to pay for everyone. It’s a big night for him, and he’s taking us to the country club. Cheever and his girlfriend are coming, too. Cheever is Pogo’s younger brother. Their father’s name is on a plaque somewhere in the building.
“On a bar stool,” Pogo joked.
“His name is the same as yours,” Cheever told him.
Pogo has wads of cash in his pocket. I have a small square of paper in my purse. It’s proof of something I don’t quite believe. When the doctor said it, I thought of an incubator and chicks, my body as a holding area, warm, but like everything else, temporary. Pogo will eventually show everyone the cash. I don’t plan to show anyone the paper. This is Pogo’s big night, not mine. One big night at a time seems like a good philosophy.
Cheever and Natasha are already at the bar when we arrive. Natasha’s glass is full and sweating in her hand. She swirls the yellow straw between her fingers. Cheever orders a gin and tonic for himself. He and Pogo don’t look like brothers, but they look related. They slap each other on the back with friendly hostility, which leads into a wrestler-grip hug held a few beats too long.
“I’m proud of you,” says Cheever. He tries to mess Pogo’s hair, but Pogo blocks him. Pogo tries to mess Cheever’s hair instead, except he can’t because it’s short and bristly, so it ends up looking like a plush carpet you stroked in the wrong direction.
Pogo orders drinks for both of us. He’s had two already, before we got here. One before we got in the car, and one he finished on the way to the club, while I drove. His cheeks and his nose are pleasantly red.
At the bar, I hold up the car key for him to take, and he shows me his pocket. I reach over to slip the key into his khakis, and he grabs my fingers.
“The other one,” he whispers in my ear.
I put the key in his other pocket, on the side facing away from Cheever and Natasha, the side without the wad of cash in it. I reach all the way in to stroke him through the lining of his pocket. He isn’t wearing underwear. I can feel the hard curve of him. If I try, I think I can feel his blood rushing. He keeps talking, leaning up against the bar. He leans toward Natasha. While he talks, he touches her with his hand that holds the drink, as if he might rest the glass on her shoulder. I squeeze a little. He flinches in a way only I would notice, and he has to stop my hand and shift himself. All this he does seamlessly, while holding the drink in the other hand and expounding on the vagaries of the market.
*
Pogo has an old Mercedes. His father has one, too. His affection for old things confuses me—some are quality, and some are just old. The idea is to look like they don’t care about money, or even think about it. If you’ve had enough of it for a long enough time, say, generations, you don’t think about it in the same way as other people. But that’s someone else’s money, and whenever Pogo manages to get his own, he wants everyone to know. In my family, what modest funds my parents earned were spent on my sister’s doctors and life-skills counselors, and on the annual summer jaunt to a nearby mountain lodge, where Donna and I counted dead flies on the windowsill and held our noses against the smell of the septic tank. We’d never had the luxury to act like we didn’t worry.
*
On the way to the club, Pogo and I stopped in the parking lot of Broder’s, the gourmet grocery store. We shut off the car engine, but left the radio on. We parked at the far end of the lot, but I could still see people coming and going, pushing their carts, which were smaller and daintier than the carts at a run-of-the-mill store.
I didn’t want to mess up my skirt by hiking it up to my waist, so I took it off. Pogo tilted the passenger seat back as far as it would go, and I straddled him. It was cramped, and I had to hunch my shoulders to avoid hitting the ceiling. At one point, I leaned forward all the way and lay on top of him, and he pushed me up with his pelvis and shouted “giddyap.” He can be a goof that way. I was so high up, I thought later about my naked bottom and the car’s moon roof, and shouldn’t I laugh about it? But I wasn’t exactly thinking about it at the time. A vibration was beginning inside of me, like the background hum of an amplifier. Clapton was singing, Nobody’s lucky till luck comes along/Nobody’s lonely till somebody’s gone. That’s when I came. Pogo already had, a moment before. It was still daylight.
I wasn’t into it at first, doing it outside of Broder’s, or even at all. Pogo could nearly always persuade me; he knew and I knew that I would end up feeling like it before he was done. After that, I drove us to the club. The thrumming in my body continued to reverberate, in seeming rhythm with the rattling diesel engine. I wanted to be still for a while longer and let it finish whatever it was doing to me.
Pogo said, “‘You, in the cheaper seats, clap your hands; the rest of you just rattle your jewelry.’” This was John Lennon at the Beatles’ Royal command performance, Pogo was fond of reminding me.
“Am I the queen?” I asked.
“You are the queen of all you survey,” said Pogo.
“The Broder’s parking lot?” I said.
“Your fiefdom.”
“Are you my serf?” I asked.
“I serf no one,” said Pogo.
“Ugh,” I said.
When we got to the club, I went to the ladies’ room. There were hand towels made of the same fabric you’d make cloth napkins out of, folded in rows on a table near the sink. I wanted to bring one into the stall with me to clean up from preceding events. I couldn’t though, because there was a black woman sitting on a chair in the room, wearing what looked like a nurse’s uniform. She was an attendant. I wasn’t sure what she was going to do for me, and I didn’t have time to figure it out. My insides felt shaken up and rearranged, and standing in that dim room with the slightly antiseptic odor tipped the balance toward one arrangement rather than another. I bent over the toilet, my bare knees pressed into the knobby floor, and waited. I threw up, and threw up again. After a while, it stopped on its own, and I sat on the rim in a weakened state, leaning to one side so that I could feel the cool wall tiles. I could fool myself that I was empty, if only for a moment. I had a vision of my body turned inside out, gleaming pink, pristine. So much for that. My knees hurt, as if I’d knelt in pebbles. I sat for as long as I thought I could, awaiting with dread the attendant’s tap on the stall door, or Pogo’s voice outside the ladies’ room calling to me. At that moment, nothing seemed more difficult than leaving the bathroom.
When I finally emerged from the stall, the attendant handed me a cup of green liquid. I looked at her questioningly, but she kept her face neutral and turned away. I smelled it; it was mouthwash. She probably thought I was drunk, like the other girls the men try to impress, bringing them to the club for drinks before they get them into bed. But Pogo had done things in reverse, as usual. He didn’t have to get me drunk first. He didn’t even have to impress me.
After I washed my hands, the woman handed me a towel. There was no place for tips, so I figured that wasn’t done. There was a large wicker basket where I finally realized I was supposed to put the used cloth after I dried my hands. I smiled at her and said, “thank you” when I left the bathroom.
She must be keeping things clean between customers. For some reason, I imagine that she’s never permitted to leave the building; perhaps she can’t even leave the ladies’ room. I wonder if anyone on the outside knows about this, or if it’s a secret the members are expected to keep. She’s the only black person I’ll see at the club tonight.
*
At the club’s bar, I don’t touch my drink right away. I’m not sure how much I want to drink. Same way I was unsure about having sex earlier. I’m resolutely not focusing on the possible reason. Pogo puts the glass in my hand: “Drink the potion,” he says. He’s always paying attention to how much other people drink. I know I’ll oblige. I wonder if Pogo would still give me a drink if he knew. I can’t imagine him suddenly becoming responsible. This is, after all, what I both want and don’t want about him.
Pogo’s ten years older than me. Most men his age are married. He thinks I won’t push him. I play along. I’m only a year out of school, but it’s as if I’m the grown-up. Pogo wants to be a kid forever.
My doctor asked me, is the father someone you’re serious with? I said yes. Then he’ll do right by you, the doctor said. I laughed. The doctor looked at me sadly then. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be pregnant. Or I suppose when I forgot to take my pill, I could have said no. When Pogo said, just this one time, please? We’d been dating a year, and up to that time I’d been very good about remembering it. I thought one time would be okay. And maybe it would have been. But if I’m honest I’ll also admit it was not just one time.
If we had a boy, first Pogo would teach him how to pee on the side of the road. Then he would teach him persuasion. These are not bad things to know, just as it’s not bad sometimes to let yourself be persuaded.
*
I stare at the coaster my drink has been sitting on. It’s the most substantial paper coaster I’ve ever seen, as thick as a whole pad of paper. Someone spent a lot of money on those. Worth it? I imagine the talk: “Our golf course is first rate, but you should see our coasters—a well-kept secret.” Along with the black woman in the bathroom. The club’s fleur-de-lis symbol is embossed in gold in the center of the coaster. There’s a wet ring where my drink was. But the water doesn’t get absorbed, it sits on top. The fleur-de-lis reminds me of something. Sex-flower. Flower of lascivious pomposity. I make these phrases in my head; I entertain myself that way. The same symbol is on the hand towels in the bathroom. I almost cleaned myself with the seal of the King of France.
It’s easier to talk to Cheever and Natasha when they’ve had a couple of drinks, as if they discover their personalities. Maybe they think I’m the same. They’re talking about Pogo’s big news, except he doesn’t want to tell the whole story yet. He’s waiting for the moment of utmost drama, so he only drops teasers like, “Do you know how much cash I have in my pocket right now?”
I make a face that tells Cheever and Natasha that I know the answer, and won’t they be impressed? Pogo winks at me, commiserating. We’re like Penn and Teller.
“I hope it’s more than you have in your bank account,” says Cheever.
*
Pogo showed me the money when we were in the car. He used the same line with me: “Do you know how much cash I have in my pocket right now?” This was right before we had sex.
The money was rolled into a thick wad held tight by a rubber band. “I thought you were just happy to see me,” I said. “How much is that?”
“Six thousand right here,” he said, squeezing it in his fist. “The rest is being held at the firm. Earnest money. The importance of being earnest.”
“Are you supposed to have all that?”
“It’s mine, all mine,” he laughed maniacally and sipped his drink, which was in a real glass he’d brought from home. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen do that, bring a drink in an open glass in a car that isn’t a limo. But I never saw Pogo or any of his friends without a drink, a wisecrack, or a woman. They were not-quite Southerners in the not-quite South, pretend gentility and bad behavior coexisting without any apparent discomfort, like Pogo’s dress-code-correct pressed khakis with no boxers underneath.
“This is chump change,” he said. “After the sale, I get more. A lot more.” He unfurled the wad and started peeling off bills. There were fifties and hundreds. His pants were on, but my skirt was already off. I was stretched out next to him, reclining as best I could in the driver’s seat, the steering wheel preventing much range of motion. He laid one bill after another side to side, flat on my thighs, all the way to my knees. I stayed very still. Then, he lifted my blouse, and tried to put bills on my stomach, going up to my breasts, but my stomach was too fat, and only one of the bills would stay, the one covering my belly button.
“Pizza,” said Pogo, smacking my stomach a little too hard.
“Look who’s talking,” I said. He was giving me an opening, but I was waiting for the right moment, too, and this wasn’t it. I thought of what I would do. And I thought, for the thousandth time, of what he would do. Would he look at that inky print-out, which resembled nothing more than a galactic cloud, an obscured thumbprint, his and mine together, and would he, like always, say just the right, wrong thing? I thought of taking that square of paper with my future printed on it and placing it over his crotch and saying, ‘Here. How much is this worth?’
“I thought you said I was cute,” he pouted, the insult to me already forgotten.
“The Pillsbury dough boy is adorable,” I said. Pogo had a round face, and he was flabby in the middle, but tall enough that he came off as sturdy and strong. Would his baby have his baby face? His cheek was smooth to the touch. I imagined a tiny hand reaching out to it. I felt something tighten inside me. When I was a kid, what did I imagine about having a baby? Why do I only remember playing with dolls that looked like little adults? What would Pogo do? How could I know him for this long and not know the answer to that?
“Nya-nya ‘doughboy’ nya-nya. Very funny. You’re not as funny as me,” he said. “I’m the funniest of all.”
“You’re the King of Comedy,” I said. “Throw some more money at me, and I promise I’ll say whatever you want to hear.”
“I’m deeply, deeply wounded by your sarcasm,” Pogo said sarcastically. He attempted to put a fifty over my mouth. I breathed out through my nose and the bill fluttered down to land on the floor mat. He snatched it up.
“Beautiful money,” he said. “I’ve mistreated you.” He stroked it and reinserted it in the stack he held. He collected the bills from my thighs, along with the others that had landed on the floor of the car, and folded the wad back into his pocket. He leaned over the gearshift and kissed me. Slowly, he kissed all of the places where the money had been. When we were having sex, his pants were pushed down around his knees, and I could feel the bulging cash rub against my ankle.
Excerpted from You May See a Stranger by Paula Whyman. Copyright © 2016 by Paula Whyman. Excerpted by permission of TriQuarterly Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood
By Paul Hertneky
The Prurient Power of Pierogi
In a place averse to looking back, cultural traditions in Ambridge emerged through religion, song, dance, and food. Mostly food, though, because every day when it hit the table it reminded us of our origins.
Housewives in the 1960s experimented with modern food, but they fell back on what they learned from their mothers. And the kitchens in church basements and parochial schools turned out some of the best Old Country cooking. For me, the melding of food and religion came together on meatless Fridays.
Sitting at a kitchen table my father had built, I picked up my bowl to finish the sweet brown milk left behind by the Cocoa Krispies, letting myself go cross-eyed, pretending I didn’t hear my mother click her tongue at my slurping. I stood up and set the bowl in the sink while checking the kitchen counter for my lunch box, and not seeing it. Oh, wow, it’s Friday, I thought when it hit me—no packed lunch today.
My father sat quietly, working his daily crossword, doodling profiles of beautiful women in the margins, his usual morning meditation.
“Dad, could I have some money for pirohi?” Not pierogi, which is what Poles and Croatians called the handmade, stuffed dumplings, served swimming in butter and onions. We Czechs and Slovaks had our own word.
Even though Milt would happily pay for my lunch, he insisted that I ask, as part of a larger lesson about money. “If you can’t ask for it, maybe you don’t need it,” he would say, explaining that when he went to the credit union or the bank for a loan, he had to ask; they didn’t just give it to him.
He smiled and dug into his front pocket, coming up with a fistful of change.
“How much?”
“Thirty-five cents.” Enough to feed a nine year-old.
He held out a calloused hand and reminded me to take enough for milk. “Sixty-five for me,” Mark said as he swaggered in. He was three years older. My father whistled low in mock-disbelief and snapped each coin on the Formica table one at a time. Betty jerked away from the counter where she had been buttering toast, annoyed by the snapping of the coins. Mark kissed her and she handed him a glass of grape juice. He downed it, grabbed the change and two slices of toast.
Watching quietly behind his empty bowl, Chris, who was just finishing first grade, looked up at Mark with wide eyes and announced, “Pirohi today!” Mark swallowed and said “Well, it is Friday, doofus.” With that, Betty, known for her prickly morning moods, popped Mark behind the right ear. He shook it off, and after a hurried round of kisses, we headed out the back door on a typical Friday morning, going off to school with more freedom than on the other days of the week. None of the Catholic schools provided everyday lunches, but their churches raised money with pirohi, or pierogi, or pirozhki. On Friday, without lunchboxes or bags, I had a free hand with which to gesture and swat, pick up pebbles and throw them at street signs, on our way to the bus stop.
Streets in the neighborhood ran like creeks to a river that was the main road. Out of the tiny households came kids with an array of European surnames: Marcia Sokil, with her fine and even Ukrainian features, would get off the bus at Sts. Peter and Paul; Dave Duplaga, a Pole, would say goodbye in front of St. Stanislaus, Bobby Cipriani at St. Veronica’s.
Swaying like a drunk around the corner, the bus skidded onto the gravel shoulder. It was a heap, an eyesore even in its industrial surroundings. Tosta’s Bus Company served the parochial schools, hauling their students in broken-down buses of two designs: the salvaged city bus, and the retired tour coach. The city buses, with fare boxes, shiny handrails, outdated billboards and cables for requesting a stop, were like rolling funhouses. In contrast, the coaches were dark and quiet, with overhead luggage racks and high, reclining seats that were threadbare and torn.
All the buses had rusty floorboards with holes big enough to see the road, but too small to lose a foot through, and gearboxes that just caught. The drivers, all mechanics, wore greasy jumpsuits and smelled like garlic, motor oil, and sweat. One smoked a pipe while he drove, stuffed with what could only have been plain old oak leaves.
“Oh…God…no,” I groaned when the door swung open and smoke rushed out like a late commuter. I saw the goofy smile of the green immigrant, holding the door lever with the same hand that held his goosenecked pipe, its mouthpiece crushed from his few remaining molars.
Inside, a cloud hung over the luggage rack. The usual choke of moldy seats and exhaust fumes that seeped up through the floor was overwhelmed by the smoldering trash in the driver’s pipe. We made gagging sounds and laughed, but the driver only watched us and smiled with his pipe in his teeth. Most days I prayed for the bus to break down. My hopes sprang from the frequency with which it happened—first a loud clunk, then a whimper from below, the driver cussing and wrestling the rig onto a lawn or a sidewalk. They never called for help, preferring to slide their toolboxes stored under their seat and fix it themselves.
On Fridays, though, my brothers and I wanted a smooth ride. By the time the bus wheeled to the curb in front of Divine Redeemer, I noticed Chris’s vacant stare and gaping mouth. The poor little aromatically sensitive guy, who ran from the house to escape offensive cooking odors, had turned khaki. I yanked our bookbags from the luggage rack and escorted Chris down the aisle and stairs. On the sidewalk, he doubled over and gulped the fresher air while I stood behind him, throwing my head back and inhaling like a hound in a stiff breeze. That’s when I caught it. The scent of Friday shot to my salivary glands. When two nuns pushed open the churches’ oak doors, even the latent incense gave way to the embrace of butter and onions.
During Mass, the promise and seduction became unbearable. My stomach clawed toward its quarry while I knelt through the long Latin consecration. I stared at the ornamental sacristy and my eyes glossed over, seeing Jesus feeding hordes of followers by multiplying pirohi instead of loaves and fishes. Or my gaze landed on the soft white mound of Monica Halicek’s top vertebra. How its contours transported me, how its roundness resembled a tender potato pirohi.
Rising for the Our Father, I examined my conscience for any transgressions that might keep me from momentarily stemming my cravings with the appetizer that was communion. The unleavened wafer seemed a poor substitute for the flesh it presumed to replace. A better choice, I thought, would have been a slice of pepperoni.
Friday mornings dragged. Through religion, geography, and history lessons, I learned only forbearance. Even the nuns admitted their cravings and their secrets for coping: muttering mantras like “Jesus, have mercy on me”—ejaculations, they called them (setting up real teenage confusion down the road)—until the moments of weakness passed.
Billy Evans poked me in the back while Sister Tomasina answered a knock at the door. “How many you gettin’?” he asked.
“A half dozen,” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth, careful not to turn around.
“I’m gettin’ a whole dozen.” Of course you are; you’re fat.
When noon arrived, Sister Tomasina opened the door and the full force of cooking odors washed over us. She cuffed her sleeves and folded her thick, hairy forearms as she stood in the doorway and watched the younger kids file toward the basement. I squirmed in my seat, fishing out the coins and slapping them on my desk for a final count. Satisfied, I cupped my hand at the edge of the desk and slid the coins into it, except for the nickel that bounced off my thumb and fell to the tile floor, found its edge and rolled all the way to the back wall, where it disappeared between a row of bookbags.
Billy noticed and we were both tracking the nickel when Sister Tomasina must have signaled the class to rise and form a queue. Caught by surprise, I spun and stood, tipping over my chair. While righting it, I turned to see the angry nun hustling toward me. Her black robes billowed like a crow descending on roadkill. She took me by the ear and dragged me, sidestepping, to face the blackboard two inches away. When I dared to look sideways, I saw Billy being flung ear-first to my side.
I closed my eyes and memorized the color of the bookbags the nickel had rolled between: red and powder blue. But I doubted I’d have a chance to retrieve it. I might end up staying at the blackboard throughout lunch. Sister Tomasina’s heart had long ago been removed, we theorized, frozen and broken into particles that, when added to torpedoes, made them more deadly. Maybe she’d let us go later, when the entire school had eaten the best pirohi varieties. Billy seethed. I would pay for this on the playground.
As our classmates marched out, the sweet aroma intensified and God’s own forgiving breath must have swept in and subdued the nun. She ordered us to catch up with the others, but before we escaped she drew a four-foot pointer from the folds of her apron and sliced the air behind us, cracking both of our buttocks simultaneously.
The sting made us hop. But we were giddy as we started down the stairs and Billy elbowed me hard enough to knock me into the rail. That was it; retribution delivered. He didn’t hold grudges. Besides, we were dropping into the most overwhelming sensual pleasure either of us would know until puberty, with a narrow escape behind us.
The pupils, as we were called, filed into a bright multipurpose room filled with long tables, folding chairs, and noisy pirohi hogs. This feast was open to the public, and local workers on their lunch breaks sat along the west wall. Kids filled half of the tables in the vast middle, and along the east wall, facing the room, sat a brigade of silver-haired grandmothers. They carefully spooned fillings—mashed potato, sauerkraut, cottage cheese, and lekvar, a prune preserve—into the disks of dough they cradled in their floury hands. They folded the edges together and pinched the semicircular dumplings into shape.
The pinchers would seldom rise. Other volunteers rolled out the dough and cut it into circles with teacups, or mixed fillings and delivered them to the pinchers in heaping bowls, then returned to harvest the finished pirohi.
Pinching and chatting in Slovak or Czech to the friends who flanked her, my grandmother, Anna Rosol, found my face and smiled, flashing perfect false teeth. I broke free of my classmates, now dazed in pirohi nirvana, and scrambled behind the pinchers—“Hi, Mrs. Hovanec, Mrs. Yaniga, Mrs. Duda, Mrs. Sinchak, Mrs. Tabachka”—until I reached my grandmother’s strong arms and soft cotton apron. She kissed me and hugged me hard, pressing her wrists into my back. Her hands, kept chaste for touching food, flew away from me. She was careful like that.
By now, Billy had reached the serving line and I had to hurry. I patted the coins in my pocket and sorely missed that nickel. I suppose I could have asked my grandmother for one, but I knew she was too poor. If she were to give it to me, she’d probably walk home instead of taking the bus. Still, the shortfall forced me to reconfigure my usual order, maybe cutting out the lekvar, its mellow sweetness made sophisticated when it met salt, pepper, butter, and onions. I hated quandaries such as these.
Just as I was about to pick up a plate, a hunchbacked woman in a dark print dress emerged from the kitchen lugging a giant bowl of snowy cottage cheese. She saw me at once, cried my name, and set the bowl down. She wiped her hands and grabbed my face, mashing a kiss on my lips before pushing me away and tugging at the ear still tender from my trip to the blackboard. Like a magician, she let go and presented me with a shiny quarter in the palm of her hand.
Grandma Hertneky, an osteoporotic angel, always greeted me in public with a gangway flourish—even though I saw her nearly every day. Her gypsy drama, in greeting, feeding, scolding, mourning, or scaring, never subsided. She counterposed Grandma Rosol, whose serene demeanor shrouded her in ethereal gauze.
Now I was flush. I knew all the ladies wielding spoons, too, and one scooped four glistening potato pirohis onto my plate. Then I boldly ordered two kraut to go with my usual two lekvar, forcing me to hold the plate with both hands. Searching for a seat, I saw Chris, nose-down, all business. I also spotted Mark, who had just cruised in with the upperclassmen and stood on his tiptoes to assess my plate, as if he might cross the room and steal it. He winked at me.
With the long-awaited aroma buttering my face, I found Billy and sat, just before my knees were about to buckle from excitement. I freed my fork from its napkin wrapper, grabbed the salt and pepper, checked the caps for cruel jokes, and seasoned my little treasures. With my fork, I cut the firm potato pillow in half, exposing the fine filling placed there by ancient hands, refined through generations of argument, fulfilled by sunlight, pitchforks, and cauldrons of boiling water. I flipped its gaping side down in a pool of butter and smeared it across the plate.
The first bite made me close my eyes. The multipurpose room fell silent and every cavity in my head absorbed a humble gift composed of elements that sang secret lyrics to notes along an archetypal scale, a harmony to my subconscious. In my pirohi rapture I could be lost and found, week after week, even when I reached the age when ardent kisses tried to surpass it, and never really could.
Excerpt from Rust Belt Boy, Stories of an American Childhood by Paul Hertneky. © 2016 Paul Hertneky. Published by Bauhan Publishing, Peterborough, New Hampshire. Used by permission.
Each year a lot of attention is paid to “new and emerging” authors under a certain age. Every fall the National Book Foundation honors a group of authors through its 5 Under 35 program, designed to introduce “the next generation” of fiction writers. And in the spring the New York Public Library offers its ten-thousand-dollar Young Lions Fiction Award to a writer age thirty-five or younger. Yale University Press only recently lifted the age restriction for the legendary Yale Series of Younger Poets, which for nearly a century stipulated that the publication award was open only to poets under forty. Every ten years the London-based literary magazine Granta names the twenty writers it considers the Best of Young British Novelists, all of them under forty. The New Yorker made waves back in 1999 with its first 20 Under 40 list—a popular feature the magazine repeated in 2010—anointing authors such as Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat, and George Saunders as “standouts in the diverse and expansive panorama of contemporary fiction,” as the New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman put it. BuzzFeed got in on that action with a feature in 2014, “20 Under 40 Debut Writers You Need to Be Reading,” that included the line: “Out with the old, in with the debut.”
While there is something undeniably exciting about news of the next big book by an undiscovered talent, we would like to remind writers and readers that new does not necessarily mean young, no matter how broadly that qualifier is defined. And while popular culture tends to favor youth, there is something equally exciting about the work of those authors who have lived more than half a century—some pursuing alternative careers, others raising families; all of them taking their time, either by choice or by necessity, and collecting valuable life experience that undoubtedly informs and inspires their writing—before publishing a book.
Here, in their own words, we present five authors over the age of fifty whose debut books were published in the past year.
Know the Mother (Wayne State University Press, March) by Desiree Cooper
Her, Infinite (New Issues Poetry & Prose, March) by Sawnie Morris
An Honorable Man (Emily Bestler Books, April) by Paul Vidich
You May See A Stranger (TriQuarterly Books, May) by Paula Whyman
Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood (Bauhan Publishing, May) by Paul Hertneky
Age: 56
Residence: Detroit, Michigan
Book: Know the Mother, a collection of meditative stories exploring the complex archetype of the mother in all of her incarnations.
Publisher: Wayne State University Press (March)
Agent: None
Twenty years ago I was deep in the throes of raising two elementary-schoolers and struggling to keep apace with the demands of motherhood, wifehood, and personhood. I had a career as a newspaper columnist, which I accomplished between drop-offs and pickups, sometimes driving three hours one way to deliver kids to tutors or games or piano lessons.
Once a year I landed on the shores of a poetry residency where I was a board member (not an actual poet), feeling like a bedraggled refugee. It was there, in the late 1990s, that I penned a poem titled “Know the Mother.” It was a narrative poem about a daughter sitting by her mother’s deathbed, realizing that she will never know who her mother really was. I remember thinking, even then, “If I ever have a book, that will be the title.”
In March 2016, five days before my fifty-sixth birthday, I stood in front of a packed Detroit art gallery for the launch of my first book, a collection of flash fiction titled Know the Mother. By then I was a grandmother, a Kresge Artist Fellow, and a survivor of what could have been a fatal encounter with a semitruck only months before.
All I could think was, “I can’t believe I lived to see this moment.”
Since the age of four, I have wanted only to write stories. But as part of the first generation after the civil rights movement and the oldest child of middle-class strivers, I quickly learned to think of writing as a hobby, not a “real job.” The currents of life sent me on a traditional path to college, law school, a career in journalism, marriage, and family. Through it all, I was a mare champing at the muse. I wrote for myself, on the side, in writing groups, at retreats. I found a community of kitchen-table writers who helped shape my voice. Frustrated at the stingy moments left for me to write, I often very nearly stopped, but I couldn’t stay away for long. Somehow I managed to believe in myself as a creative writer with little outward validation.
Then, one day while I was lurking at a writing event, M. L. Liebler, one of Detroit’s well-known authors and indefatigable writing mentors, shouted “Send me your book!” when he saw me in the parking lot. My heart stopped and I looked around, wondering who he was addressing. He had heard me read at an event and assumed I had more. I had been outed.
Liebler liked my work and handed it to Wayne State University Press. When the gifted editors at the press and the brilliant publicist Kima Jones both said that they would get behind my manuscript, I was awash in disbelief. Maybe because, deep down, I had resigned myself to being a secret writer forever.
I would be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that the path to my first book was as lucky as it was labored. But there were forces that prepared me to step through the publishing door when it miraculously opened late in life. My career as a newspaper columnist gave me the muscle for compressed storytelling, a skill that shaped my ability to write flash fiction. I never stopped sharing my writing with other writers and readers. They became my community MFA program, teaching me what works and what doesn’t, forcing me to produce, encouraging me to stretch.
My life as a mother gave me fodder, empathy, and insight into the human condition. It taught me patience that I never knew I could muster, and a concrete understanding that, while time often feels like a foe, it can be a friend as well. The women in my collection are informed by my own experiences—and those of the women I have met along the way. They are born out of a lifetime of living and observing how racism and sexism profoundly affect our intimate lives.
When I was in my thirties I dreamed of writing a book called Know the Mother. But it wasn’t until I was fifty that I knew for sure who she really was.
(Photo credit: Justin Milhouse)
Age: 61
Residence: Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico
Book: Her, Infinite, a collection of poems that 2015 New Issues Poetry Prize judge Major Jackson calls “a ceremony of tantalizing music.”
Publisher: New Issues Poetry & Prose (March)
Agent: None
In the late 1980s, my husband and I founded and began working for what became a highly accomplished environmental-advocacy organization. Although the experiences expressed in Her, Infinite were written as that life was being lived, the seed poem did not arrive until 2007. The book gathered to its purpose poems written as much as fourteen years prior and five years after its own inception. Beginning in 2010, I spent five years submitting my manuscript to a wide range of presses and contests; Her, Infinite received recognition as a finalist fifteen times before being selected by Major Jackson for the New Issues Poetry Prize. The road to publication via contests was at times a grueling one, but I have no regrets.
A poem is not simply words on a page but a way of touching the stars and having the stars that have fallen into the sea touch us. Our lives are poems. Everything arrives and passes away as it should, and we don’t know the ending—which is the moment the entire poem, its meaning and music, is revealed—until the last line is written, even though it has perhaps existed in the eternal now all along. If we are called to write—and love is the true measure of any calling—then it is joyful duty, even in struggle.
In the fall of 2014 I woke from a dream knowing Her, Infinite was finally going to enter the world. I was floating in the sea and the manuscript had become part of that great benevolence. I felt a gentle yet profound euphoria that had little to do with publication and more to do with connection and a sense of utter acceptance. I woke crying and with the understanding that something huge was transpiring in my life.
On May 4, 2015, my beloved husband, an elegant and articulate abstract expressionist painter, received an advanced cancer diagnosis. Eight days later, in the late afternoon, post-surgery, as I was seated at the foot of his bed rubbing his feet, my cell phone rang. Her, Infinite had found a home. It would be another day before a faint happiness would appear to me in the form of a tiny asterisk moving whimsically around the hospital room while my husband recovered. It would be a year before true happiness, containing as it does a calm center, took hold in my body and I could feel both gratitude and awe for the mysterious synchronicity of those events—the cancer removed, the phone call from the press—arriving together, within the same hour. And even longer to appreciate the fact that the judge had taken an extra week to make his decision. The same week in which we were absorbing our terrifying news and plotting how to face, and with any luck, defeat it.
In a world where such things happen, how can we doubt the auspices of timing, doubt ourselves, or allow anyone else to doubt us due to age and its conspirator, time? Age is only as meaningful as what we have managed to learn and absorb, in our minds, in our bodies. We are here now. Now is the moment to put pen to paper, fingertip to key—to learn and practice our craft, to open ourselves to the music arriving from outside as well as rising from within us, in search of a welcoming.
Age: 66
Residence: New York City
Book: An Honorable Man, a Cold War spy thriller set in 1950s Washington, D.C.
Publisher: Emily Bestler Books (April)
Agent: Will Roberts
My path to writing An Honorable Man was long and winding. I had written two atrocious novels by the time I was twenty-seven, at which point I learned I was to be a father. At the time I didn’t believe I could be a successful writer, and certainly not one who could contribute to meeting a family’s financial needs, so I pursued my other, more conventional, ambition and got an MBA. I also promised myself that I’d quit business when we were financially secure and take up full-time writing again. In 2006, at the age of fifty-six, I didn’t renew my contract at Time Warner, where I had worked in the AOL and Warner Music Group divisions for eighteen years, which surprised many of my colleagues. I enjoyed my long business career, and I was good at it, but I always had the calling to write, and I supported literary organizations such as Poets & Writers, whose board I had joined. I enrolled in the new MFA program at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and began the workshopping and reading needed to develop the tools of written expression. When I started to write more seriously I was able to look back at a life—my life. I had lived a lot, and the distance of time gave me perspective. There was a world to write about that I did not have access to at twenty-seven.
In 2012 I received a letter from a literary agent who’d read a story of mine that had recently won an award. He liked the story, but he didn’t represent collections. Did I have a novel? I looked at my wife. “I guess I should write a novel,” I said. But which one? There was an abiding family tragedy that sat unsettled in my mind for years: My uncle worked for the CIA in 1953 and his unsolved murder remained a devastating family loss. I finished the first draft in forty-five days, and, of course, many drafts followed.
The completed manuscript benefitted from critiques by six fellow Rutgers MFA alumni. (We still meet regularly and comment on each other’s work.) I sent the finished manuscript to four agents who represented authors whose work was similar to my own—espionage novels with a literary register. Olen Steinhauer is one such author who is represented by the Gernert Company. David Gernert liked the book but wanted some changes and introduced me to his young associate, Will Roberts, who handled the novel’s auction. I was fortunate to land with Emily Bestler of Emily Bestler Books, an imprint at Simon & Schuster.
My advice to people coming to writing and publishing later in life: You have to want to write, and I mean really want it. You have to be disciplined about the work. You may have a story, but the writer needs to master the techniques of telling that story. And it is important not to be discouraged by age. You have to inoculate yourself from the perception, however true, that the world only seems to recognize youth and ignores the contributions of later-aged newcomers.
You also need self-confidence. One day, feeling down, I put together a list of authors who had debuted later in life. Raymond Chandler wrote The Big Sleep, his first book, at fifty-one; Julia Glass wrote her first novel, Three Junes, when she was forty-six; and so on. Compiling this list stoked my confidence. If they could do it, then so could I.
Oh, and one other thing: I used to look at the many thousands of books published each year and say, “It can’t be that hard.” I was wrong. It is, in fact, hard work—but it’s worth it.
(Photo credit: Bekka Palmer)
Age: 51
Residence: Bethesda, Maryland
Book: You May See a Stranger, a collection of funny, linked stories that illuminate the life of protagonist Miranda Weber and her strange, unsettling times.
Publisher: TriQuarterly Books (May)
Agent: Daniel Menaker
There’s a scene in my book where an antsy crackhead is waiting for a car’s cigarette lighter to heat up. “Why’s it taking so #%$&* long?” he asks. The car’s driver, who is not a crackhead, replies, “It takes that long.”
I don’t have a satisfying answer to explain why it took so long to publish my first book of fiction. I’ve been making up stories since I learned how to talk, but I knew I would find no classified ads for “fiction writer” when I was looking for a job. I worked as a bar-back, a temp, and an editor, and many things in between, before returning to school for my MFA at American University. My first short story was published the week my first child was born. I was already over thirty by then, too old to be an ingenue, even though the story appeared in an anthology called Virgin Fiction. I went on to write two novel drafts and made false starts on a couple more. I wrote a lot of stories—some good, some terrible. Meanwhile, there were frustrations, uncertainties, and even tragedies.
It was hard to dedicate myself to writing while I was deeply engaged as a parent, especially when my kids were young. I lost touch with many of the writers I’d met in grad school; I was no longer part of a writing community. But my kids made me a better writer—they taught me empathy. And once they were old enough for me to be away, I began attending residencies and conferences. It turned out to be a good thing for me and for them. They take pride in my achievements, and I’ve given them a real-life demonstration of persistence and dedication and passion for one’s work. I’ll never forget when one of my kids excitedly told his English teacher that his mom was going to Yaddo, the same place the poet whose work he was studying, Langston Hughes, had gone to write.
The biggest advance in my work came when I finally stopped telling myself my first book had to be a novel. I think of it as the triumph of the irrational plan. I decided to allow myself to write the stories I wanted to write. I began writing stories that felt dangerous to me; I allowed the characters to go places I didn’t want to go.
Like all writers, I’ve weathered a lot of rejection. I’ve always been persistent, and optimistic enough that I responded to the least encouragement. That encouragement, coming from people whose judgment I trust, has been key.
And then there is serendipity. I met my agent, Daniel Menaker, when I took his humor workshop at the Key West Literary Seminar more than three years ago. I asked him for advice on my fiction, and to my surprise, he offered to represent me. I hadn’t written the book yet.
I found my publisher—or he found me—when I was awarded a scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. My book was making the rounds and getting (nice) rejections from big houses when my scholar bio was posted on the Sewanee website. Mike Levine at TriQuarterly saw it and requested my manuscript. A few weeks later, he told me he wanted to publish the collection. The book came out this past May.
Do I wish all of this had happened more quickly? Sure. But the truth is, I could not have written this book when I was thirty. The more life experience I gained, the more perspective I could bring to the work. Along the way, I became better at choosing among my ideas and understanding how to make them work.
My first child turned eighteen shortly after my book came out. He starts college this fall. On my publication day, he told me, “I feel like I grew up watching you write. Now your book is ready to go out into the world, and so am I.”
It can take this long. Are you too old? Is it too late? Nonsense. Imagination has no expiration date.
(Photo credit: Jo Eldredge Morrissey)
Age: 61
Residence: Hancock, New Hampshire
Book: Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood, a collection of essays about the immigrant experience, set in Pittsburgh and the author’s hometown of Ambridge, Pennsylvania.
Publisher: Bauhan Publishing (May)
Agent: None
First, an admission: I did not grow up with a love of books, but with a love of reading. Newspapers became a habit, magazines a marvel, poems a playground. Bound mysteries and biographies from the library captivated me, but inspiration came from the once-literary pages of Esquire and the essays of Montaigne.
I had never imagined myself a writer, much less the author of a cohesive volume of prose. Making my living through copywriting and journalism, I became friends with authors at a time when clear paths led to publishing books. Years of work went into each book, and the heartache of seeing them on remainder tables made the enterprise seem too Sisyphean for me.
My stories and essays came and went on the wings of ephemera and airwaves, their footprints left in the tiny lines of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, then a library database. But no Internet. Not even the illusion of permanence, much less posterity.
I cared more about my reputation among editors than my identity as a writer. I cared about my sentences, stories, sources, and serving readers and listeners. I satisfied my artful side by publishing an essay, or performing one on public radio.
And then one day I interviewed a man over lunch who ordered steamed milk with honey. His taste for this biblical concoction tied in to the subject, forming a metaphor that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I set out to write a series of essays and stories that, ten years later, became Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood.
My early manuscripts made little impression on the young intellectuals staffing the front lines at agencies and literary presses. Years of relentless rejection followed, but I continued to believe in my stories and in the invisible communities and characters they portrayed. I reformulated the book countless times, responding to advice from agents and publishers, and kept pitching.
Revision became my solace, my drug of choice, the only activity that made me feel better. I cut and clarified, expanded and recast. A great friend, the novelist Eugenia Kim, believed in my book from the beginning and insisted that I continue, editing draft after draft for me, questioning and challenging me.
You see, I had dedicated myself to a seemingly foolish task. Most of my published work had been tailored to narrowly defined readers and audiences. I wanted this book to engage literary readers while also captivating working stiffs, many of whom read less than one book a year. Reaching that broad spectrum with respect for a range of sensibilities demanded everything I had learned over twenty-five years of writing for publication.
Howard Mansfield, a friend as well as an author of nine books and a superb editor, had read one of the earliest versions of Rust Belt Boy. He told me how pleased he had been working with Bauhan Publishing, a small press with distribution by the University Press of New England, for his upcoming book. I knew of Bauhan, and I hadn’t thought my book would fit in with their New England–centered list.
But I also knew that its former managing editor, Jane Eklund, had liked my essays well enough to publish one years earlier in a literary magazine she edited. Soon after I gave her the manuscript, she recommended it for publication by Bauhan.
Trusting my pitch that my collection carried universal themes for millions of mill-town kids, the Bauhan team produced a beautiful book and has supported it well. With the help of publicist Scott Manning, the book enjoyed a strong launch, required a second printing within weeks, and has drawn considerable attention from media and reviewers.
My own truth for book writing: I will only write a book that means the world to me, that obsesses me and compels me, as long as it takes, sentence by sentence, to earn the attention of readers, to hold them, and leave them wanting more.
From the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 program to the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, many organizations make a point of recognizing young, gifted authors at the start of their literary careers. In the November/December 2016 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, we feature five debut authors over the age of fifty—Desiree Cooper, Sawnie Morris, Paul Vidich, Paula Whyman, and Paul Hertneky—whose first books came out this past year, and who stand as living proof that it’s never too late to start your literary journey. Here, we feature excerpts from their debut books.
Know the Mother(Wayne State University Press, March) by Desiree Cooper
Her, Infinite (New Issues Poetry & Prose, March) by Sawnie Morris
An Honorable Man (Emily Bestler Books, April) by Paul Vidich
You May See A Stranger (TriQuarterly Books, May) by Paula Whyman
Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood (Bauhan Publishing, May) by Paul Hertneky
Know the Mother
By Desiree Cooper
The Disappearing Girl
My minivan churns impatiently as I wait in the long queue. Up ahead, it’s easy to spot my daughter in the gaggle of starched, school-crested shirts and navy-blue pants. She’s the only one with brown eyes and skin to match. She’s the only one whose thick, black hair is tamed into stiff braids.
She is standing apart, her eyes scanning the row of cars, a refugee on a hostile shore waiting for an airlift. When she finally sees our car, she shoulders her heavy book bag—too full of academic pressure for a fourth grader—and a smile lands on her face. She is not ashamed to show me the beautiful Wolof gap in her front teeth. She waves desperately, as if otherwise I might miss her, the lone black child in a sea of white.
Finally, she opens the door and jumps into the back seat. “How was your day?” I say brightly, swallowing the stress of having to pick her up from private school every afternoon. She buckles in and opens her daily treat—today it’s a bag of Doritos and bottled tea. No time to get to the store for apples. Bad mom.
She says nothing, but munches quietly and looks out the window. We pass the blond girls yelling things out of car windows like “Call me if you want to go riding!” or “Don’t forget your swimsuit!”
At ten, my daughter wants, more than anything, to be chosen. She has a crush on Henry Frank (the kids call him HankFrank, as if it were one word). My daughter has a chance with HankFrank because he is funny-goofy, already eccentric, probably gay.
I turn off the radio, which I always do when the kids are in the car, just in case something bubbles up from their mysterious lives. Lately, my daughter has become impenetrable. When I hug her, she stiffens. Even though I am her lifeboat, she will not touch me. She is the kind of lonely that cannot be explained, so it becomes someone else’s fault. Mine.
“Did you know that I am invisible?” Her words come in a scratchy little-girl voice, but she is too old for make-believe. She is stating a fact. My heart is a block of ice. I glance at her in the rearview mirror. She keeps eating Doritos vacantly.
Suddenly, I am six. It is 1967 and my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Houston, is so severe, every inch of me wants to please her.
I figure out after the first day that I am smarter than the other kids. The white kids. Every day, I want prove my worth to Mrs. Houston by giving her the right answers. She calls on the other children; I don’t understand why she doesn’t see me. I stretch my hand higher, accent my eagerness with a few “Ooh, oohs,” but still she gazes over my head to the dolt behind me with the ruby curls.
This is not what I had imagined when I’d longed to go to school. I’d dreamed of friends and books and scissors and the sweet smell of paste. I dreamed of chalk scraping on the board and gold stars on my homework. I never dreamed I would disappear.
My daughter finishes her Doritos and crumples the bag loudly. I stop the car in front of the manicured lawn of a stranger. I get out and open my daughter’s door. She tracks me wide-eyed, afraid that she is in trouble. I unlock her seat belt and pull her out of the car. Her classmates peer at us curiously as they drive by in their moms’ SUVs. She doesn’t know it yet, but after today, my daughter will never see them again.
I take her shoulders and gaze into her eyes. I look at her so long that the hard resentment of her spine bends toward me. Her anger softens to tears.
“I can see you,” I say, taking her into my arms.
Know the Mother
As I wash my mother’s back, her scent fills my nostrils. Already, she smells like a garden unearthed, a freshly dug grave. I soak the cloth in warm water and witch hazel; she sighs as I swab her shrunken thighs, her shriveled feet.
“Don’t leave me,” I plead beneath my breath. She twitches and my heart leaps—maybe she’s changed her mind and has decided to stay with me a little longer. But for the next three hours, she gives me nothing to hold on to—not one fluttering eyelid, not a wan smile of possibility. She is leaving me so easily, I wonder if her love ever rose above duty.
Two months ago, I was bringing warm sheets up from the dryer in the basement. As I reached the top of the stairs, I could hear Mother singing. I dashed around the corner, half expecting to see her remaking her bed, lifting the mattress to miter the corners.
But when I reached her room, nothing had changed. Her hair was still a thin layer of down. Her cheeks were still sallow. Her shoulder blades jutted beneath the summer blanket as if she were hiding her favorite book beneath the covers. Yet somehow as she slept, she was a young woman again, singing.
At her bedside, I doze without resting. I dream that my mother is dressed in a black taffeta gown. Her cheeks are rouged with stage makeup, her eyes shimmering. On cue, she makes her way to the curtain. I call her name three times, but nothing I say can make her look back.
Excerpted from Know the Mother by Desiree Cooper. Copyright © 2016 by Desiree Cooper. Excerpted by permission of Wayne State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Her, Infinite
By Sawnie Morris
Sunlight Hardens on the Bed
In the next room,
handmade cabinets open, shut. A crashing sound
and the man’s voice calls out glass. Scalene, obtuse,
with a generous curve. Another woman’s voice
from the speaker-phone enters. They are stringed instruments,
so events happen quickly. The spatula scrapes against
the body of the skillet. The brain rewires itself
tonographically, as though just being someplace warmer
could change the music. Fire at will, he says,
when they return to the house on the mesa
in a sky like ice water, stars tinkling. Shards
reminiscent of sails, and he carries the broken
in a box alongside the kitchen island and out
the back door, its window tracked by drippings
summer oil left. Nothing to protect either of them
from the heart’s investment. Divested of all else,
what she learns will be survival
without guilt. What he learns will be startled
dependence on the not mapped .
Inland See (II)
re: “Deepwater Horizon” catastrophic oil spill, June 2010
Grandmothers scoop up a light-net,
haul pelican (in the spirit world) like fish—
and fish. Or net the sludge,
thick ooze, and how-to
staunch a puncture. (Sometimes
we must protect ourselves, we said of television,
internet.) Our fingers
over dinner, splay—were we? Eating a bird,
we become it.
And Afterward, to Eat Oranges
—to dust off the dark spots of oil
and clean my face.
A draft, sinewy and luminous
wraps across our vision.
In a haven of smoke, cars throttled past.
¡Qué silencio en las iglesias! Someone
on a phonograph plays the cymbals, tapping them lightly
as in a dream when you kiss me awake.
The clamoring of spirits springs up inside the piano.
What are we waiting for, those of us who hear?
Already a waif with torn clothes and a finger,
I want you like a tight fit, like a swallow under eaves.
A Sand Trail w/ Stone Walls & Configurations
For a while I am walking along a path
next to a river. A sand trail
w/ stone walls & configurations.
I dream more prosaically at night
and for a while I am aware she is following.
Then she is no longer a poet, but a lion.
The house is bright and quiet when I wake,
and I hear water draining from the bath.
Some days I am a morning bedside chatterbox.
Others I am on my way south to see the
great whales. That’s the circumstance
in which she is at her best and most natural.
In a house made of wood, the main task
is making collages—she has a box-full,
though I think to myself, no thanks,
this life is not the circus for me.
At one point I go for a walk near the ocean.
At the stone dock a speed boat races past
and crashes into what is called a jetty.
I think surely there will be injuries and admit
there are moments I envy the alcoholics,
the way they do that disappearing act
into something else. A man shoots
a very old very loud gun in every
direction. It is a way of keeping time,
the equivalent of church bells.
She was so handsome I felt completely,
almost completely unworthy. And when she went
into the sand dunes and I heard a cry,
I was afraid. I raced to find her, but no
need to be distraught. She was content,
leaning against a large stone beside the river,
complicated, in the shade.
Excerpted from Her, Infinite by Sawnie Morris. Copyright © 2016 by Sawnie Morris. Excerpted by permission of New Issues Poetry & Prose. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
An Honorable Man
By Paul Vidich
WASHINGTON, D.C., 1953
Mueller stood at the apartment’s third-floor window and said to the FBI agent, “It’s been too long. He won’t show.” He ground his cigarette into the overflowing ash tray. “We’re wasting our time.”
“He’ll come. He can’t resist the bait.”
Mueller looked across the icy street at the dilapidated apartment building separated from the sidewalk by a wrought iron fence. Bars protected first-floor windows. There was no activity and there hadn’t been since he’d arrived. A streetlamp at the corner cast its amber glow up the block, but it didn’t reach the stoop. An unmarked car stood at Twelfth Street NE and Lincoln Park, and a black Buick was around the corner, in the alley, out of sight, but Mueller had seen it on his way over. Further up the block, an agent waited in the dimly lit phone booth, self-conscious with his newspaper.
“He’s been scared off.”
“He has no reason to believe we’re here.”
“He doesn’t need a reason. It’s instinct. Even an amateur would wonder why that man’s been in the phone booth an hour. For you it’s a job.” Mueller dropped the curtain. “It’s his life. He knows.”
Mueller glanced at his watch. “When do you call it quits?”
“There’s time. We spotted her making the drop at five. She’s Chernov’s wife. She went in the lobby with the package. She came out without it. He’ll come.”
“You’re sure it was her?” Mueller asked.
He waited for FBI agent Walker to respond. Mueller thought Walker flamboyant, enjoying his status as agent-in-charge, eager to hunt. He dressed the part: dark hair combed straight back, polished shoes, double-breasted suit, and thin moustache like a Hollywood leading man. Through the window street sounds spilled into the darkened apartment—a car’s honk, a woman’s anger. The agent raised opera glasses and scanned the street and then shifted his attention to the edge of Lincoln Park. Automobiles cruised single men sitting alone on wood benches. A giant mound of dirty snow from the weekend storm buried parked cars.
“We know it was her,” Walker said in his drawl. “We have surveillance. Two cars. She left the Soviet embassy, took a taxi to the residence, and walked here with the package. It’s still inside.”
Mueller waited. He looked at his watch again, and then without thinking, he did it again. Waiting was the hardest part. He moved to the center of the room. There was the rank smell of cigarettes in the small apartment, half-drunk coffee cups, and the wilted remains of a take-out dinner. All waiting did was give him time to be irritated. He took a tennis ball from the table and squeezed it, working out his tension, squeezing and resqueezing. At another window he lifted the curtain. The street was dark, quiet, empty. Walker didn’t understand that double agents lived in fear, chose their time, and that a cautious man wasn’t going to take an unnecessary risk.
Lights in the building across the street were dark except for a top-floor apartment. A big woman at the window pulled her sweater over her head and then reached behind to undo her bra. Mueller looked then glanced away. A light on the second floor. Had someone entered the building lobby? Through the window an older man stood in boxer shorts before an open refrigerator. He drank milk straight from a quart bottle and then he shuffled off to the kitchen table and sat by a console radio. Mueller looked back at the top floor, but the curtain was drawn.
How long should he stay? Walker and his men wouldn’t abandon the stakeout until long after it was an obvious bust. No one wanted to admit failure, or have to invent excuses. Mueller was officially just an observer.
He saw a young man with a notepad approach from across the room. Crew-cut, freckled face, no tie, boyish smile. Too young for this type of assignment.
“You the CIA guy?” the young man asked.
Mueller narrowed his brow. “Who are you?”
“The Star.” He lifted the press badge hanging around his neck.
Mueller confronted Walker by the fire escape window. Two men standing inches apart in the darkened apartment. Mueller snapped, “What’s he doing here?”
“He’s okay.”
“We said no press. No surprises. No embarrassments.” He didn’t hide his anger.
“I had no choice,” Walker said laconically.
Mueller gave the agent-in-charge a cold, hard glare and considered who in his chain of command had authorized a reporter. He held back what he wanted to say, that under the circumstances the best outcome for the CIA was that their man didn’t take the bait, didn’t show. “We had an understanding,” Mueller said. “This wasn’t it.”
“He’s a kid. He’ll write what he’s told to write.”
“What does he think is happening?”
“Vice squad got a lead on a State Department guy who cruises Lincoln Park. Security risk. We arrest him and book him. Metro Police give the kid the story. He’ll write what he’s given.”
Mueller headed to the apartment door.
“Where are you going?”
“A little fresh air.”
Walker raised his voice so that it carried to Mueller in the hall stairway. “He’s okay.”
Outside, Mueller stood hidden from view on the top step of the building’s stoop. He lit a cigarette. Habit. Then thought better of it and flicked it in the snow. His eyes settled on the empty street where he saw nothing to change his mind that the night was a bust. The Capitol Building fretted the tree line of the park, a gleaming dome in the night, a navigation point above the neighborhood’s sprawling poverty. In the distance Mueller heard the anxious wail of a police siren and then behind him, the soft click of the door closing. He saw Walker. They stood side by side without talking.
“I hear you’re leaving the Agency,” Walker said.
“Who told you that?”
“One of the guys.”
Which guy? Mueller nodded. “If we get him tonight I’ll be gone by the end of the month.”
“What’s next?”
“Fly-fishing.” A lie.
“That will last a while.”
Mueller didn’t indulge Walker’s sarcasm. He didn’t like Walker, but he tolerated him, and he kept him close to keep himself safe. Walker was too ambitious for Mueller’s taste, quick to take credit for success, quick to blame others for his own mistakes. Mueller didn’t like Walker’s having that detail of his personal life. He kept private matters away from his job, but the daily grind made that hard. Each morning he got up to face the endless urgency of ambitious colleagues inventing useful crises. Politics had taken over everything. He was tired of the double life, the daily mask, and he’d lost his ability to appear interested in a conversation when he was bored out of his mind. Walker bored him. But he knew Walker well enough not to trust him. Walker was a good weatherman of Washington’s changing political winds and he was a good spy hunter.
Mueller’s exhale came at last. “Where’d you get the tip?”
“The mailbox on East Capitol we’ve been watching. Someone left a chalk mark. This is the dead drop.”
“You know, or you think?”
“She left the lobby without the package. What else would it be?” Then, confidently, “He’ll come.”
The two men stood in the dark. “I don’t get it,” Walker said. “Great reputation, but your results stink. Vienna was a failure. So was Hungary. Last week you lost Leisz.” Walker paused. His breath fogged in the chilly night air. “Word is you guys got the news Stalin died by listening to Radio Moscow.” Walker flicked his butt to the snow. “Great reputation, but your results stink.”
“Piss off,” Mueller said. He thought about the damn fool Leisz. Ignored the rules after he’d been warned, thinking he wasn’t at risk, then got sloppy and paid for it.
“Someone’s coming.” A voice from the window above.
Mueller and Walker saw the young black woman at the same time. Blond wig, leopard-skin coat, stiletto heels, and a tiny rhinestone purse clutched in one hand. She had emerged from the tree line at Lincoln Park and glanced both ways before making a two-step hustle across the street. Mueller and Walker stepped back deeper into shadow.
When she achieved the opposite sidewalk she glanced over her shoulder. Mueller followed her line of sight to the streetlamp cleaving the darkness at the park’s edge. From the trees stepped an army enlisted man. Mueller saw the drab sameness of style of someone who sought to fit in, go unnoticed. Long khaki coat, a visor cap pulled down on his forehead, and a steady stride that didn’t bring attention to itself. She baited him with exaggerated hip movements and a calculated head nod. The start of another war had kept Washington filled with single men, and with single men came dreary bars with women who sold themselves.
“He won’t come with this sideshow,” Mueller said.
“They’ll leave. Hail a taxi. Go to a hotel.”
Mueller lit another cigarette and then regretted his choice again. He ground it under his heel. Drinking and smoking, two occupational hazards that had begun to wear on him.
The woman walked up the block, but slowed her stride to allow the man to catch up. The air was cold and crisp, sharp like flint. Suddenly she stopped. The two talked on the sidewalk. A bargain was struck.
“There’s something odd about him,” Mueller said.
“Odd?”
“The uniform. His shoes. He’s wearing loafers.”
The enlisted man opened the iron gate for the woman and then followed her up the steps to the apartment house lobby. He shot a glance over his shoulder before disappearing inside.
“What are you saying?” Walker asked. “It’s him?” Then a demand. “You think it’s him?”
“Not my call.”
Mueller saw Walker’s discomfort and he felt the torment of the decision he faced. Both men knew it would be impossible to recover from a bad call.
“So be it,” Walker muttered. He pulled on his glove, stretching his fingers deep into the leather, and clenched a fist.
Mueller watched the FBI assemble. Walker signaled his agent in the phone booth, who in turn placed a call. It took a minute, or less, for the Buick and two unmarked cars to converge on the apartment building. Two agents, handguns drawn, stepped from the first car and hustled up the steps to the lobby. Four other men took up positions at their cars, and one crouched agent scrambled toward the rear of the building.
Walker stood in the street barking orders to his team, and the sudden noise brought neighborhood residents to their windows. They saw black cars stopped at oblique angles on the street, doors flung open.
Mueller stayed out of sight, alone. He saw an FBI agent escort the army enlisted man down the stoop tightly gripping his arm. The enlisted man had lost his hat, his wrists were handcuffed behind his back, and his unbuckled pants rode down his hips. He looked dazed and embarrassed.
A second agent had cuffed the prostitute and guided her, protesting, toward a car. Her wig was gone and she was hobbling on one broken heel, shouting fierce baritone obscenities at the agent who hustled her down the steps.
“Don’t rush me,” the transvestite yelled, “I’ll sprain an ankle.”
Mueller waited until Walker emerged from the apartment lobby and then he stepped out from his hiding spot. They met halfway across the street, Walker agitated, his face twisted in a scowl. He waved a stack of bills at Mueller as he walked past. “Keep this farce to yourself,” he snapped. “Don’t say a thing. Not a word. Hear me?”
Walker slipped in the Buick’s front seat and slammed his door shut. In a minute the cars were all gone and Mueller stood alone. There was one orphaned stiletto heel on the sidewalk that he dropped in a garbage can.
He walked rapidly away. He didn’t bother to look behind to see if anyone noticed him, or to check on the curious neighbors. But at the end of the street he happened to turn. An instinct he’d acquired in Vienna after the war, the feeling of knowing when he was being observed. There at the corner in the shadow of a mature tree, a tall man in a gray homburg, hands shoved in the pockets of a long trench coat. There was something suspicious about the figure. Mueller read into every stranger the possibility the person was tailing him, and this man got his attention. Mueller stood there thirty feet away on the other side of the street, staring at the motionless figure, who stared back. Mueller couldn’t make out the man’s face, or the shape of his jawline in the hat’s deep shadow.
“Hey, you,” Mueller yelled.
He went to cross the street, but a garbage truck fitted with a snowplow lumbered by in a riot of noise. When the truck passed, Mueller looked for the man, but he was gone.
Excerpted from An Honorable Man by Paul Vidich. Copyright © 2016 by Paul Vidich. Excerpted by permission of Atria/Emily Bestler, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
You May See A Stranger
By Paula Whyman
Pogo wants to pay for everyone. It’s a big night for him, and he’s taking us to the country club. Cheever and his girlfriend are coming, too. Cheever is Pogo’s younger brother. Their father’s name is on a plaque somewhere in the building.
“On a bar stool,” Pogo joked.
“His name is the same as yours,” Cheever told him.
Pogo has wads of cash in his pocket. I have a small square of paper in my purse. It’s proof of something I don’t quite believe. When the doctor said it, I thought of an incubator and chicks, my body as a holding area, warm, but like everything else, temporary. Pogo will eventually show everyone the cash. I don’t plan to show anyone the paper. This is Pogo’s big night, not mine. One big night at a time seems like a good philosophy.
Cheever and Natasha are already at the bar when we arrive. Natasha’s glass is full and sweating in her hand. She swirls the yellow straw between her fingers. Cheever orders a gin and tonic for himself. He and Pogo don’t look like brothers, but they look related. They slap each other on the back with friendly hostility, which leads into a wrestler-grip hug held a few beats too long.
“I’m proud of you,” says Cheever. He tries to mess Pogo’s hair, but Pogo blocks him. Pogo tries to mess Cheever’s hair instead, except he can’t because it’s short and bristly, so it ends up looking like a plush carpet you stroked in the wrong direction.
Pogo orders drinks for both of us. He’s had two already, before we got here. One before we got in the car, and one he finished on the way to the club, while I drove. His cheeks and his nose are pleasantly red.
At the bar, I hold up the car key for him to take, and he shows me his pocket. I reach over to slip the key into his khakis, and he grabs my fingers.
“The other one,” he whispers in my ear.
I put the key in his other pocket, on the side facing away from Cheever and Natasha, the side without the wad of cash in it. I reach all the way in to stroke him through the lining of his pocket. He isn’t wearing underwear. I can feel the hard curve of him. If I try, I think I can feel his blood rushing. He keeps talking, leaning up against the bar. He leans toward Natasha. While he talks, he touches her with his hand that holds the drink, as if he might rest the glass on her shoulder. I squeeze a little. He flinches in a way only I would notice, and he has to stop my hand and shift himself. All this he does seamlessly, while holding the drink in the other hand and expounding on the vagaries of the market.
*
Pogo has an old Mercedes. His father has one, too. His affection for old things confuses me—some are quality, and some are just old. The idea is to look like they don’t care about money, or even think about it. If you’ve had enough of it for a long enough time, say, generations, you don’t think about it in the same way as other people. But that’s someone else’s money, and whenever Pogo manages to get his own, he wants everyone to know. In my family, what modest funds my parents earned were spent on my sister’s doctors and life-skills counselors, and on the annual summer jaunt to a nearby mountain lodge, where Donna and I counted dead flies on the windowsill and held our noses against the smell of the septic tank. We’d never had the luxury to act like we didn’t worry.
*
On the way to the club, Pogo and I stopped in the parking lot of Broder’s, the gourmet grocery store. We shut off the car engine, but left the radio on. We parked at the far end of the lot, but I could still see people coming and going, pushing their carts, which were smaller and daintier than the carts at a run-of-the-mill store.
I didn’t want to mess up my skirt by hiking it up to my waist, so I took it off. Pogo tilted the passenger seat back as far as it would go, and I straddled him. It was cramped, and I had to hunch my shoulders to avoid hitting the ceiling. At one point, I leaned forward all the way and lay on top of him, and he pushed me up with his pelvis and shouted “giddyap.” He can be a goof that way. I was so high up, I thought later about my naked bottom and the car’s moon roof, and shouldn’t I laugh about it? But I wasn’t exactly thinking about it at the time. A vibration was beginning inside of me, like the background hum of an amplifier. Clapton was singing, Nobody’s lucky till luck comes along/Nobody’s lonely till somebody’s gone. That’s when I came. Pogo already had, a moment before. It was still daylight.
I wasn’t into it at first, doing it outside of Broder’s, or even at all. Pogo could nearly always persuade me; he knew and I knew that I would end up feeling like it before he was done. After that, I drove us to the club. The thrumming in my body continued to reverberate, in seeming rhythm with the rattling diesel engine. I wanted to be still for a while longer and let it finish whatever it was doing to me.
Pogo said, “‘You, in the cheaper seats, clap your hands; the rest of you just rattle your jewelry.’” This was John Lennon at the Beatles’ Royal command performance, Pogo was fond of reminding me.
“Am I the queen?” I asked.
“You are the queen of all you survey,” said Pogo.
“The Broder’s parking lot?” I said.
“Your fiefdom.”
“Are you my serf?” I asked.
“I serf no one,” said Pogo.
“Ugh,” I said.
When we got to the club, I went to the ladies’ room. There were hand towels made of the same fabric you’d make cloth napkins out of, folded in rows on a table near the sink. I wanted to bring one into the stall with me to clean up from preceding events. I couldn’t though, because there was a black woman sitting on a chair in the room, wearing what looked like a nurse’s uniform. She was an attendant. I wasn’t sure what she was going to do for me, and I didn’t have time to figure it out. My insides felt shaken up and rearranged, and standing in that dim room with the slightly antiseptic odor tipped the balance toward one arrangement rather than another. I bent over the toilet, my bare knees pressed into the knobby floor, and waited. I threw up, and threw up again. After a while, it stopped on its own, and I sat on the rim in a weakened state, leaning to one side so that I could feel the cool wall tiles. I could fool myself that I was empty, if only for a moment. I had a vision of my body turned inside out, gleaming pink, pristine. So much for that. My knees hurt, as if I’d knelt in pebbles. I sat for as long as I thought I could, awaiting with dread the attendant’s tap on the stall door, or Pogo’s voice outside the ladies’ room calling to me. At that moment, nothing seemed more difficult than leaving the bathroom.
When I finally emerged from the stall, the attendant handed me a cup of green liquid. I looked at her questioningly, but she kept her face neutral and turned away. I smelled it; it was mouthwash. She probably thought I was drunk, like the other girls the men try to impress, bringing them to the club for drinks before they get them into bed. But Pogo had done things in reverse, as usual. He didn’t have to get me drunk first. He didn’t even have to impress me.
After I washed my hands, the woman handed me a towel. There was no place for tips, so I figured that wasn’t done. There was a large wicker basket where I finally realized I was supposed to put the used cloth after I dried my hands. I smiled at her and said, “thank you” when I left the bathroom.
She must be keeping things clean between customers. For some reason, I imagine that she’s never permitted to leave the building; perhaps she can’t even leave the ladies’ room. I wonder if anyone on the outside knows about this, or if it’s a secret the members are expected to keep. She’s the only black person I’ll see at the club tonight.
*
At the club’s bar, I don’t touch my drink right away. I’m not sure how much I want to drink. Same way I was unsure about having sex earlier. I’m resolutely not focusing on the possible reason. Pogo puts the glass in my hand: “Drink the potion,” he says. He’s always paying attention to how much other people drink. I know I’ll oblige. I wonder if Pogo would still give me a drink if he knew. I can’t imagine him suddenly becoming responsible. This is, after all, what I both want and don’t want about him.
Pogo’s ten years older than me. Most men his age are married. He thinks I won’t push him. I play along. I’m only a year out of school, but it’s as if I’m the grown-up. Pogo wants to be a kid forever.
My doctor asked me, is the father someone you’re serious with? I said yes. Then he’ll do right by you, the doctor said. I laughed. The doctor looked at me sadly then. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be pregnant. Or I suppose when I forgot to take my pill, I could have said no. When Pogo said, just this one time, please? We’d been dating a year, and up to that time I’d been very good about remembering it. I thought one time would be okay. And maybe it would have been. But if I’m honest I’ll also admit it was not just one time.
If we had a boy, first Pogo would teach him how to pee on the side of the road. Then he would teach him persuasion. These are not bad things to know, just as it’s not bad sometimes to let yourself be persuaded.
*
I stare at the coaster my drink has been sitting on. It’s the most substantial paper coaster I’ve ever seen, as thick as a whole pad of paper. Someone spent a lot of money on those. Worth it? I imagine the talk: “Our golf course is first rate, but you should see our coasters—a well-kept secret.” Along with the black woman in the bathroom. The club’s fleur-de-lis symbol is embossed in gold in the center of the coaster. There’s a wet ring where my drink was. But the water doesn’t get absorbed, it sits on top. The fleur-de-lis reminds me of something. Sex-flower. Flower of lascivious pomposity. I make these phrases in my head; I entertain myself that way. The same symbol is on the hand towels in the bathroom. I almost cleaned myself with the seal of the King of France.
It’s easier to talk to Cheever and Natasha when they’ve had a couple of drinks, as if they discover their personalities. Maybe they think I’m the same. They’re talking about Pogo’s big news, except he doesn’t want to tell the whole story yet. He’s waiting for the moment of utmost drama, so he only drops teasers like, “Do you know how much cash I have in my pocket right now?”
I make a face that tells Cheever and Natasha that I know the answer, and won’t they be impressed? Pogo winks at me, commiserating. We’re like Penn and Teller.
“I hope it’s more than you have in your bank account,” says Cheever.
*
Pogo showed me the money when we were in the car. He used the same line with me: “Do you know how much cash I have in my pocket right now?” This was right before we had sex.
The money was rolled into a thick wad held tight by a rubber band. “I thought you were just happy to see me,” I said. “How much is that?”
“Six thousand right here,” he said, squeezing it in his fist. “The rest is being held at the firm. Earnest money. The importance of being earnest.”
“Are you supposed to have all that?”
“It’s mine, all mine,” he laughed maniacally and sipped his drink, which was in a real glass he’d brought from home. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen do that, bring a drink in an open glass in a car that isn’t a limo. But I never saw Pogo or any of his friends without a drink, a wisecrack, or a woman. They were not-quite Southerners in the not-quite South, pretend gentility and bad behavior coexisting without any apparent discomfort, like Pogo’s dress-code-correct pressed khakis with no boxers underneath.
“This is chump change,” he said. “After the sale, I get more. A lot more.” He unfurled the wad and started peeling off bills. There were fifties and hundreds. His pants were on, but my skirt was already off. I was stretched out next to him, reclining as best I could in the driver’s seat, the steering wheel preventing much range of motion. He laid one bill after another side to side, flat on my thighs, all the way to my knees. I stayed very still. Then, he lifted my blouse, and tried to put bills on my stomach, going up to my breasts, but my stomach was too fat, and only one of the bills would stay, the one covering my belly button.
“Pizza,” said Pogo, smacking my stomach a little too hard.
“Look who’s talking,” I said. He was giving me an opening, but I was waiting for the right moment, too, and this wasn’t it. I thought of what I would do. And I thought, for the thousandth time, of what he would do. Would he look at that inky print-out, which resembled nothing more than a galactic cloud, an obscured thumbprint, his and mine together, and would he, like always, say just the right, wrong thing? I thought of taking that square of paper with my future printed on it and placing it over his crotch and saying, ‘Here. How much is this worth?’
“I thought you said I was cute,” he pouted, the insult to me already forgotten.
“The Pillsbury dough boy is adorable,” I said. Pogo had a round face, and he was flabby in the middle, but tall enough that he came off as sturdy and strong. Would his baby have his baby face? His cheek was smooth to the touch. I imagined a tiny hand reaching out to it. I felt something tighten inside me. When I was a kid, what did I imagine about having a baby? Why do I only remember playing with dolls that looked like little adults? What would Pogo do? How could I know him for this long and not know the answer to that?
“Nya-nya ‘doughboy’ nya-nya. Very funny. You’re not as funny as me,” he said. “I’m the funniest of all.”
“You’re the King of Comedy,” I said. “Throw some more money at me, and I promise I’ll say whatever you want to hear.”
“I’m deeply, deeply wounded by your sarcasm,” Pogo said sarcastically. He attempted to put a fifty over my mouth. I breathed out through my nose and the bill fluttered down to land on the floor mat. He snatched it up.
“Beautiful money,” he said. “I’ve mistreated you.” He stroked it and reinserted it in the stack he held. He collected the bills from my thighs, along with the others that had landed on the floor of the car, and folded the wad back into his pocket. He leaned over the gearshift and kissed me. Slowly, he kissed all of the places where the money had been. When we were having sex, his pants were pushed down around his knees, and I could feel the bulging cash rub against my ankle.
Excerpted from You May See a Stranger by Paula Whyman. Copyright © 2016 by Paula Whyman. Excerpted by permission of TriQuarterly Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood
By Paul Hertneky
The Prurient Power of Pierogi
In a place averse to looking back, cultural traditions in Ambridge emerged through religion, song, dance, and food. Mostly food, though, because every day when it hit the table it reminded us of our origins.
Housewives in the 1960s experimented with modern food, but they fell back on what they learned from their mothers. And the kitchens in church basements and parochial schools turned out some of the best Old Country cooking. For me, the melding of food and religion came together on meatless Fridays.
Sitting at a kitchen table my father had built, I picked up my bowl to finish the sweet brown milk left behind by the Cocoa Krispies, letting myself go cross-eyed, pretending I didn’t hear my mother click her tongue at my slurping. I stood up and set the bowl in the sink while checking the kitchen counter for my lunch box, and not seeing it. Oh, wow, it’s Friday, I thought when it hit me—no packed lunch today.
My father sat quietly, working his daily crossword, doodling profiles of beautiful women in the margins, his usual morning meditation.
“Dad, could I have some money for pirohi?” Not pierogi, which is what Poles and Croatians called the handmade, stuffed dumplings, served swimming in butter and onions. We Czechs and Slovaks had our own word.
Even though Milt would happily pay for my lunch, he insisted that I ask, as part of a larger lesson about money. “If you can’t ask for it, maybe you don’t need it,” he would say, explaining that when he went to the credit union or the bank for a loan, he had to ask; they didn’t just give it to him.
He smiled and dug into his front pocket, coming up with a fistful of change.
“How much?”
“Thirty-five cents.” Enough to feed a nine year-old.
He held out a calloused hand and reminded me to take enough for milk. “Sixty-five for me,” Mark said as he swaggered in. He was three years older. My father whistled low in mock-disbelief and snapped each coin on the Formica table one at a time. Betty jerked away from the counter where she had been buttering toast, annoyed by the snapping of the coins. Mark kissed her and she handed him a glass of grape juice. He downed it, grabbed the change and two slices of toast.
Watching quietly behind his empty bowl, Chris, who was just finishing first grade, looked up at Mark with wide eyes and announced, “Pirohi today!” Mark swallowed and said “Well, it is Friday, doofus.” With that, Betty, known for her prickly morning moods, popped Mark behind the right ear. He shook it off, and after a hurried round of kisses, we headed out the back door on a typical Friday morning, going off to school with more freedom than on the other days of the week. None of the Catholic schools provided everyday lunches, but their churches raised money with pirohi, or pierogi, or pirozhki. On Friday, without lunchboxes or bags, I had a free hand with which to gesture and swat, pick up pebbles and throw them at street signs, on our way to the bus stop.
Streets in the neighborhood ran like creeks to a river that was the main road. Out of the tiny households came kids with an array of European surnames: Marcia Sokil, with her fine and even Ukrainian features, would get off the bus at Sts. Peter and Paul; Dave Duplaga, a Pole, would say goodbye in front of St. Stanislaus, Bobby Cipriani at St. Veronica’s.
Swaying like a drunk around the corner, the bus skidded onto the gravel shoulder. It was a heap, an eyesore even in its industrial surroundings. Tosta’s Bus Company served the parochial schools, hauling their students in broken-down buses of two designs: the salvaged city bus, and the retired tour coach. The city buses, with fare boxes, shiny handrails, outdated billboards and cables for requesting a stop, were like rolling funhouses. In contrast, the coaches were dark and quiet, with overhead luggage racks and high, reclining seats that were threadbare and torn.
All the buses had rusty floorboards with holes big enough to see the road, but too small to lose a foot through, and gearboxes that just caught. The drivers, all mechanics, wore greasy jumpsuits and smelled like garlic, motor oil, and sweat. One smoked a pipe while he drove, stuffed with what could only have been plain old oak leaves.
“Oh…God…no,” I groaned when the door swung open and smoke rushed out like a late commuter. I saw the goofy smile of the green immigrant, holding the door lever with the same hand that held his goosenecked pipe, its mouthpiece crushed from his few remaining molars.
Inside, a cloud hung over the luggage rack. The usual choke of moldy seats and exhaust fumes that seeped up through the floor was overwhelmed by the smoldering trash in the driver’s pipe. We made gagging sounds and laughed, but the driver only watched us and smiled with his pipe in his teeth. Most days I prayed for the bus to break down. My hopes sprang from the frequency with which it happened—first a loud clunk, then a whimper from below, the driver cussing and wrestling the rig onto a lawn or a sidewalk. They never called for help, preferring to slide their toolboxes stored under their seat and fix it themselves.
On Fridays, though, my brothers and I wanted a smooth ride. By the time the bus wheeled to the curb in front of Divine Redeemer, I noticed Chris’s vacant stare and gaping mouth. The poor little aromatically sensitive guy, who ran from the house to escape offensive cooking odors, had turned khaki. I yanked our bookbags from the luggage rack and escorted Chris down the aisle and stairs. On the sidewalk, he doubled over and gulped the fresher air while I stood behind him, throwing my head back and inhaling like a hound in a stiff breeze. That’s when I caught it. The scent of Friday shot to my salivary glands. When two nuns pushed open the churches’ oak doors, even the latent incense gave way to the embrace of butter and onions.
During Mass, the promise and seduction became unbearable. My stomach clawed toward its quarry while I knelt through the long Latin consecration. I stared at the ornamental sacristy and my eyes glossed over, seeing Jesus feeding hordes of followers by multiplying pirohi instead of loaves and fishes. Or my gaze landed on the soft white mound of Monica Halicek’s top vertebra. How its contours transported me, how its roundness resembled a tender potato pirohi.
Rising for the Our Father, I examined my conscience for any transgressions that might keep me from momentarily stemming my cravings with the appetizer that was communion. The unleavened wafer seemed a poor substitute for the flesh it presumed to replace. A better choice, I thought, would have been a slice of pepperoni.
Friday mornings dragged. Through religion, geography, and history lessons, I learned only forbearance. Even the nuns admitted their cravings and their secrets for coping: muttering mantras like “Jesus, have mercy on me”—ejaculations, they called them (setting up real teenage confusion down the road)—until the moments of weakness passed.
Billy Evans poked me in the back while Sister Tomasina answered a knock at the door. “How many you gettin’?” he asked.
“A half dozen,” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth, careful not to turn around.
“I’m gettin’ a whole dozen.” Of course you are; you’re fat.
When noon arrived, Sister Tomasina opened the door and the full force of cooking odors washed over us. She cuffed her sleeves and folded her thick, hairy forearms as she stood in the doorway and watched the younger kids file toward the basement. I squirmed in my seat, fishing out the coins and slapping them on my desk for a final count. Satisfied, I cupped my hand at the edge of the desk and slid the coins into it, except for the nickel that bounced off my thumb and fell to the tile floor, found its edge and rolled all the way to the back wall, where it disappeared between a row of bookbags.
Billy noticed and we were both tracking the nickel when Sister Tomasina must have signaled the class to rise and form a queue. Caught by surprise, I spun and stood, tipping over my chair. While righting it, I turned to see the angry nun hustling toward me. Her black robes billowed like a crow descending on roadkill. She took me by the ear and dragged me, sidestepping, to face the blackboard two inches away. When I dared to look sideways, I saw Billy being flung ear-first to my side.
I closed my eyes and memorized the color of the bookbags the nickel had rolled between: red and powder blue. But I doubted I’d have a chance to retrieve it. I might end up staying at the blackboard throughout lunch. Sister Tomasina’s heart had long ago been removed, we theorized, frozen and broken into particles that, when added to torpedoes, made them more deadly. Maybe she’d let us go later, when the entire school had eaten the best pirohi varieties. Billy seethed. I would pay for this on the playground.
As our classmates marched out, the sweet aroma intensified and God’s own forgiving breath must have swept in and subdued the nun. She ordered us to catch up with the others, but before we escaped she drew a four-foot pointer from the folds of her apron and sliced the air behind us, cracking both of our buttocks simultaneously.
The sting made us hop. But we were giddy as we started down the stairs and Billy elbowed me hard enough to knock me into the rail. That was it; retribution delivered. He didn’t hold grudges. Besides, we were dropping into the most overwhelming sensual pleasure either of us would know until puberty, with a narrow escape behind us.
The pupils, as we were called, filed into a bright multipurpose room filled with long tables, folding chairs, and noisy pirohi hogs. This feast was open to the public, and local workers on their lunch breaks sat along the west wall. Kids filled half of the tables in the vast middle, and along the east wall, facing the room, sat a brigade of silver-haired grandmothers. They carefully spooned fillings—mashed potato, sauerkraut, cottage cheese, and lekvar, a prune preserve—into the disks of dough they cradled in their floury hands. They folded the edges together and pinched the semicircular dumplings into shape.
The pinchers would seldom rise. Other volunteers rolled out the dough and cut it into circles with teacups, or mixed fillings and delivered them to the pinchers in heaping bowls, then returned to harvest the finished pirohi.
Pinching and chatting in Slovak or Czech to the friends who flanked her, my grandmother, Anna Rosol, found my face and smiled, flashing perfect false teeth. I broke free of my classmates, now dazed in pirohi nirvana, and scrambled behind the pinchers—“Hi, Mrs. Hovanec, Mrs. Yaniga, Mrs. Duda, Mrs. Sinchak, Mrs. Tabachka”—until I reached my grandmother’s strong arms and soft cotton apron. She kissed me and hugged me hard, pressing her wrists into my back. Her hands, kept chaste for touching food, flew away from me. She was careful like that.
By now, Billy had reached the serving line and I had to hurry. I patted the coins in my pocket and sorely missed that nickel. I suppose I could have asked my grandmother for one, but I knew she was too poor. If she were to give it to me, she’d probably walk home instead of taking the bus. Still, the shortfall forced me to reconfigure my usual order, maybe cutting out the lekvar, its mellow sweetness made sophisticated when it met salt, pepper, butter, and onions. I hated quandaries such as these.
Just as I was about to pick up a plate, a hunchbacked woman in a dark print dress emerged from the kitchen lugging a giant bowl of snowy cottage cheese. She saw me at once, cried my name, and set the bowl down. She wiped her hands and grabbed my face, mashing a kiss on my lips before pushing me away and tugging at the ear still tender from my trip to the blackboard. Like a magician, she let go and presented me with a shiny quarter in the palm of her hand.
Grandma Hertneky, an osteoporotic angel, always greeted me in public with a gangway flourish—even though I saw her nearly every day. Her gypsy drama, in greeting, feeding, scolding, mourning, or scaring, never subsided. She counterposed Grandma Rosol, whose serene demeanor shrouded her in ethereal gauze.
Now I was flush. I knew all the ladies wielding spoons, too, and one scooped four glistening potato pirohis onto my plate. Then I boldly ordered two kraut to go with my usual two lekvar, forcing me to hold the plate with both hands. Searching for a seat, I saw Chris, nose-down, all business. I also spotted Mark, who had just cruised in with the upperclassmen and stood on his tiptoes to assess my plate, as if he might cross the room and steal it. He winked at me.
With the long-awaited aroma buttering my face, I found Billy and sat, just before my knees were about to buckle from excitement. I freed my fork from its napkin wrapper, grabbed the salt and pepper, checked the caps for cruel jokes, and seasoned my little treasures. With my fork, I cut the firm potato pillow in half, exposing the fine filling placed there by ancient hands, refined through generations of argument, fulfilled by sunlight, pitchforks, and cauldrons of boiling water. I flipped its gaping side down in a pool of butter and smeared it across the plate.
The first bite made me close my eyes. The multipurpose room fell silent and every cavity in my head absorbed a humble gift composed of elements that sang secret lyrics to notes along an archetypal scale, a harmony to my subconscious. In my pirohi rapture I could be lost and found, week after week, even when I reached the age when ardent kisses tried to surpass it, and never really could.
Excerpt from Rust Belt Boy, Stories of an American Childhood by Paul Hertneky. © 2016 Paul Hertneky. Published by Bauhan Publishing, Peterborough, New Hampshire. Used by permission.
Each year a lot of attention is paid to “new and emerging” authors under a certain age. Every fall the National Book Foundation honors a group of authors through its 5 Under 35 program, designed to introduce “the next generation” of fiction writers. And in the spring the New York Public Library offers its ten-thousand-dollar Young Lions Fiction Award to a writer age thirty-five or younger. Yale University Press only recently lifted the age restriction for the legendary Yale Series of Younger Poets, which for nearly a century stipulated that the publication award was open only to poets under forty. Every ten years the London-based literary magazine Granta names the twenty writers it considers the Best of Young British Novelists, all of them under forty. The New Yorker made waves back in 1999 with its first 20 Under 40 list—a popular feature the magazine repeated in 2010—anointing authors such as Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat, and George Saunders as “standouts in the diverse and expansive panorama of contemporary fiction,” as the New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman put it. BuzzFeed got in on that action with a feature in 2014, “20 Under 40 Debut Writers You Need to Be Reading,” that included the line: “Out with the old, in with the debut.”
While there is something undeniably exciting about news of the next big book by an undiscovered talent, we would like to remind writers and readers that new does not necessarily mean young, no matter how broadly that qualifier is defined. And while popular culture tends to favor youth, there is something equally exciting about the work of those authors who have lived more than half a century—some pursuing alternative careers, others raising families; all of them taking their time, either by choice or by necessity, and collecting valuable life experience that undoubtedly informs and inspires their writing—before publishing a book.
Here, in their own words, we present five authors over the age of fifty whose debut books were published in the past year.
Know the Mother (Wayne State University Press, March) by Desiree Cooper
Her, Infinite (New Issues Poetry & Prose, March) by Sawnie Morris
An Honorable Man (Emily Bestler Books, April) by Paul Vidich
You May See A Stranger (TriQuarterly Books, May) by Paula Whyman
Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood (Bauhan Publishing, May) by Paul Hertneky
Age: 56
Residence: Detroit, Michigan
Book: Know the Mother, a collection of meditative stories exploring the complex archetype of the mother in all of her incarnations.
Publisher: Wayne State University Press (March)
Agent: None
Twenty years ago I was deep in the throes of raising two elementary-schoolers and struggling to keep apace with the demands of motherhood, wifehood, and personhood. I had a career as a newspaper columnist, which I accomplished between drop-offs and pickups, sometimes driving three hours one way to deliver kids to tutors or games or piano lessons.
Once a year I landed on the shores of a poetry residency where I was a board member (not an actual poet), feeling like a bedraggled refugee. It was there, in the late 1990s, that I penned a poem titled “Know the Mother.” It was a narrative poem about a daughter sitting by her mother’s deathbed, realizing that she will never know who her mother really was. I remember thinking, even then, “If I ever have a book, that will be the title.”
In March 2016, five days before my fifty-sixth birthday, I stood in front of a packed Detroit art gallery for the launch of my first book, a collection of flash fiction titled Know the Mother. By then I was a grandmother, a Kresge Artist Fellow, and a survivor of what could have been a fatal encounter with a semitruck only months before.
All I could think was, “I can’t believe I lived to see this moment.”
Since the age of four, I have wanted only to write stories. But as part of the first generation after the civil rights movement and the oldest child of middle-class strivers, I quickly learned to think of writing as a hobby, not a “real job.” The currents of life sent me on a traditional path to college, law school, a career in journalism, marriage, and family. Through it all, I was a mare champing at the muse. I wrote for myself, on the side, in writing groups, at retreats. I found a community of kitchen-table writers who helped shape my voice. Frustrated at the stingy moments left for me to write, I often very nearly stopped, but I couldn’t stay away for long. Somehow I managed to believe in myself as a creative writer with little outward validation.
Then, one day while I was lurking at a writing event, M. L. Liebler, one of Detroit’s well-known authors and indefatigable writing mentors, shouted “Send me your book!” when he saw me in the parking lot. My heart stopped and I looked around, wondering who he was addressing. He had heard me read at an event and assumed I had more. I had been outed.
Liebler liked my work and handed it to Wayne State University Press. When the gifted editors at the press and the brilliant publicist Kima Jones both said that they would get behind my manuscript, I was awash in disbelief. Maybe because, deep down, I had resigned myself to being a secret writer forever.
I would be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that the path to my first book was as lucky as it was labored. But there were forces that prepared me to step through the publishing door when it miraculously opened late in life. My career as a newspaper columnist gave me the muscle for compressed storytelling, a skill that shaped my ability to write flash fiction. I never stopped sharing my writing with other writers and readers. They became my community MFA program, teaching me what works and what doesn’t, forcing me to produce, encouraging me to stretch.
My life as a mother gave me fodder, empathy, and insight into the human condition. It taught me patience that I never knew I could muster, and a concrete understanding that, while time often feels like a foe, it can be a friend as well. The women in my collection are informed by my own experiences—and those of the women I have met along the way. They are born out of a lifetime of living and observing how racism and sexism profoundly affect our intimate lives.
When I was in my thirties I dreamed of writing a book called Know the Mother. But it wasn’t until I was fifty that I knew for sure who she really was.
(Photo credit: Justin Milhouse)
Age: 61
Residence: Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico
Book: Her, Infinite, a collection of poems that 2015 New Issues Poetry Prize judge Major Jackson calls “a ceremony of tantalizing music.”
Publisher: New Issues Poetry & Prose (March)
Agent: None
In the late 1980s, my husband and I founded and began working for what became a highly accomplished environmental-advocacy organization. Although the experiences expressed in Her, Infinite were written as that life was being lived, the seed poem did not arrive until 2007. The book gathered to its purpose poems written as much as fourteen years prior and five years after its own inception. Beginning in 2010, I spent five years submitting my manuscript to a wide range of presses and contests; Her, Infinite received recognition as a finalist fifteen times before being selected by Major Jackson for the New Issues Poetry Prize. The road to publication via contests was at times a grueling one, but I have no regrets.
A poem is not simply words on a page but a way of touching the stars and having the stars that have fallen into the sea touch us. Our lives are poems. Everything arrives and passes away as it should, and we don’t know the ending—which is the moment the entire poem, its meaning and music, is revealed—until the last line is written, even though it has perhaps existed in the eternal now all along. If we are called to write—and love is the true measure of any calling—then it is joyful duty, even in struggle.
In the fall of 2014 I woke from a dream knowing Her, Infinite was finally going to enter the world. I was floating in the sea and the manuscript had become part of that great benevolence. I felt a gentle yet profound euphoria that had little to do with publication and more to do with connection and a sense of utter acceptance. I woke crying and with the understanding that something huge was transpiring in my life.
On May 4, 2015, my beloved husband, an elegant and articulate abstract expressionist painter, received an advanced cancer diagnosis. Eight days later, in the late afternoon, post-surgery, as I was seated at the foot of his bed rubbing his feet, my cell phone rang. Her, Infinite had found a home. It would be another day before a faint happiness would appear to me in the form of a tiny asterisk moving whimsically around the hospital room while my husband recovered. It would be a year before true happiness, containing as it does a calm center, took hold in my body and I could feel both gratitude and awe for the mysterious synchronicity of those events—the cancer removed, the phone call from the press—arriving together, within the same hour. And even longer to appreciate the fact that the judge had taken an extra week to make his decision. The same week in which we were absorbing our terrifying news and plotting how to face, and with any luck, defeat it.
In a world where such things happen, how can we doubt the auspices of timing, doubt ourselves, or allow anyone else to doubt us due to age and its conspirator, time? Age is only as meaningful as what we have managed to learn and absorb, in our minds, in our bodies. We are here now. Now is the moment to put pen to paper, fingertip to key—to learn and practice our craft, to open ourselves to the music arriving from outside as well as rising from within us, in search of a welcoming.
Age: 66
Residence: New York City
Book: An Honorable Man, a Cold War spy thriller set in 1950s Washington, D.C.
Publisher: Emily Bestler Books (April)
Agent: Will Roberts
My path to writing An Honorable Man was long and winding. I had written two atrocious novels by the time I was twenty-seven, at which point I learned I was to be a father. At the time I didn’t believe I could be a successful writer, and certainly not one who could contribute to meeting a family’s financial needs, so I pursued my other, more conventional, ambition and got an MBA. I also promised myself that I’d quit business when we were financially secure and take up full-time writing again. In 2006, at the age of fifty-six, I didn’t renew my contract at Time Warner, where I had worked in the AOL and Warner Music Group divisions for eighteen years, which surprised many of my colleagues. I enjoyed my long business career, and I was good at it, but I always had the calling to write, and I supported literary organizations such as Poets & Writers, whose board I had joined. I enrolled in the new MFA program at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and began the workshopping and reading needed to develop the tools of written expression. When I started to write more seriously I was able to look back at a life—my life. I had lived a lot, and the distance of time gave me perspective. There was a world to write about that I did not have access to at twenty-seven.
In 2012 I received a letter from a literary agent who’d read a story of mine that had recently won an award. He liked the story, but he didn’t represent collections. Did I have a novel? I looked at my wife. “I guess I should write a novel,” I said. But which one? There was an abiding family tragedy that sat unsettled in my mind for years: My uncle worked for the CIA in 1953 and his unsolved murder remained a devastating family loss. I finished the first draft in forty-five days, and, of course, many drafts followed.
The completed manuscript benefitted from critiques by six fellow Rutgers MFA alumni. (We still meet regularly and comment on each other’s work.) I sent the finished manuscript to four agents who represented authors whose work was similar to my own—espionage novels with a literary register. Olen Steinhauer is one such author who is represented by the Gernert Company. David Gernert liked the book but wanted some changes and introduced me to his young associate, Will Roberts, who handled the novel’s auction. I was fortunate to land with Emily Bestler of Emily Bestler Books, an imprint at Simon & Schuster.
My advice to people coming to writing and publishing later in life: You have to want to write, and I mean really want it. You have to be disciplined about the work. You may have a story, but the writer needs to master the techniques of telling that story. And it is important not to be discouraged by age. You have to inoculate yourself from the perception, however true, that the world only seems to recognize youth and ignores the contributions of later-aged newcomers.
You also need self-confidence. One day, feeling down, I put together a list of authors who had debuted later in life. Raymond Chandler wrote The Big Sleep, his first book, at fifty-one; Julia Glass wrote her first novel, Three Junes, when she was forty-six; and so on. Compiling this list stoked my confidence. If they could do it, then so could I.
Oh, and one other thing: I used to look at the many thousands of books published each year and say, “It can’t be that hard.” I was wrong. It is, in fact, hard work—but it’s worth it.
(Photo credit: Bekka Palmer)
Age: 51
Residence: Bethesda, Maryland
Book: You May See a Stranger, a collection of funny, linked stories that illuminate the life of protagonist Miranda Weber and her strange, unsettling times.
Publisher: TriQuarterly Books (May)
Agent: Daniel Menaker
There’s a scene in my book where an antsy crackhead is waiting for a car’s cigarette lighter to heat up. “Why’s it taking so #%$&* long?” he asks. The car’s driver, who is not a crackhead, replies, “It takes that long.”
I don’t have a satisfying answer to explain why it took so long to publish my first book of fiction. I’ve been making up stories since I learned how to talk, but I knew I would find no classified ads for “fiction writer” when I was looking for a job. I worked as a bar-back, a temp, and an editor, and many things in between, before returning to school for my MFA at American University. My first short story was published the week my first child was born. I was already over thirty by then, too old to be an ingenue, even though the story appeared in an anthology called Virgin Fiction. I went on to write two novel drafts and made false starts on a couple more. I wrote a lot of stories—some good, some terrible. Meanwhile, there were frustrations, uncertainties, and even tragedies.
It was hard to dedicate myself to writing while I was deeply engaged as a parent, especially when my kids were young. I lost touch with many of the writers I’d met in grad school; I was no longer part of a writing community. But my kids made me a better writer—they taught me empathy. And once they were old enough for me to be away, I began attending residencies and conferences. It turned out to be a good thing for me and for them. They take pride in my achievements, and I’ve given them a real-life demonstration of persistence and dedication and passion for one’s work. I’ll never forget when one of my kids excitedly told his English teacher that his mom was going to Yaddo, the same place the poet whose work he was studying, Langston Hughes, had gone to write.
The biggest advance in my work came when I finally stopped telling myself my first book had to be a novel. I think of it as the triumph of the irrational plan. I decided to allow myself to write the stories I wanted to write. I began writing stories that felt dangerous to me; I allowed the characters to go places I didn’t want to go.
Like all writers, I’ve weathered a lot of rejection. I’ve always been persistent, and optimistic enough that I responded to the least encouragement. That encouragement, coming from people whose judgment I trust, has been key.
And then there is serendipity. I met my agent, Daniel Menaker, when I took his humor workshop at the Key West Literary Seminar more than three years ago. I asked him for advice on my fiction, and to my surprise, he offered to represent me. I hadn’t written the book yet.
I found my publisher—or he found me—when I was awarded a scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. My book was making the rounds and getting (nice) rejections from big houses when my scholar bio was posted on the Sewanee website. Mike Levine at TriQuarterly saw it and requested my manuscript. A few weeks later, he told me he wanted to publish the collection. The book came out this past May.
Do I wish all of this had happened more quickly? Sure. But the truth is, I could not have written this book when I was thirty. The more life experience I gained, the more perspective I could bring to the work. Along the way, I became better at choosing among my ideas and understanding how to make them work.
My first child turned eighteen shortly after my book came out. He starts college this fall. On my publication day, he told me, “I feel like I grew up watching you write. Now your book is ready to go out into the world, and so am I.”
It can take this long. Are you too old? Is it too late? Nonsense. Imagination has no expiration date.
(Photo credit: Jo Eldredge Morrissey)
Age: 61
Residence: Hancock, New Hampshire
Book: Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood, a collection of essays about the immigrant experience, set in Pittsburgh and the author’s hometown of Ambridge, Pennsylvania.
Publisher: Bauhan Publishing (May)
Agent: None
First, an admission: I did not grow up with a love of books, but with a love of reading. Newspapers became a habit, magazines a marvel, poems a playground. Bound mysteries and biographies from the library captivated me, but inspiration came from the once-literary pages of Esquire and the essays of Montaigne.
I had never imagined myself a writer, much less the author of a cohesive volume of prose. Making my living through copywriting and journalism, I became friends with authors at a time when clear paths led to publishing books. Years of work went into each book, and the heartache of seeing them on remainder tables made the enterprise seem too Sisyphean for me.
My stories and essays came and went on the wings of ephemera and airwaves, their footprints left in the tiny lines of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, then a library database. But no Internet. Not even the illusion of permanence, much less posterity.
I cared more about my reputation among editors than my identity as a writer. I cared about my sentences, stories, sources, and serving readers and listeners. I satisfied my artful side by publishing an essay, or performing one on public radio.
And then one day I interviewed a man over lunch who ordered steamed milk with honey. His taste for this biblical concoction tied in to the subject, forming a metaphor that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I set out to write a series of essays and stories that, ten years later, became Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood.
My early manuscripts made little impression on the young intellectuals staffing the front lines at agencies and literary presses. Years of relentless rejection followed, but I continued to believe in my stories and in the invisible communities and characters they portrayed. I reformulated the book countless times, responding to advice from agents and publishers, and kept pitching.
Revision became my solace, my drug of choice, the only activity that made me feel better. I cut and clarified, expanded and recast. A great friend, the novelist Eugenia Kim, believed in my book from the beginning and insisted that I continue, editing draft after draft for me, questioning and challenging me.
You see, I had dedicated myself to a seemingly foolish task. Most of my published work had been tailored to narrowly defined readers and audiences. I wanted this book to engage literary readers while also captivating working stiffs, many of whom read less than one book a year. Reaching that broad spectrum with respect for a range of sensibilities demanded everything I had learned over twenty-five years of writing for publication.
Howard Mansfield, a friend as well as an author of nine books and a superb editor, had read one of the earliest versions of Rust Belt Boy. He told me how pleased he had been working with Bauhan Publishing, a small press with distribution by the University Press of New England, for his upcoming book. I knew of Bauhan, and I hadn’t thought my book would fit in with their New England–centered list.
But I also knew that its former managing editor, Jane Eklund, had liked my essays well enough to publish one years earlier in a literary magazine she edited. Soon after I gave her the manuscript, she recommended it for publication by Bauhan.
Trusting my pitch that my collection carried universal themes for millions of mill-town kids, the Bauhan team produced a beautiful book and has supported it well. With the help of publicist Scott Manning, the book enjoyed a strong launch, required a second printing within weeks, and has drawn considerable attention from media and reviewers.
My own truth for book writing: I will only write a book that means the world to me, that obsesses me and compels me, as long as it takes, sentence by sentence, to earn the attention of readers, to hold them, and leave them wanting more.
All of the published authors who appear in the pages of this magazine have roads behind them—paths to publication that are as unique to each writer as their own poems, stories, and essays. Some of these roads cut a straight path, while others turn this way and that; some double back and crisscross, while others are under construction, redirected by detours and bypasses. Sometimes there are shortcuts, but other times there are long scenic tours through many of life’s most notable markers: births, deaths, loves, families, travels, careers. Periods of joy and contentment followed by episodes of darkness, difficulty. Achievements and failures—all of it informing, inspiring, delaying, or precipitating the writer’s work in some way, directly or indirectly.
The authors featured in our second annual 5 Over 50 have followed different paths as well, but their routes to publication are perhaps a bit longer—and, one could argue, more nuanced, often more complex, and even more, dare we say it, interesting—than those of “younger” writers who have the spotlight in today’s youth-focused culture. If our 5 Over 50 authors have one thing in common, it’s a sense of patient determination to create something meaningful, beautiful. And it really doesn’t matter how long that takes. As Peg Alford Pursell says, “There exists only one moment—the last—at which it’s too late for anything.”
Here, in their own words, we present five authors over the age of fifty whose debut books were published this year.
A Small Revolution (Little A, May) by Jimin Han
States of Motion (Wayne State University Press, May) by Laura Hulthen Thomas
Getting It Right (Akashic Books, June) by Karen E. Osborne
Ground, Wind, This Body (University of New Mexico Press, March) by Tina Carlson
Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow (ELJ Editions, March) by Peg Alford Pursell
Age: Fifty-one.
Residence: South Salem, New York.
Book: A Small Revolution (Little A, May), a novel that unravels the intertwined narratives of a hostage crisis on the campus of a college in central Pennsylvania, two young people finding love, and a student uprising in South Korea.
Editor: Vivian Lee.
Agent: Cynthia Manson of Cynthia Manson Literary Agency.
Recently I was invited to speak on a panel about literary friendships at the annual alumni festival at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. The panel was scheduled for a smaller auditorium than where the other events were being held, and one of the other panelists, my longtime friend Patricia Dunn, author of the novel Rebels by Accident (Sourcebooks Fire, 2015), joked that no one would show up. She was wrong: It was standing room only. I spoke about how important it is to find spaces to protect and nurture my writer self and that the most significant space for me is my writers group.
Alexandra Soiseth, author of a memoir, Choosing You: Deciding to Have a Baby on My Own (Seal Press, 2008), was the other member of our panel. Patricia, Alexandra, and I have been in a writing group with four other writers for nearly twenty years, ever since we left our MFA program. That small fact made the audience collectively gasp. A number of people asked how our friendship had helped us write and publish.
The answer wasn’t just about how we critiqued one another’s work, although we all had something to contribute in that department; we’ve all taught at some point and shared revision techniques and writing prompts in our weekly meetings. The answer also had to do with how we support one another, how we celebrate birthdays, pregnancies, marriages, divorces, new loves, anniversaries, graduations, new pets, and how we’ve leaned on one another through infertility, cancer, miscarriages, abortions, IVF, depression, menopause, restraining orders, deaths of parents, deaths of pets, job changes, surgeries, periods of drought and indecision in our writing, and periods of doubt when we thought we’d given up for good.
Four years earlier, at one of our Friday-night writers group meetings, at essayist Kate Brandt’s house (we meet at one another’s homes or at local cafés), it was my turn to announce I was quitting writing. The manuscript I’d been working on seemed to be at a dead end. Maybe it seemed so because my mother had recently suffered a stroke and I was preoccupied with what she needed. Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer, author of Informed Consent, End Days, and other plays, said that she’d write alongside me for as long as it took for me to feel connected to my book again. She meant it; she met me every day until the way seemed possible.
My writers group helped me realize I had to address the inner despair that got in my way—personal work that required a therapist. It took three false starts before I found the right one. We talk a lot about the future in our sessions. This is a simple truth: The future is unknowable. I never knew whether I’d have a book published, but I knew the act of writing sustained me. During one session, after I told my therapist that I hadn’t written that day, she replied, “Why not? If it helps you, why not? Who knows where it will lead?”
I was inspired by her question. I found myself feeling entitled to say what I wanted to say again in my writing. The therapist worked with me to unpack the origins of self-doubt that plagued me. It wasn’t easy, it still isn’t, but I was able to push through and complete the novel. Waiting at the end of that process was my agent, who was enthusiastic about my manuscript. She was able to sell it to an editor who loved it and understood what I was trying to accomplish. This last part—publication—is so much about luck. I’ve read many compelling manuscripts written by brilliant writers that have not been published. But that isn’t a reason to give up.
The only part we can control is writing and accepting that we don’t know where it will lead—which is all the more reason to keep trying.
(Photo credit: Janice Chung)
Age: Fifty-one.
Residence: Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Book: States of Motion (Wayne State University Press, May), a collection of vividly rendered stories set in small-town Michigan that follow characters broken by economic hardships, betrayal, and conflict in the mess of real life.
Editor: Annie Martin.
Agent: None.
The day my dream editor, Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press, called to reject the manuscript of States of Motion was the day I decided to give up on fiction. The no should have been business as usual. A writer like me works for many years before hearing yes to even a single story. My long stories shatter nearly every literary magazine’s word-count ceiling, so acceptances are rare. That this editor had read my collection at all felt like a one-hit wonder. I’d contributed to her press’s anthology, so she was a sympathetic, generous reader. Her rejection felt like the end of the line. Besides, real life was throwing one of its tantrums. My husband had lost his job in the recession. Our closest friends, too, were losing their jobs and homes. Writing fiction seemed…well, unaffordable. The editor extended a kind invitation to resubmit the manuscript when the stories did more than coexist. I wondered whether my life as a writer could continue to coexist with my life outside of fiction.
Several months after I stopped writing, I called my great-aunt Joan, who was dying of cancer. She’d always led a quiet life in her small New Hampshire town, but on the phone she recalled a grand adventure. In the spring of 1939, when she was five years old, Joan traveled with her mother on one of the Queen Mary’s last voyages before the ocean liner was retrofitted as a World War II troopship. A terrible storm outside New York almost swept Joan overboard. “The waves were sloshing the decks something wicked,” she said. “Then suddenly Mother lifted me up and held me out to the storm.”
“Wait,” I said. “By ‘held out’ do you mean she dangled you over the railing?”
“Oh, yes. The clouds were black and folding over each other like snakes. The ocean was crashing into the hull. The waves seemed to come right up to my ankles.”
As a protective mother, I was aghast. Who was this reckless great-grandmother I’d never met? A woman who decided to take her continental tour alone, with her five-year-old daughter in tow—when the continent in question was approaching war?
This was a woman who didn’t merely coexist with her life and times.
I saw then that abandoning my work was just a safety railing. I set aside the collection to write new fiction about Southeast Michigan’s troubles. I invited my dearest writing buddies to an inspiring DIY retreat at a cabin on Lake Huron. Years later, when my stories were no longer coexisting, but conversing, I resubmitted States of Motion to the dream editor.
The book came out just before I turned fifty-one, well after the hope for dreams you might achieve matures into the acceptance that you just might not. I have found, however, that not publishing earlier in life has been a gift. By hearing yes only rarely from editors and readers, I discovered how to say yes to my work, today, right now. I no longer seek the writer I should be, but the writer I am.
Several days after my great-aunt told me of her greatest adventure, Joan passed peacefully. Before we hung up for the last time, I had asked why she thought her mother had thrust her over that railing. “Laura, she just wanted me to be able to see,” Joan said. How courageous of my great-grandmother to show her daughter the terrifying beauty of risk, even when no one else is on deck to share the view.
(Photo credit: Ron Thomas)
Age: Sixty-nine.
Residence: Port Saint Lucie, Florida.
Book: Getting It Right (Akashic Books, June), a novel about half-sisters—one the product of an abusive foster-care situation, the other of dysfunctional privilege—who finally meet during their father’s final days.
Editor: Marva Allen.
Agent: Marie Brown of Marie Brown Associates.
Writing was always my dream. As a girl growing up in the Bronx, I told my friends stories I’d made up but pretended were true. I wrote my first short story when I was twelve. In middle school I’d submit book reports on my own stories with fake author names and receive As. Under my graduation picture in the Evander Childs High School yearbook, next to “Ambition” it said “Writer.”
Of course, I also read over the years, often consuming a novel a week in spite of a husband, two small children, and going to college full time. I squeezed in moments to read for pleasure, and every novel made me yearn to write my own.
For forty-two years, like the protagonist Kara in my novel, I suffered the consequences of childhood sexual abuse, before finding a therapist who helped me navigate a healing journey. During the years of gut-wrenching work, I freed secrets and worked through their aftermath. Along the way I met dozens of other survivors. I explored their narratives, motivations, successes, and setbacks. I learned the restorative power of gratitude, redemption, and forgiveness—major themes in my writing. But my goal for Getting It Right was to write a page-turner, not a book about abuse. One early reader described it as a “genre-bending mystery and family saga.” I kept the chapters short and the action fast, and I let Kara and her half-sister, Alex, lead the way.
My career as a consultant, executive coach, and presenter specializing in philanthropy, opinion research, and organizational management led me all over the world as I taught, spoke, and consulted with nonprofit leaders. Storytelling infused every engagement. In each city, in every new country, I jotted down scraps of thoughts, words, and ideas in small notebooks stashed in my briefcase. Writing on airplanes, in airport lounges, and hotel rooms, I finished the first draft in a year. It took a long time to rewrite.
Once I was finished—after I had shared the manuscript with trusted readers and revised and polished it—I took the next scary step: I sent the manuscript out in search of an agent. I networked, went to writing conferences, and took classes that included an agent’s review of the first ten pages. I sent it out and then sent it out again, and again.
Everyone says it because it’s true: Rejection is hard. I’m not sure which moments in the long process are the most memorable. The day my agent said she loved the book and wanted to represent me, or the day she told me that she had an offer from a publisher. We ate lunch and discussed the contract. I asked questions, took notes, thanked her, walked out of the restaurant—all quite professional. Once I hit the street, I cried all the way to the parking lot.
I held my book launch in Australia, at the open-air restaurant at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Sydney Opera House gleaming in the background. It was an intimate affair. My husband joined me, along with two women I’d been writing with online for fifteen years but had never met. We hugged, laughed, and celebrated. In the weeks since, my readings, talks, and signings continue to fill my heart with joy as I keep writing. So far I’ve written two more books, and I’m working on a fourth.
Another thing everyone says because it’s true: You’re never too old to realize your dreams.
(Photo credit: Robert Osborne)
Age: Sixty-four.
Residence: Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Book: Ground, Wind, This Body (University of New Mexico Press, March), a poetry collection exploring the vestiges of war and redemption as a traumatized soldier returns home from WWII carrying a legacy of violence and abuse.
Editor: James Ayers.
Agent: None.
I watched Lucille Clifton, well into her fifties, perform: “these hips are mighty hips. / these hips are magic hips / i have known them / to put a spell on a man and / spin him like a top!” She danced and swayed and made the words into music in a small auditorium at Pacifica University in the late 1980s. I did not yet consider myself a poet, but I could not forget the sensual power of her words.
Ground, Wind, This Body began with the last poem in the book, “Embryo of Light,” which consists of dream fragments from the two and a half years it took to adopt my daughter Mia from China. The dreams came feverishly and took the form of my “pregnancy” with her. A beautiful poet and mentor, Laurie Kutchins, encouraged me to let the language and poems be as strange as the dreams. That permission allowed me to begin the book. I was in my early forties and just beginning to feel I had something of value to say. I am amazed at younger poets who find their voices early and are so strong. My voice, like my life, was fragmented and numbed for much of my early adulthood. In order to find it, I had to begin the long hard work of trauma and substance abuse recovery. My daughter, with her fragmented history, encouraged me to look at mine, and I started to write about how the war that lived inside my father was a force in our family.
This book was written over many years. It was made possible by community and endurance. New Mexico hosts a vibrant and active poetry community, and through workshops, readings, and writing groups, the poems were born. I sent out poems and most were rejected, as was the manuscript, multiple times. It was the power of communal work and exploration that encouraged me to keep going. It is so easy to give up, especially as an older woman with little confidence. I honor my teachers: Joy Harjo, Laurie Kutchins, Joy Jacobson, Valerie Martinez, Margaret Randall, Lisa Gill, Hilda Raz, Lynn Miller, and many others both at the University of New Mexico and in private workshops who bore witness to my efforts and encouraged me to keep going.
Writing and publishing are not competitive sports. Writing is the most important, but reading aloud brings the writing to life and allows for an audience. Listen to and read as many other poets and other writers as you can. Join a group that will root you on through the muck. Keep working on the craft with good teachers. Submit to paper and online journals, newspapers, art shows. Find local presses by talking to poets you know, noting which presses are publishing the books of poetry you love, and doing online research. I was able to publish my first book through the University of New Mexico Press, which has an honorable history of publishing books related to the Southwest. Encourage other poets to publish, to read aloud, to be heard. Buy their books when they come out, go to their readings. We live in a culture that doesn’t read enough poetry, so invite those people who don’t know poetry to go with you to readings. Send them poems you love. Animate the world with your words.
Age: “Over fifty.”
Residence: San Francisco Bay Area.
Book: Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow (ELJ Editions, March), a collection of intense hybrid prose—flash fiction, prose poetry, and other forms that resist categorization—that pulls a world of almost terrifying beauty into laser-sharp focus.
Editor: Ariana Den Bleker.
Agent: None.
Recently I returned to the town where I grew up and where most of my family still lives. I went there to attend a wedding, to visit family, and to give readings from my first book in (somewhat) nearby Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. There is still no bookstore in my hometown, nowhere for a girl to window-shop and superimpose her reflection on a book jacket. I grew up knowing no one who made a living by writing, no one who wrote as a matter of course. Until college, I’d never been to a literary reading.
This experience, or lack thereof, isn’t particularly unique, but it may have a lot to do with why I didn’t take my writing seriously until later in life. I was in my late thirties when I thought about learning to write, seeking entry into a then-unconventional MFA program—Warren Wilson, the first low-residency program (and, I might add, the best in the country). I was a single mother who taught in the public education system. I stole spare moments, usually in summer, to write. And though I’d entered and won a prestigious short story contest, I still didn’t understand my need to write, or to publish as the necessary completion of the creative act.
During that recent trip to my hometown, I visited my sister and her husband, two lovely and gifted people who paint, play music, teach school—and, for the past year, have run the region’s playhouse. When my vivacious brother-in-law greeted me, he said something that took me aback. I didn’t register the exact words, but they had to do with his excitement about how we three are doing big things at an age when most people are supposed to be winding down—he and my sister taking over the theater and me publishing and promoting my book.
The surprise I felt was similar to the one that anyone over fifty has experienced when passing the plate glass of a storefront, say, on the way to the post office. You catch your reflection: Can that aged face really be yours? It can. It is. But you go about your business—collecting your mail, recycling junk flyers—and the image is gone, never to supplant the picture of yourself you hold in your mind’s eye.
Though it’s true that this is my first published book, giving readings, finishing a new book, and sending out work for publication are my daily activities—simply part of what it is for me to be in the world. I’ve come to understand the necessity. And I’ve come to understand that the act of creating follows its own imperatives. Writing—a story, a poem, a book—takes as long as it takes. To publish a first book over the age of fifty? I’m glad to say it doesn’t seem that unusual to me. I’m looking forward to the next one.
As for practical advice, I’d offer that the essential value resides in respecting your own process and creative imperatives, in pushing through the self-doubts that all art-makers experience—that advice isn’t age-specific, of course. For me it comes to this: Never stop. There exists only one moment—the last—at which it’s too late for anything.
Each year a lot of attention is paid to “new and emerging” authors under a certain age. Every fall the National Book Foundation honors a group of authors through its 5 Under 35 program, designed to introduce “the next generation” of fiction writers. And in the spring the New York Public Library offers its ten-thousand-dollar Young Lions Fiction Award to a writer age thirty-five or younger. Yale University Press only recently lifted the age restriction for the legendary Yale Series of Younger Poets, which for nearly a century stipulated that the publication award was open only to poets under forty. Every ten years the London-based literary magazine Granta names the twenty writers it considers the Best of Young British Novelists, all of them under forty. The New Yorker made waves back in 1999 with its first 20 Under 40 list—a popular feature the magazine repeated in 2010—anointing authors such as Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat, and George Saunders as “standouts in the diverse and expansive panorama of contemporary fiction,” as the New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman put it. BuzzFeed got in on that action with a feature in 2014, “20 Under 40 Debut Writers You Need to Be Reading,” that included the line: “Out with the old, in with the debut.”
While there is something undeniably exciting about news of the next big book by an undiscovered talent, we would like to remind writers and readers that new does not necessarily mean young, no matter how broadly that qualifier is defined. And while popular culture tends to favor youth, there is something equally exciting about the work of those authors who have lived more than half a century—some pursuing alternative careers, others raising families; all of them taking their time, either by choice or by necessity, and collecting valuable life experience that undoubtedly informs and inspires their writing—before publishing a book.
Here, in their own words, we present five authors over the age of fifty whose debut books were published in the past year.
Know the Mother (Wayne State University Press, March) by Desiree Cooper
Her, Infinite (New Issues Poetry & Prose, March) by Sawnie Morris
An Honorable Man (Emily Bestler Books, April) by Paul Vidich
You May See A Stranger (TriQuarterly Books, May) by Paula Whyman
Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood (Bauhan Publishing, May) by Paul Hertneky
Age: 56
Residence: Detroit, Michigan
Book: Know the Mother, a collection of meditative stories exploring the complex archetype of the mother in all of her incarnations.
Publisher: Wayne State University Press (March)
Agent: None
Twenty years ago I was deep in the throes of raising two elementary-schoolers and struggling to keep apace with the demands of motherhood, wifehood, and personhood. I had a career as a newspaper columnist, which I accomplished between drop-offs and pickups, sometimes driving three hours one way to deliver kids to tutors or games or piano lessons.
Once a year I landed on the shores of a poetry residency where I was a board member (not an actual poet), feeling like a bedraggled refugee. It was there, in the late 1990s, that I penned a poem titled “Know the Mother.” It was a narrative poem about a daughter sitting by her mother’s deathbed, realizing that she will never know who her mother really was. I remember thinking, even then, “If I ever have a book, that will be the title.”
In March 2016, five days before my fifty-sixth birthday, I stood in front of a packed Detroit art gallery for the launch of my first book, a collection of flash fiction titled Know the Mother. By then I was a grandmother, a Kresge Artist Fellow, and a survivor of what could have been a fatal encounter with a semitruck only months before.
All I could think was, “I can’t believe I lived to see this moment.”
Since the age of four, I have wanted only to write stories. But as part of the first generation after the civil rights movement and the oldest child of middle-class strivers, I quickly learned to think of writing as a hobby, not a “real job.” The currents of life sent me on a traditional path to college, law school, a career in journalism, marriage, and family. Through it all, I was a mare champing at the muse. I wrote for myself, on the side, in writing groups, at retreats. I found a community of kitchen-table writers who helped shape my voice. Frustrated at the stingy moments left for me to write, I often very nearly stopped, but I couldn’t stay away for long. Somehow I managed to believe in myself as a creative writer with little outward validation.
Then, one day while I was lurking at a writing event, M. L. Liebler, one of Detroit’s well-known authors and indefatigable writing mentors, shouted “Send me your book!” when he saw me in the parking lot. My heart stopped and I looked around, wondering who he was addressing. He had heard me read at an event and assumed I had more. I had been outed.
Liebler liked my work and handed it to Wayne State University Press. When the gifted editors at the press and the brilliant publicist Kima Jones both said that they would get behind my manuscript, I was awash in disbelief. Maybe because, deep down, I had resigned myself to being a secret writer forever.
I would be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that the path to my first book was as lucky as it was labored. But there were forces that prepared me to step through the publishing door when it miraculously opened late in life. My career as a newspaper columnist gave me the muscle for compressed storytelling, a skill that shaped my ability to write flash fiction. I never stopped sharing my writing with other writers and readers. They became my community MFA program, teaching me what works and what doesn’t, forcing me to produce, encouraging me to stretch.
My life as a mother gave me fodder, empathy, and insight into the human condition. It taught me patience that I never knew I could muster, and a concrete understanding that, while time often feels like a foe, it can be a friend as well. The women in my collection are informed by my own experiences—and those of the women I have met along the way. They are born out of a lifetime of living and observing how racism and sexism profoundly affect our intimate lives.
When I was in my thirties I dreamed of writing a book called Know the Mother. But it wasn’t until I was fifty that I knew for sure who she really was.
(Photo credit: Justin Milhouse)
Age: 61
Residence: Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico
Book: Her, Infinite, a collection of poems that 2015 New Issues Poetry Prize judge Major Jackson calls “a ceremony of tantalizing music.”
Publisher: New Issues Poetry & Prose (March)
Agent: None
In the late 1980s, my husband and I founded and began working for what became a highly accomplished environmental-advocacy organization. Although the experiences expressed in Her, Infinite were written as that life was being lived, the seed poem did not arrive until 2007. The book gathered to its purpose poems written as much as fourteen years prior and five years after its own inception. Beginning in 2010, I spent five years submitting my manuscript to a wide range of presses and contests; Her, Infinite received recognition as a finalist fifteen times before being selected by Major Jackson for the New Issues Poetry Prize. The road to publication via contests was at times a grueling one, but I have no regrets.
A poem is not simply words on a page but a way of touching the stars and having the stars that have fallen into the sea touch us. Our lives are poems. Everything arrives and passes away as it should, and we don’t know the ending—which is the moment the entire poem, its meaning and music, is revealed—until the last line is written, even though it has perhaps existed in the eternal now all along. If we are called to write—and love is the true measure of any calling—then it is joyful duty, even in struggle.
In the fall of 2014 I woke from a dream knowing Her, Infinite was finally going to enter the world. I was floating in the sea and the manuscript had become part of that great benevolence. I felt a gentle yet profound euphoria that had little to do with publication and more to do with connection and a sense of utter acceptance. I woke crying and with the understanding that something huge was transpiring in my life.
On May 4, 2015, my beloved husband, an elegant and articulate abstract expressionist painter, received an advanced cancer diagnosis. Eight days later, in the late afternoon, post-surgery, as I was seated at the foot of his bed rubbing his feet, my cell phone rang. Her, Infinite had found a home. It would be another day before a faint happiness would appear to me in the form of a tiny asterisk moving whimsically around the hospital room while my husband recovered. It would be a year before true happiness, containing as it does a calm center, took hold in my body and I could feel both gratitude and awe for the mysterious synchronicity of those events—the cancer removed, the phone call from the press—arriving together, within the same hour. And even longer to appreciate the fact that the judge had taken an extra week to make his decision. The same week in which we were absorbing our terrifying news and plotting how to face, and with any luck, defeat it.
In a world where such things happen, how can we doubt the auspices of timing, doubt ourselves, or allow anyone else to doubt us due to age and its conspirator, time? Age is only as meaningful as what we have managed to learn and absorb, in our minds, in our bodies. We are here now. Now is the moment to put pen to paper, fingertip to key—to learn and practice our craft, to open ourselves to the music arriving from outside as well as rising from within us, in search of a welcoming.
Age: 66
Residence: New York City
Book: An Honorable Man, a Cold War spy thriller set in 1950s Washington, D.C.
Publisher: Emily Bestler Books (April)
Agent: Will Roberts
My path to writing An Honorable Man was long and winding. I had written two atrocious novels by the time I was twenty-seven, at which point I learned I was to be a father. At the time I didn’t believe I could be a successful writer, and certainly not one who could contribute to meeting a family’s financial needs, so I pursued my other, more conventional, ambition and got an MBA. I also promised myself that I’d quit business when we were financially secure and take up full-time writing again. In 2006, at the age of fifty-six, I didn’t renew my contract at Time Warner, where I had worked in the AOL and Warner Music Group divisions for eighteen years, which surprised many of my colleagues. I enjoyed my long business career, and I was good at it, but I always had the calling to write, and I supported literary organizations such as Poets & Writers, whose board I had joined. I enrolled in the new MFA program at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and began the workshopping and reading needed to develop the tools of written expression. When I started to write more seriously I was able to look back at a life—my life. I had lived a lot, and the distance of time gave me perspective. There was a world to write about that I did not have access to at twenty-seven.
In 2012 I received a letter from a literary agent who’d read a story of mine that had recently won an award. He liked the story, but he didn’t represent collections. Did I have a novel? I looked at my wife. “I guess I should write a novel,” I said. But which one? There was an abiding family tragedy that sat unsettled in my mind for years: My uncle worked for the CIA in 1953 and his unsolved murder remained a devastating family loss. I finished the first draft in forty-five days, and, of course, many drafts followed.
The completed manuscript benefitted from critiques by six fellow Rutgers MFA alumni. (We still meet regularly and comment on each other’s work.) I sent the finished manuscript to four agents who represented authors whose work was similar to my own—espionage novels with a literary register. Olen Steinhauer is one such author who is represented by the Gernert Company. David Gernert liked the book but wanted some changes and introduced me to his young associate, Will Roberts, who handled the novel’s auction. I was fortunate to land with Emily Bestler of Emily Bestler Books, an imprint at Simon & Schuster.
My advice to people coming to writing and publishing later in life: You have to want to write, and I mean really want it. You have to be disciplined about the work. You may have a story, but the writer needs to master the techniques of telling that story. And it is important not to be discouraged by age. You have to inoculate yourself from the perception, however true, that the world only seems to recognize youth and ignores the contributions of later-aged newcomers.
You also need self-confidence. One day, feeling down, I put together a list of authors who had debuted later in life. Raymond Chandler wrote The Big Sleep, his first book, at fifty-one; Julia Glass wrote her first novel, Three Junes, when she was forty-six; and so on. Compiling this list stoked my confidence. If they could do it, then so could I.
Oh, and one other thing: I used to look at the many thousands of books published each year and say, “It can’t be that hard.” I was wrong. It is, in fact, hard work—but it’s worth it.
(Photo credit: Bekka Palmer)
Age: 51
Residence: Bethesda, Maryland
Book: You May See a Stranger, a collection of funny, linked stories that illuminate the life of protagonist Miranda Weber and her strange, unsettling times.
Publisher: TriQuarterly Books (May)
Agent: Daniel Menaker
There’s a scene in my book where an antsy crackhead is waiting for a car’s cigarette lighter to heat up. “Why’s it taking so #%$&* long?” he asks. The car’s driver, who is not a crackhead, replies, “It takes that long.”
I don’t have a satisfying answer to explain why it took so long to publish my first book of fiction. I’ve been making up stories since I learned how to talk, but I knew I would find no classified ads for “fiction writer” when I was looking for a job. I worked as a bar-back, a temp, and an editor, and many things in between, before returning to school for my MFA at American University. My first short story was published the week my first child was born. I was already over thirty by then, too old to be an ingenue, even though the story appeared in an anthology called Virgin Fiction. I went on to write two novel drafts and made false starts on a couple more. I wrote a lot of stories—some good, some terrible. Meanwhile, there were frustrations, uncertainties, and even tragedies.
It was hard to dedicate myself to writing while I was deeply engaged as a parent, especially when my kids were young. I lost touch with many of the writers I’d met in grad school; I was no longer part of a writing community. But my kids made me a better writer—they taught me empathy. And once they were old enough for me to be away, I began attending residencies and conferences. It turned out to be a good thing for me and for them. They take pride in my achievements, and I’ve given them a real-life demonstration of persistence and dedication and passion for one’s work. I’ll never forget when one of my kids excitedly told his English teacher that his mom was going to Yaddo, the same place the poet whose work he was studying, Langston Hughes, had gone to write.
The biggest advance in my work came when I finally stopped telling myself my first book had to be a novel. I think of it as the triumph of the irrational plan. I decided to allow myself to write the stories I wanted to write. I began writing stories that felt dangerous to me; I allowed the characters to go places I didn’t want to go.
Like all writers, I’ve weathered a lot of rejection. I’ve always been persistent, and optimistic enough that I responded to the least encouragement. That encouragement, coming from people whose judgment I trust, has been key.
And then there is serendipity. I met my agent, Daniel Menaker, when I took his humor workshop at the Key West Literary Seminar more than three years ago. I asked him for advice on my fiction, and to my surprise, he offered to represent me. I hadn’t written the book yet.
I found my publisher—or he found me—when I was awarded a scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. My book was making the rounds and getting (nice) rejections from big houses when my scholar bio was posted on the Sewanee website. Mike Levine at TriQuarterly saw it and requested my manuscript. A few weeks later, he told me he wanted to publish the collection. The book came out this past May.
Do I wish all of this had happened more quickly? Sure. But the truth is, I could not have written this book when I was thirty. The more life experience I gained, the more perspective I could bring to the work. Along the way, I became better at choosing among my ideas and understanding how to make them work.
My first child turned eighteen shortly after my book came out. He starts college this fall. On my publication day, he told me, “I feel like I grew up watching you write. Now your book is ready to go out into the world, and so am I.”
It can take this long. Are you too old? Is it too late? Nonsense. Imagination has no expiration date.
(Photo credit: Jo Eldredge Morrissey)
Age: 61
Residence: Hancock, New Hampshire
Book: Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood, a collection of essays about the immigrant experience, set in Pittsburgh and the author’s hometown of Ambridge, Pennsylvania.
Publisher: Bauhan Publishing (May)
Agent: None
First, an admission: I did not grow up with a love of books, but with a love of reading. Newspapers became a habit, magazines a marvel, poems a playground. Bound mysteries and biographies from the library captivated me, but inspiration came from the once-literary pages of Esquire and the essays of Montaigne.
I had never imagined myself a writer, much less the author of a cohesive volume of prose. Making my living through copywriting and journalism, I became friends with authors at a time when clear paths led to publishing books. Years of work went into each book, and the heartache of seeing them on remainder tables made the enterprise seem too Sisyphean for me.
My stories and essays came and went on the wings of ephemera and airwaves, their footprints left in the tiny lines of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, then a library database. But no Internet. Not even the illusion of permanence, much less posterity.
I cared more about my reputation among editors than my identity as a writer. I cared about my sentences, stories, sources, and serving readers and listeners. I satisfied my artful side by publishing an essay, or performing one on public radio.
And then one day I interviewed a man over lunch who ordered steamed milk with honey. His taste for this biblical concoction tied in to the subject, forming a metaphor that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I set out to write a series of essays and stories that, ten years later, became Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood.
My early manuscripts made little impression on the young intellectuals staffing the front lines at agencies and literary presses. Years of relentless rejection followed, but I continued to believe in my stories and in the invisible communities and characters they portrayed. I reformulated the book countless times, responding to advice from agents and publishers, and kept pitching.
Revision became my solace, my drug of choice, the only activity that made me feel better. I cut and clarified, expanded and recast. A great friend, the novelist Eugenia Kim, believed in my book from the beginning and insisted that I continue, editing draft after draft for me, questioning and challenging me.
You see, I had dedicated myself to a seemingly foolish task. Most of my published work had been tailored to narrowly defined readers and audiences. I wanted this book to engage literary readers while also captivating working stiffs, many of whom read less than one book a year. Reaching that broad spectrum with respect for a range of sensibilities demanded everything I had learned over twenty-five years of writing for publication.
Howard Mansfield, a friend as well as an author of nine books and a superb editor, had read one of the earliest versions of Rust Belt Boy. He told me how pleased he had been working with Bauhan Publishing, a small press with distribution by the University Press of New England, for his upcoming book. I knew of Bauhan, and I hadn’t thought my book would fit in with their New England–centered list.
But I also knew that its former managing editor, Jane Eklund, had liked my essays well enough to publish one years earlier in a literary magazine she edited. Soon after I gave her the manuscript, she recommended it for publication by Bauhan.
Trusting my pitch that my collection carried universal themes for millions of mill-town kids, the Bauhan team produced a beautiful book and has supported it well. With the help of publicist Scott Manning, the book enjoyed a strong launch, required a second printing within weeks, and has drawn considerable attention from media and reviewers.
My own truth for book writing: I will only write a book that means the world to me, that obsesses me and compels me, as long as it takes, sentence by sentence, to earn the attention of readers, to hold them, and leave them wanting more.
Peter Kaldheim, author of Idiot Wind, published in August by Canongate. (Credit: Kyrre Skjelby Kristoffersen)
The sun was dropping fast when I returned to the highway, anxious to get moving again before dark. Tallahassee was less than halfway across the Panhandle, and I still had nearly two hundred miles to go before I reached Pensacola. The first ride I caught didn’t help much. The businessman who picked me up was only going down the road a few exits, to the western outskirts of Tallahassee. I took the ride anyway. I thought maybe I’d have more luck at the edge of town, away from the local traffic. Climbing into his Eldorado Caddy, I felt a blast of cold air hit me in the face and I realised the guy had his air conditioner cranked—a pleasant reminder that I was now in the Deep South and wouldn’t have to worry about freezing out on the road overnight. Or so I thought.
My next ride was longer, and anything but cool. In fact, if I had known how much I’d be sweating by the time it was over I never would have gotten in the car. The lights of Tallahassee were winking on for the night when a beat-up Ford Fairlane trailing sparks from a dragging tailpipe came scraping down the ramp and pulled over on the shoulder beside me. The back door swung open and a Southern voice called out, “Room for one more. Come on, if you’re coming!” What am I getting myself into? I wondered, but I was tired of waiting on the ramp, so I grabbed my stuff and jumped into the back seat beside a blond teenager with a scared-rabbit look in his eyes.
“That there’s Kalvin,” said the driver, twisting around in his seat to introduce me to the scrawny teenager. “Picked him up a few miles back. I’m Virgil and this here peckerhead’s my brother, Sammy,” he said, nodding at the other middle-aged redneck in the front seat. “What’s your name, hoss?” When I told him, he said, “Well, Pete, we can take you far as the Alford turn-off. Then we’re headin’ north to Alabama. Sammy, pass that bottle. Let ol’ Pete get a nip for the road.”
Brother Sammy swung around and shoved a pint of Wild Turkey at me, but I smiled and waved him off. “Shoot yourself,” he grinned. “More for me and Virgil.” Not that the two of them needed it, I thought to myself. The inside of the Fairlane smelled like the business end of a moonshine still. Kalvin’s jittery look was starting to make sense. And it wasn’t long before I was wearing that same look myself.
Virgil stomped on the gas, and the Fairlane fishtailed off the shoulder in a clatter of gravel. We shot out onto the highway, with the crazy redneck steering one-handed and the tailpipe spraying sparks like a grinding wheel. “Make yourself useful, Sammy,” Virgil barked, once we were up to speed. “Find us some Reba on the radio. Ain’t a party without Reba. And don’t be hogging that Turkey, you peckerhead. Give it here,” he said, letting go of the wheel with his steering hand to snatch the bottle from his brother’s grasp.
With growing alarm, I wondered what kind of show-off game the fool was playing, as Virgil took a long pull from the bottle and let the Fairlane drift rudderless across two lanes of traffic. Why the hell wasn’t he steering with his other hand? That’s when fear sharpened my focus and I belatedly noticed the pinned-up left sleeve of Virgil’s khaki fatigue jacket. I couldn’t believe it – we were crossing the Panhandle in the dark with a one-armed drunk at the wheel. Could this ride get any crazier?
I glanced to my left to see how Kalvin was taking it. The poor kid looked ready to jump out of the car on the fly. I nudged him with my elbow and whispered, “Hang tough, Kalvin. We’ll get through this.”
“In how many pieces, you think?” Kalvin whispered back. Gallows humour. I liked it. The kid had more pluck than I thought. Which was a good thing, because the eighty-mile ride to Alford was a hair-raising test of nerve for both of us. Amazingly, we made it through alive. Don’t ask me how. Only the angels can answer that one. All I know is, the kid and I were wrung out by the time we scrambled out of the Fairlane at the Alford exit and we both agreed to bed down for the night rather than push on in the dark.
While we were scouting around for a campsite in a clover field beside the road, a cold drizzle began falling and the only shelter available was the overpass bridge, so we climbed the steep embankment and lay down head-to-head on the wide concrete ledge beneath the roadway support beams. I nodded out for an hour or so before waking to take a piss, and when I opened my eyes I saw Kalvin sitting up wide awake beside me, hugging himself and shivering with cold. The night air had gotten much cooler after the rain and the kid’s flannel lumberjack shirt wasn’t cutting it.
“Why didn’t you wake me up and tell me you were freezing?” I scolded him. He said he’d been scared to bother me. “Don’t be a dummy,” I said, stripping off my overcoat. “Here, put this over you,” I told him, and when I got back we lay down beside each other beneath my coat. Eventually his teeth stopped chattering and he drifted off. But we’d only managed a couple hours’ sleep before the probing beam of a cop’s spotlight hit me full in the face and woke me up.
“YOU THERE, UNDER THE BRIDGE, COME DOWN WITH YOUR HANDS UP!” the bullhorn voice commanded.
Kalvin woke up muttering and asked what was going on. “The cops want a word with us,” I whispered. “We better get down there.”
Squinting into the bright light, we started down the steep slope, but neither of us could keep our footing on the embankment’s rain-slick paving stones and ended up sliding halfway down the slope on our asses. Which might have been comical if our pratfalls hadn’t landed us at the feet of an Army MP and a county sheriff who were out hunting an escaped military prisoner.
“Either of these two your man?” the local cop asked the MP, but the army cop shook his head. “What are you guys doing under the bridge?” the sheriff asked. We told him we were holing up till daylight before thumbing west to Louisiana. He must have found our tandem tumbling act amusing, because instead of hassling us any further he and the MP just climbed back in their cruisers and drove off to resume their manhunt.
“We got lucky,” Kalvin exhaled.
“Tell that to my tailbone,” I moaned, brushing dirt off the seat of my pants. But both of us were laughing as we picked our way cautiously back up the slope and settled in to sleep off the last few hours before first light.
Idiot Wind © 2019 by Peter Kaldheim. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Canongate. All rights reserved.
“I once read about how Sheryl Crow told Bob Dylan she was having trouble writing her next album. Dylan told her to learn the songs that made her want to be a musician and play those during concerts. I think what Dylan was telling Crow was to remember how a song was made by living inside it, recreating it herself. After Crow did that, she wrote her album. Years ago I worried I was losing the impulse that made me want to write, so I typed out poems: Sharon Olds’s ‘Satan Says’ and David Trinidad’s “Driving Back From New Haven.” I typed Denise Duhamel’s “Things I Could Never Tell My Mother,” and so many others. I wanted, as Dylan suggested, to feel inside my chest and with my fingers the poems that made me want to write. Eventually I bound them into an anthology: a poetry mix tape. I know I’m not the first to type other people’s poems to learn from them, but I do know that retyping the work that’s important to me brought back that thrill only being inside a poem can generate. Now when I need inspiration, I open my mix tape, or I find another poem and start typing.”
—Aaron Smith, author of The Book of Daniel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
In this video, Andrea Cohen reads a selection of her poetry at the 2017 Nantucket Book Festival. Cohen, whose sixth collection, Nightshade, is out now by Four Way Books, is featured in Literary MagNet in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
