The Question I've Wrestled With

The day after my 60th Birthday (2.2.22)

In advance of turning 60 this week I read Stephen Jenkinson’s Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble. I read the book to shed light on a question I’ve been wrestling with for a couple of years now: What should I do with this last part of my life?

Jenkinson is a contrarian philosopher. His nonconformist roots, like mine, are wedged in the counter-culture movement of the 60s, which for all its flaws and mistakes has produced some stunning thinking.

Often in his philosophizing, Jenkinson will do a thing I call “chasing rabbits,” where he dashes off on a tangent, talking about something that seems to have nothing to do with a subject at hand. In one of these chases, he is in an airport bookstore before a long flight, walking the aisles looking for a book. He can find nothing that interested him.

“Really, they’re not even bookstores. They are grottoes of grim fascination with technology, and they are selling gizmos that promise to enhance the reading experience but are clearly helping to make books—the paper kind, what they call now the bricks-and-mortar of the trade—a nostalgic memory. This is something that is happening in your lifetime.”

We are making books a “nostalgic memory.” And it is happening in our lifetimes.

Jenkinson goes on to say that nostalgia sells well but is a “halfway house on the road to oblivion.”

The End of Books

My first book came out in October 1999, a full 22 years ago. I was so lucky. I was able to experience the huge love that many, many people have for books and their authors. Rank strangers wrote me love-letters; they sent gifts of blank journals, Easter candy, or their own brave poems and stories. They invited me into their libraries, bookstores, churches, homes. This crazy love was especially evident in the South, because the South had a particular and fascinating relationship with its authors, and I was one of them. But similar love poured from the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast, the Midwest—from every corner of the country and sometimes from beyond our borders people felt something either in the writing or between the lines, and they reached out.

As the years passed, publishing became harder. I was sending out lots of writing that couldn’t find a home, not where I wanted, meaning New York and the big magazines. I sent book manuscripts to my New York agent that couldn’t be placed. I found another agent with no better luck. I tried to do a better job at playing by the rules—I turned book manuscripts into book proposals, as if they’d never been written. The same things happened.

This was difficult, because my ambition was huge.

Occasionally some piece was taken, if I got far enough down the list of important magazines and if I was willing to forego being paid.

This wasn’t happening only to me. That great phenom of a writer, Linda Hogan, was dumped by her agent and couldn’t find another. She put out a notice on Facebook asking if anybody knew one. So many writers—especially older women writers—suddenly went silent.

In 2021, a decade after my last book had published, I submitted a book proposal to a university press. The publisher liked it, accepted it, and set a fast pub date. It was like the old days, such a happy feeling. I never have wanted to publish trash—books are printed on trees and trees are too precious a resource to waste. Plus if some reader gives me the gift of even a few minutes of their time, I want them to go away happier, maybe even uplifted, or elated. The press worked hard to publicize and market Wild Spectacle, sending out a few hundred copies to editors and influencers (book reviewers at the newspapers are mostly gone), setting up an impressive book tour, and trying to get the word out to every reader left standing. But the sales numbers were low, too low.

The Power of Books

You know how deeply and thoroughly I believe in the power of books to do the one thing I am most interested in doing, which is to change the world today into a better place than it was yesterday, and to change its humans, starting with myself, into better versions of ourselves. I’ve seen and experienced this transformation over and over. Just last week, Jenkinson’s book transformed me. I believe that’s what books are for. They are a tool for transformation, probably the best tool we have. Writing is activism.

I am a story-teller, and it’s likely, since you subscribed to this newsletter, that you are as well. We are story-listeners, story-tellers, story-keepers. In your lifetime and in mine, I can’t imagine that fact changing.

But Things are Changing

Readership is changing. The world is changing around us. The numbers are down. There are fewer readers, they read fewer books, there are fewer book collectors.

And I am changing. I am older, not just on the outside but on the inside.

Publishing has been a man’s world (and a white man’s world) for as long as it has existed. This world was willing to let in a few ovulating women. I happened to get in, and I’m very grateful for that. Even so, publishing was never easy—I was a nature-writer and nobody wanted to hear that the wild world was disintegrating, which is why we denied the climate crisis for so long. It’s a big thing for a marginalized woman to claim her power and to say, I want this. She’ll have to work hard.

Now my eggs have run out. Fewer publishers want to feature an older, graying, eggless woman who is also white and Southern. This is a trend we’ve seen coming.

Lots of things about the book world are topsy-turvy. Success of a book or even a story no longer depends on the writing. How well a book does financially is determined by the exponent of number of dollars thrown at it. A poorly written book often gets more attention than a well-written one. (There are glorious exceptions, books like Cold Mountain.) And self-publishing, for all its democratic flagging, has flooded the publishing world and our bookshelves with mostly unvetted, unedited manuscripts published too soon.

Most books I pick up these days I find impossible to read. My tastes run toward lyricism and meaning, not entertainment; I have less time left to read books that are not true to themselves (and to me) in every possible way.

All this led me to the question that has gnawed at me for at least two years, What should I do with the last part of my life? The great John Lewis said, “You must do all you can do while you occupy your space during your lifetime.” What is the path I’m supposed to be on? Or am I already on my path and simply need to recognize it? Am I doing all I can do? Am I being asked to work harder, to push harder? Do I fit in anymore? Is my work done? Or do I get another chance to do great things? Should I keep writing, although my work reaches fewer people than ever? Is writing no longer my work?

Bare Bones

You know where I am going with this, but let me lay it out for you anyway:

• I have entered the “invisible” stage of my life as an older woman.

• I am a boomer, one of the change-making generation that some parts of society (the corporate, empirical, colonial forces) are trying to shut up.

• I am a writer and my craft is mostly no longer needed.

• Our MFA programs have turned out hordes of writers, many of them brilliant, many clamoring to have their voices heard. There is so much noise, and too much of it violent in its self-centeredness.

I’ve been trying to work this out with many friends. I tell them what I’m thinking, and most of them reply to me what you are probably wanting to say: That we don’t know who our work touches. That if it touches one person, that’s enough. That Van Gogh never in his lifetime had a following. That he died poor.

I am unmoved by the words because I know for a fact that there exists a balance between effort and effortlessness. Effort is my job. Effortlessness is the work of the spirit. I know when the balance is awry.

The other night I spoke by zoom to a couple of Audubon Society groups from California. In a signature moment of truth-telling, I revealed a brief synopsis of these thoughts. An ecologist and an activist unmuted herself: But we need the stories, she said. We out here, doing the work. We need the stories to inspire us to keep going.

For a moment, I wavered. Inspiring the change-makers sounds pretty awesome.

In 2021 I began studying the I Ching as a method of divination. I ask the question and throw the coins. Over and over this advice comes up: Receive the mandate.

What, oh what is the mandate? And is it so difficult to realize because of all the noise, all the social media, all the distractions, all the books? 

These Few Things I Do Know

I am writing all this to you the day after my birthday, lying in bed (sick with breakthrough Covid-19) (but getting well by the day):

1.     I cannot stop writing.

2.     However, I may stop Being a Writer. Most of the writing life as it exists today I have no interest in belonging to. I can tweet or tiktok with the best but have no desire to add to the noise and clamor.

3.     I have written a few unpublished books and essays that I believe will bring comfort and clarity to some few people. In 2022 I will proceed with making those available in non-traditional ways, including the dreaded self-publishing and this newsletter.

4.     “You don’t look your age” is a way of saying that being young is far better than being old, that being old is a horrible mandate we all must face. Yesterday I turned 60 beautiful years old. I no longer ovulate and have no interest in child-bearing or child-rearing. As an object of romantic attachment, I am useless. My goal is to stay as fit and healthy as I can but to work even harder at becoming a good elder, which our young people, our world, and our planet so desperately need. And which our old people need as well.

5.     If the answer to the question plaguing me gets revealed, I will head in a new direction or with renewed vigor in an old direction.

6.     I’m watching for a mandate. For now, it’s

7.     Come of Age.

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Meanwhile, These Events are Upcoming

If You’re Anywhere Close, I Would Be Honored By Your Presence

Feb. 11—Story and Song Books, 4 pm ET, Fernandina Beach, FL

Feb. 21—Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (virtual), Athens, GA*

Feb. 24—Spring Island Trust, 6 pm ET, Okatie, SC*

March 4—Georgia Collegiate Honors Council, Abraham Baldwin Ag College, Tifton, GA*

March 6—“March Forth” with Drew Lanham, Jonathan Haupt & more, Pat Conroy Literary Center, Beaufort, SC*

March 10—Lenten Poetry and Organ Concert, featuring organist Andrew Galuska, 11 am. Open to the public, live-streamed, recorded & archived, Community Church of Vero Beach. Vero Beach, FL

March 12—Writing Workshop, Pole Barn, Laura Riding Jackson House, 9:30-12:30, Vero Beach, FL*

April 9—Rural Writing Institute, with Kathryn Aalto (virtual), England*

June 12-19—Bread Loaf Environmental Conference, with Megan Mayhew Bergman, Middlebury, VT*

*Registration is required.

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And I thought you’d like to see this picture my first cousin Sandra recently sent of my birth family, circa 1972. I’m bottom right.