There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
― Maya Angelou
It takes style to mark your 100th birthday by publishing a novel – and even more style to call that book Little Boy.
Happy Birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti! Happy Birthday, American original, hitting the century mark on Sunday, March 24, and still with plenty to say – and plenty to show.
Roger Angell won’t reach his 100th birthday for another year and a half, and he’s still going strong as well. Four years ago, he won a National Magazine Award for his remarkable New Yorker personal essay, “This Old Man,” which was honest and direct about life after ninety.
This Saturday at 2 p.m., we’re hosting an Author Talk here at the Wellstone Center featuring Elizabeth Mckenzie, author of the highly acclaimed novel The Portable Veblen, as well as Paul Skenazy, a great teacher of writing and inspirer of future writers, who is publishing his first novel in his seventies, Temper CA.
I’m not going to be coy about it: As a fifty-six-year-old writer who has been telling himself since the summer of 1985 that it’s just about time to make the big push and finally get a first novel published (this is the year!), I find the later-in-life achievements of Skenazy and the others to be deeply encouraging and inspiring.
I can highly recommend Paul’s novel, set in California Gold Country, a story about family and the ways in which memories of childhood play tricks on us. What I love most about the book is how fearless Paul is, how comfortable claiming this territory as his own. He could only write such a book when it was time to write it. That meant no longer spending most of his time – and energy – working with students.
“There is only so much energy, and when you expend it in one direction it can at the same time enliven the other dimensions and also sap the will and ability to expend yourself in other directions—for your own work, or for sustained time separate from the teaching,” he told me. “Teaching is a two-edged sword, to offer a cliche: it both offers an ongoing intense immersion and limits your—or did my—ability to take advantage of that intensity and turn it to other dimensions.”
The same could be said of other ways we spend our time. Skenazy’s story is inspirational because he hung in there, always believing that the story within him would find a way to be released, and he loved words and literature so much, he wasn’t about to be defined or limited by traditional notions. He wasn’t going to read articles in the New York Times about how writers past forty are always on the way downhill and take them too seriously.
But really, it’s not just about celebrating older writers, it’s about celebrating writers of any age who find a way to take that journey on the page all the way to its conclusion. I visited this week with journalism students at San Francisco State University, invited up by Kim Komenich and Don Menn, and was hugely inspired to talk to so many bright, alert young people ready to make their own mark. They may be studying journalism, but many were ready to try their hands at fiction – and I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more has a novel to their credit before long.
Too often, I think, the assumption is made that it requires a very traditional model forward – MFA, residencies, awards – to build up the career of “fiction writer” as opposed to burning inside with a passion for what you need to say. To publish your first novel in your seventies requires a rare passion – and I think reading the novel, that passion is contagious. Check it out for yourself and tell me if you agree.
– Steve Kettmann
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