“Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging”: Life-, Age-, and Art-Affirming Manifestos https://ift.tt/szl3Yuv
The first thing I noticed upon receiving a copy of Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging is its beauty. This is a beautiful book with very high production values. Its pages have a delicate sheen; there are full-color photographs taken by American photographer Carolyn Sherer, and a sleek dust jacket adorns the hard casebound cover. This is a book to keep and cherish. A book for your coffee table. A book to gift to your girlfriends on their 50th, 60th, 70th, and 80th birthdays, as well as all the birthdays beyond and between.
I welcome this book, which arrives at a time when I, too, feel somewhat invisible, “dismissed” as a perimenopausal woman and as an artist — when, for example, I visit extended family and no one asks a question about my writerly work, when all the emotional energy in the room is directed to my children and what service I can be to them as their mother.
The book also arrives at a time when the sexism and misogyny encountered in everyday American life are off-the-charts, and my country seems intent on relegating women to second-class citizenship. With so much of a laser focus on pregnant and potentially pregnant people, what space is left for those of us who are “off the shelf”; beyond, girlhood, motherhood, and perhaps even menopause; who are turning the page on a new chapter?
Old Enough is edited by Jay Lamar and Jennifer Horne. Lamar has been a writer and editor for almost 30 years and is co-editor of The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers. Horne was the twelfth poet laureate of Alabama from 2017 until 2021. She is the author of three poetry collections, a short story collection, and a biography. Both women call Alabama home.
In this volume, they have collected essays on creativity and aging by 21 accomplished artists and writers — writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; painters and sculptors; a quilter; a photographer (Sherer herself); and a singer-songwriter. They range in age from the late 50s to the late 80s, and all have lived for lengthy periods in the American South.
The essays are varied, touching on their personal lives, their creative processes, their approaches to aging, and the tenets and truths they live by. Some of the essays are more narrative in nature, whereas others are more lyrical. One is a scripted conversation. There are excerpts of poetry in some, references to the works of other artists and thinkers, and fables. Titles run the gamut from “Finding the Words: Writing Past the Age of Fifty” to “Creativity and Illness” to “The Generous Becoming.”
It’s not necessary to read this book front to back; I dipped into it and out of it at will. I wanted to highlight passages with my Sharpie but couldn’t (see paragraph on high production values above). If I had to come up with one word to describe these essays, it would be life-affirming, or maybe age-affirming or art-affirming. All theaffirmings. I felt validated and inspired by the voices of other like-minded women artists who write about the call to create, about how they conceive of and create their art, about finding time to pursue art while also parenting and caregiving, adapting to aging, and facing illness. I agree with Katie Lamar Jackson in her essay that this collection is “brimming with ideas, strengths, wisdom, insight, and further questions.”
“On the Art of Dying” by Carmen Agra Deedy, an award-winning author and storyteller and an accomplished lecturer, is an exemplar. She first writes about an ancient koan called “The Tiger and the Strawberry” — a koan being a paradoxical riddle that is intended to show the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to bring about enlightenment in Zen Buddhism. She braids this tale with the story of her father’s craving for cafecito and buttered Cuban bread before his death, and the result is quite profound.
“The two times a woman is most free are when she is very young and when she is very old,” begins the next essay, “The Mystery of Creativity and the Unmasking of Beauty,” by Patricia Ellisor Gaines, who also graces the cover of the book. I connected with her evocation of Carl Jung, her reflection that we are all creatives in childhood, and how aging as an artist is, for her, a “growing into my earliest dreams for myself.”
Novelist Patti Callahan Henry has a similar mic drop moment when she describes her coming of age as an artist as a “dismantling” as opposed to a building-up, as “unmaking a wall I had made for most of my life, a wall created of my ‘should do’ and ‘must do.’”
The essays are as diverse as the essayists. Writer, poet, and playwright Angela Jackson-Brown describes deferring her dream of being a writer to be a fully present mother to her son while referencing Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes. Meanwhile, quilter Yvonne Wells, who used to make three quilts to tell a story, now finds she makes more one-piece quilts as she gets older. Asked about her birthday (she’s now in her mid-80s), she says, “I like my birthday. I do, and the more I have, the more I like it.”
Perhaps Jennifer Horne’s essay, “Past It,” resonated with me most because she introduced me to the concept of “The F-You Fifties,” in which I happily find myself; invoked the marvelous Julia Sugarbaker from Designing Women, a staple show of my adolescence; compared an aging woman artist to the “gorgeous wreck” of a tree that will stand until it doesn’t (I just love this); and coined the term croneography — the writings of crones. I now want to put “Amy Martin, Croneographer” on my business cards.
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