Ellen Meeropol, Celeste Gainey, Sandra Gail Lambert, and Cynthia Robinson Young | February 2021

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Ellen Meeropol, Celeste Gainey, Sandra Gail Lambert, & Cynthia Robinson Young

Women who come to writing later in life face a landscape tainted with sexism and ageism. Although there has been little formal investigation of gender and age discrimination in publishing, the VIDA Count analyzes self-reported data from writers published in major literary magazines. In the 2017 Count, VIDA volunteers included age for the second year; however, the percentage of female authors who responded about their age was, not unsurprisingly, quite low.

Even in the magazines with the best gender parity, the percentage of women who reported being fifty-five or older was small. Women comprised fifty to sixty percent of those published in the most equitable magazines, but the percentages of those women who reported being fifty-five or older rarely reached twenty percent.

Despite the incomplete data, the toxic combination of ageism and sexism resonates with older women writers, as seen by the standing-room-only audiences at panels on this topic at the last three AWP annual conferences: “Second Blooming: Women Authors Debuting After 50” in 2017, “Second Blooming: Resources for Older Women Writers” in 2018, and “Better Later? Success and the Late-Blooming Woman Author” in 2019.

The purpose of this conversation is to open up to a wider audience what was initiated in those AWP presentations and further explore how women who first publish after fifty, particularly women of color, LGBTQ, or with disabilities, favorably negotiate such a landscape. Do we define success differently than younger writers? Do we modify our aspirations to accommodate the uneven terrain?

The women in this conversation are a diverse group. We write poetry, novels, memoir, and essays. We each published our first book after the age of fifty. All of us want a seat at the literary table. We each came to writing later in life, through various paths and after other kinds of professional success. One of the questions we ask each other is how getting a late start affects our image of ourselves as writers.

Cynthia Robinson Young: I have a horrible habit. Whenever I read articles about debut poets, I always look at their age first, to see if I find people like myself. I do this with race and gender too. I’m looking to see if there are souls like me at the table.

Enough time has passed over the fifty years I have been writing, so I believe we know better that diversity in race and gender tend to be more in the forefront of the minds of editors and publishers, (at least I would hope so!). But what about age? What about writers over fifty?

I just turned sixty-six years old. I’m not a debut poet, but I feel like one. I’m a graduate student in English with a concentration on Creative Writing. I didn’t just begin the journey here. However, like the debut poets I read articles about, I started getting published in my twenties, and went for my MFA in my thirties. But somewhere along the journey, I made choices that didn’t involve immersing myself in writing and sending work out. I wasn’t afraid. I believed that the writing world would hold a place for me right where I left off when I returned.

Do I regret my decision? It wasn’t like I didn’t seek advice. In the early part of my career, I was blessed to have access to wonderful African American women writers such as Wanda Coleman, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Opal Palmer Adisa. They fueled my desire to succeed in writing, but they didn’t diminish my need to make choices that were right for me at that time.

Sandra Gail Lambert: I wasn’t one of those writers who wrote her first story in crayons, was a reporter for her high school newspaper, or studied literature in college. I didn’t start writing until I was close to forty. I don’t know why I wasn’t a writer earlier. All the signs were there. I snuck flashlights to read after bedtime, I was in love with all the school librarians, as an adult I’d call in sick at work to finish a novel, and the ultimate sign—I ran a feminist bookstore for most of the ’80s. You would think I’d be writing. But I wasn’t, and the reasons are something I’ve just begun to put words to—words like shame, wariness, and the overwhelming focus it took to survive.

But I do know what was happening when I first wrote. The bookstore had immersed me in that ’80s swell of lesbian feminist publishers, printers, journals, and writers. I worked and played and did social change within a community rich with writers of all sorts, and it was a community that valued the telling of our stories as much, sometimes more, than the craft or skill in telling it. So as untrained as I was, I felt welcome to contribute.

The other factor, the main one perhaps, is that my body began to change. I had polio as a baby and had used braces and crutches all my life and that’s just how it was and I didn’t think much about my body. It was sturdy and skilled and it got me where I wanted to go. It was a stable, unchanging situation. But then, in the late ’80s, it did change. What we now know as post-polio syndrome kicked in with its hallmark features of weakness, pain, and fatigue. I kept falling. I had to make changes. I had to, for the first time perhaps, pay attention to my body. And this is when I wrote that first poem, first essay, first story. I tried everything. And each of them focused on the body.

This was a hard time in my life. But when I wrote something, anything, I was thrilled. It was an excitement that this thing, a poem or story, now existed in the world when it hadn’t before. And here’s where the path to publication first arises—I wanted to show everyone what I’d done in the way a little kid runs around in a flush of creative joy waving their drawing and shouting, “look, look, look.” I was published in journals such as Sinister Wisdom and Common Lives/Lesbian Lives and anthologies with titles like The Body of Love or The Poetry of Sex.

Then, if you were somehow tracking me from the outside, I went quiet. I didn’t publish again until 2006. I kept writing, but I didn’t try to get published. Part of that was adapting to the changes in my body. I was figuring out how to use a wheelchair. I quit the bookstore and went through the grueling process of qualifying for Social Security Disability Insurance.

But the primary reason I didn’t submit during this time was because I noticed that my writing was not that good. Perhaps that’s too judgmental. Another way to say it is I didn’t know enough to make the words on a page work the way I wanted them to. I wanted to be a better writer. I wanted more.

Celeste Gainey: In thinking about coming late to poetry and how that affects my view of my professional self, a wonderful quote of Gloria Steinem’s springs to mind: “Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”

In this quote, Steinem gives real, practical agency to the act of dreaming. I’m a big believer in dreams and intention as motivators. I’ve always used them to fuel my creative work. I started writing poetry after many years working with light in film and architecture. At around the fifty-seven-year mark I found myself writing for my own enjoyment and what I was writing was poetry, but I only knew enough to know I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I had no notion of the craft of poetry. So I sought out a poet whose work I admired, Jan Beatty, and I enrolled in a low-residency MFA program to study with Jan at Carlow University in Pittsburgh.

I think the fact that I was writing out of a world that was so particular to me really helped. As older emerging writers, there’s a whole lot of life’s territory that we’ve traversed in ways that nobody else has—like lighting for film and architecture for me. I believe writing from this unique terrain is what sets me apart from the herd. Who else could write a book of poems called The Gaffer? I view this difference as a strength.

Ellen Meeropol: I came of age in the mid-’60s, in the wonderful chaos of civil rights, anti-war activism, and second-wave feminism. By the 1970s, my political work had become mostly focused on women’s reproductive health, and that led me to become an RN and then a nurse practitioner. During that time, I wrote articles for medical and nursing journals, as well as poems and scraps of stories scribbled on the backs of envelopes. I collected stories from my patients’ lives and my political work, knowing that one day I would write them. I daydreamed that one day I would write the kind of novels I loved to read—novels about big important issues and how they affected the lives of ordinary people.

That day didn’t come until my early fifties, when I realized that if I was going to follow my dream of writing novels, I’d better get started. I had never taken a creative writing class, but started writing anyway, short stories and then a novel manuscript.

It’s challenging, isn’t it, to begin a new endeavor in mid-life? It’s both liberating and humbling. The problem was that my literary taste far outdistanced my craft. But one thing I had learned by that point in life was persistence. I kept writing. After three years, I recognized how little I knew and enrolled in a low-residency MFA program. That’s when I began taking myself seriously as a writer.

Of course, there’s a big gap between taking ourselves seriously as writers, late bloomers or not, and being taken seriously. How did you negotiate the uneven terrain of publishing?

Gainey: I started my MFA in January of 2008 and completed it in April of 2010. My first chapbook, In the land of speculation & seismography, was published in 2011 with Seven Kitchens Press. My first full-length book, the GAFFER, that grew out of my MFA thesis, was selected in 2013 for publication in 2015 by Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press.

None of this happened purely by accident. I was keenly aware from the get-go that I was in the somewhat unique position of being a woman, lesbian, and far older than your average emerging poet. I had the recurring nightmare of some grad student, charged with weeding through a first book prize submission pile, thumbing through my manuscript, seeing a poem titled “the 70s,” and rejecting it out of hand as not relevant. This is where I took some advice from what had worked for me in breaking into my previous profession: “Get your army in place. Get your plan, your strategy in place.”

So I implemented what I like to call “strategic intuition.” It goes something like this: identify a goal and then step back and figure out a game plan for getting from where you are to where you want to be that feels authentic and is true to who you are and how you operate in the world. For me, a successful strategy always starts with a basic intention, then remaining open to unforeseen opportunities as they appear, as well as suggestions and support from others.

Near the end of my MFA program, a friend, RJ Gibson, won the Robin Becker Prize—a chapbook prize for a queer poet who had not yet published a full-length collection, awarded by Seven Kitchens Press. RJ’s chapbook, Scavenge, was this beautiful handmade object, and I found myself thinking, “I would love to have one of these amazing little books; maybe this is something achievable for me?” Was I not a queer poet? Was not my first full-length book still unpublished? And wouldn’t the fact of these two requirements make the submission pool smaller than usual—giving my poetry better odds at being noticed?

I put a chapbook together and sent it off to Seven Kitchens. That year the Robin Becker Prize was to be judged by Eloise Klein Healy, longtime lesbian feminist, activist, and beloved Los Angeles poet. I thought here is a sign: Eloise is in my age group, even a wee bit older. I’m a California native, and I have poems that address the mythology of the West. Maybe my work might speak to her.

My chapbook did make its way to Eloise. And while she did not select me as the winner, she chose me as runner-up and Seven Kitchens did publish my chapbook.

In the winter of 2011, I found myself at my first AWP. It was here that I made a point of running into Eloise and introducing myself. I thanked her for selecting my chapbook, and she encouraged me to send my full-length collection to her annual competition at Arktoi Books, the imprint she had established for lesbian writers at Red Hen Press. I did just that and came away a finalist. Shortly thereafter, my collection was a finalist for the Wick Poetry Prize. The next year I submitted again to Arktoi; this time I could say I had been a finalist for the Wick. Maybe that development might forecast a more favorable outcome? I like to think it did because I got a crazy phone call from Eloise in early 2013 that the GAFFER had been accepted for publication in 2015.

Young: My path to writing my poetry collection, Migration, took me down the path of everything I experienced. I had migrated from New Jersey to Georgia, then California, and then back to the South in Tennessee. I spent those years of migrating, shedding other voices and seeking to find my own. I learned how to listen to the voices of my ancestors, the ones that made a way out of no way—strong women like my mother, who taught my sister and me by example how to get back up whenever life was knocking us down, to not waste our lives, but to keep pushing forward to whatever we felt we were called to do with our lives. I learned how to be at peace with who I am, peaceful enough to be quiet, quiet enough to hear the voices of my Elders and record them in the form of poetry. Because that is what their lives were—living poems.

Lambert: For me, for perhaps many of us, there are two paths to success. One path is about becoming a writer and the other is about being published. For some, these paths run in parallel and for others, like me, there have been jagged turns and switchbacks.

I had very little money, but I was ensconced in my little Section 8 apartment and did have time and solitude. I wrote and wrote, and when I read a book I paid attention to how it did its job and I went to see every author who came through town and sat in the front row and was that woman who asked too many questions. Each time I embarrassed myself with my ignorance, I’d shrug it off and continue. I don’t know if I could have done this when I was younger. Being worried about what people thought of me might have kept me silent and thus closed off the learning.

It became clear I needed help and community. The internet offered up lists of workshops and residencies and I applied, over and over again, to residencies that offered scholarships, not knowing that people with my background weren’t the type who were accepted or even applied. But I finally got on a waitlist. And then another. And then was accepted. They offered only a partial scholarship, but friends gave me the rest of the money. I finally had an entry into a literary world I knew nothing about.

That world was, and is, a rough-and-tumble place. I would get critiques that said I didn’t know how to write about disability, or that I should have less lesbian stuff. Often I’d be, and still am, dismissed as an old lady dabbler. Sometimes I’d go home and cry. I was also happy. I was learning what I needed to be a better writer and gathering writer friends who helped me with the basics. They told me there were these things called literary journals and that my writing was literary. They showed me how to create a table to keep track of my submissions. My submission table filled in with entries. I had no way of knowing which journals were fancier than others until I found a list on the internet. From then on, I’d start at the top and work down and was rejected so very very many times. But my writing kept getting better. And I started getting published here and there and then more. And from time to time a residency would accept me. Each success and each rejection built on the other. At age sixty-two, my novel was published. At sixty-six, my memoir was released.

Meeropol: When you start writing later in life, you feel you have to work harder to catch up. Finding the right home for my work wasn’t quick, but has made an enormous difference. Red Hen Press published my first novel just before I started Medicare and my fourth novel the month I turned seventy-four.

Is that success? I have never won a major award. Never had a review in the New York Times. Never been on Oprah. I’m not saying I wouldn’t love these kinds of validation. Of course I would. But an advantage of being an older writer is understanding why I write and letting that knowledge help guide how I determine success.

I write because I believe we need stories that illuminate injustice and inspire us to fight it. I write to imagine a more just and sustainable world. I write to ask questions, such as how do we balance on the fault lines between fighting injustice and living a satisfying life? How do we handle the potential risks and consequences of our actions?

How do we dramatize issues of social justice with nuance and humanity? I believe that fiction is better at asking these questions than at answering them. At asking questions and inviting readers to join us in exploring answers. I can’t think of any work that is more important or satisfying. At any age.

Success is also building literary communities that bring writers and readers together. In talking with Sandra, Celeste, and Cynthia, the other issue that came up was our strong desire to not only succeed with our own work, but also to be part of the solution to the problem of sexism and ageism in the publishing world.

Lambert: My skills from being part of a lesbian feminist community carried over to this new world of writers. I already knew that community works best when most of the time it’s not about you. So I have figured out ways to give back. And it was important to figure out I didn’t have to wait until I was published to give back. It doesn’t take any sort of list of accomplishments to be excited for another writer when their work is accepted or to write a review. These days I still write reviews and, in addition, mentor other writers, judge contests, blurb books, use social media to promote others, and have coedited an anthology. I’m also an early reader for a few writer friends as they are for me. These writing friendships sustain me.

My moments of creative joy now come from a well-worked sentence, solving the puzzle of a structure, finding a perfect word, or reaching a final revision. That old thrill that came from the simple act of putting words on paper and had nothing to do with the quality of that work is gone. And sometimes I miss it.

Gainey: As I said, strategic intuition is my recommended style. Were there bumps along the road? Most definitely. But they were, I believe, mitigated by the fact that I had a game plan—something that, as a writer, I could wake up into each and every morning; a little line of bread crumbs I could follow into the deep forbidding forest of poetry publication land.

I’m a proud member of a longstanding Pittsburgh institution, the Madwomen in the Attic. Housed at Carlow University, the Madwomen consists of a series of semester-long writing workshops, in all genres, open to any woman in the community who wants to write seriously in a supportive environment with other women. There are wonderful writers in these workshops and a freedom to question and explore not always found in a coed group. I’m lucky to benefit both in giving to and taking from the Madwomen.

Now that my first book has been out a while, I have people constantly asking, “What are you working on now?” Even though I am at work on a new collection, I really hate that question. Inevitably, in giving a full response, I feel I’m dissipating the power of the project. So instead of launching into any kind of involved explanation, I just reply, “Myself, I’m working on myself!”

Young: When I get the opportunity to talk to women who perceive themselves to be “over the hill,” I want to hug them close and whisper in their ears, “Listen to my voice as I encourage you. It’s not ever too late to do what you were called to do, whether it’s going for an MFA, sending out your work, or being published. Yes, there will be discouraging moments when your work is rejected, but keep sending it out, keep writing, keep studying, knowing that you abound in the riches of your life experience.”

As my grandmother always recited to me when I was faltering at a chore, If a task is once begun, never leave it ’till it’s done. Be it labor great or small, do it well or not at all! I don’t know where she got the saying from, but I guess it is the first poem I memorized, not because I tried to remember it and live out its advice, but because she repeated it so many times. I encourage women over fifty to not give up. If your task is to write, you have the rest of your life, along with a rich collection of experiences and perspectives to share. I already know from my experience that you can, as my grandmother said, do it well.