Old. Lady. Dabbler.

Writing this essay about us old broads, hags, and geezers who come to writing later in life transformed how I define success. Which allowed me to consider new ways to publish. Which led me here.

Old.  Lady.  Dabbler. by Sandra Gail Lambert

Old.

Age is slippery. When I first started writing, I was forty which is about twenty-six generations of the mice that rattled around in my kitchen, but no more than a sapling compared to the tulip poplar whose branches hung over the parking space of my basement apartment in Atlanta. I didn't know this, but from the beginning of my writing life it was already too late for me to be considered an "emerging writer." I figured it out when I saw a full-color spread of the winners the National Book Award for debut novelists. (They call it "5 Under 35.") I was fifty-four. If I ever had a debut novel (which wouldn't happen until I was sixty-two), this recognition was off-limits. To the literary world, who I was didn't exist.

I don't know why I wasn't a writer earlier, a writer who wrote her first story in crayons or was a reporter for the high school newspaper. All the signs were there. I was never brave enough to risk the disciplinary consequences of being caught with a flashlight under the covers, but I'd read through twilight and as far into the dark as possible. My eyes would ache even the next morning. In elementary school I'd use the open book on top of an open textbook technique to finish off a Hardy Boys novel during math class. My long division skills still suffer. My first crushes were school librarians, all of them. We had our special time together since a disabled girl like me wasn't allowed to go to gym class so the principals at all the schools I attended stashed me in the library. It was an odd mix of feeling, again, excluded, alongside the thrill of spending time with books and kind, lovely women. Then there was my extensive collection of bookmarks: lace, wooden, embossed leather, ribbons with beads, and flowers pressed inside plastic. But despite even the classic signs of a writer, which include calling in sick to work to finish reading a novel and managing a bookstore, I didn't write.

 But I do know what was happening when I first wrote. The feminist bookstore I worked at immersed me in that eighties swell of lesbian-feminist publishers, printers, journals, and authors. I worked and played and did social change within a community rich with writers of all sorts, and it was a community that valued our stories as much as, 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 changed. 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 it did change. What we now know as post-polio syndrome kicked in with its hallmark features of weakness, pain, and fatigue. In many ways, overnight, I became my own stereotyped image of an old person what with the naps, the falls, and the audible groans with each reach, lift, or twist. 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.

This was a hard time in my life. But when I wrote something, anything, I was thrilled. It was an excitement that this thing now existed in the world when it hadn’t before. And I wanted to show everyone what I’d done in the same way a little kid runs around in a flush of creative glee waving their drawing and shouting "look, look, look" until someone slaps it up on the fridge with magnets. The equivalent for me was when journals we sold in our bookstore, such as Sinister Wisdom and Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, published my work. Then, if you were somehow tracking me from the outside, I went quiet. I didn’t publish again for fifteen years.

These days we talk about it sometimes. How, for some of us, our trajectory as writers is delayed. For me there was addiction, abuse, and the drowning confusion of showing up on a campus as the first in my family to graduate high school much less go to college. And I was female and physically disabled. And a lesbian in a time when even the word was unknown to me. So very much creative and emotional energy as well as inexorable hours in a day were used up in negotiating the world under these circumstances. I am not unique. My circumstances are not comprehensive. It is not just some of us. And we are not delayed. Our talent, our skills, our perseverance, and our wild joy in writing are not despite obstacles. They arise from the supposed dead ends and loop de loops of our lives. 

LADY (White):

Still comfortably clueless about the literary world, I kept writing during those fifteen years. I lived in Florida now. I surpassed the lifespan of an alligator in the wild, survived the menopausal decade, and entered the aging parrot years. This is when I acquired more of the hallmarks of an Old Lady Dabbler. Considering someone just an "Old Dabbler" wouldn't be the same. Putting the female presentation label in the middle twists the phrase into its pinnacle of disdain.

Every author who came through town, of whatever genre, would look out over their audience and see me, a graying white lady, perched in her wheelchair near the front with an alert, too-eager expression, and sure enough I'd be the first to ask a question, often a banal one. Even as I asked it, I cringed at how predictable it was. But I wanted answers to questions I didn't know the words for, so I asked the obvious—what time of day do you write, do you write directly onto a computer, who are your favorite authors, how does one get an agent. I wanted some elusive to me something from these writers and, even in the moment, I could tell how unappealing, perhaps repellant, my raw need was. Later, at home, I'd cry from embarrassment. But I shrugged off the shame, kept writing, and showed up at the next reading. I think there is much about being raised female that helps us survive shame.

In the past month a cashier has expressed wonder that I grocery shop, a hotel clerk was impressed I travel on my own, and when I opened the door into a taco hut, my skill was commented on. This has happened all my life. All praise becomes suspect. It meant when I discovered that there were these things called writing workshops you could pay to attend, I noticed right off the patronizing tone to the feedback on my work. But my sense was this time it had more to do with me being a woman, an older woman, than anything about disability. Much later, when I started leading workshops myself, I asked more experienced writers for advice. The responses sometimes included variations of "The older women, mostly all they want is to be told how good their writing is. Just praise them and you'll be fine."

Dabbler.

Old is accurate. Lady, sure, no problem. Dabbler is the most fraught word in this phrase. As if dabblers don't come in all ages and in all genders. As if the man, who distorted his mouth sideways to faux whisper it during post-workshop socializing at a bar, could know the future of the writer he was dismissing or even his own future. A young person learning their craft is not a dabbler, but an older person is. Dabbler implies lack of skill but more accurately means a lack of success however your slice of the writing world defines it. I mostly write in the literary genre, so success includes prestigious journals, fellowships, and literary awards rather than just book sales and reader popularity. I had to learn all this.

Dabblers are also identified by their ignorance. Those of us who enter the hurly-burly of literary community later in life are strangers in a strange land. We can feel body checked by a world where it helps to know someone except we don't know who that is, where we are routinely embarrassed, even humiliated, and where responses can seem elitist or snobby. I didn't know the language. Slush, partial, a good rejection, and to be solicited had new meanings. I didn't know that when an agent said my work was "quiet," it was her using a kinder term than boring.

I had more success. I began to "know" people, and I cloaked myself in the armor of my publications and awards. I came to like it when someone at a writer gathering made dabbler assumptions about me, only to be brought short when someone else mentioned reading my piece in a fancy journal or congratulated me on a fellowship. Their awkward embarrassment was their own fault and they were in the wrong and it made me happy. But these days I'm trying to be less smug in these situations, since my eagerness to show them up and show off means I'm colluding in the disdain of the dabbler.

The concept of dabbler as a negative has become suspect to me. The poet and essayist Michele Sharp calls supposed dabblers the anti-capitalists of the writing world. Being lost in the creative moment has value for a person and for the world no matter the results. Exploring the craft tools of writing has value no matter the intention, talent, or time spent. The word dabbler could be removed from judgement and become a simple description. Still, it would be inaccurate to label me a dabbler at this point. There are words I've reclaimed with exuberance—dyke, gimp, hag, fat. Dabbler won't be one of them. My moments of creative joy now come from composing a well-worked sentence or when I solve the puzzle of a structure or wake from a dream that gives me the perfect phrase. The old, original thrill that came from the act of putting words on paper and had less to do with the quality of that work is gone. Sometimes I miss it.

Alligator snapping turtles hunt at night in rivers near my house. They weigh two hundred pounds and can bite with the force of a thousand pounds, but mostly don't attack. They prefer the more efficient life of choosing a likely place and lying in wait for curious fish with their jaws spread, unmoving except for the fleshy, bright pink tentacle that wiggles up from their tongues. It's called a lingual lure. At seventy, they and I are coming up on the end stage of our lifespans.

A grant asked how I saw my writing career developing in the next ten years. The question made me laugh. I think they had a younger applicant in mind and didn't know they were asking me what I wanted to get done before I died. But it's a good question, nevertheless. A decade is an arbitrary number of years to choose but a helpful one. With disability there has always been the honing down of what is possible to what is most important. It has always given me clarity and self-governance. With age, a similar focus is required. For the grant application I made a list: complete a second collection of essays, prepare a manuscript of short stories, and publish another novel. But then I wondered how long I will continue to strive in the same unrelenting way. And what it means about legacy and purpose if I stop. And I'm curious about what will emerge to forefront if I clear the space to become my version of an old lady dabbler. These are the questions that will have the most exciting answers.

Turritopsis dohrnii is a jellyfish found in Florida waters. Under stress it will rebirth itself and thus is considered biologically immortal. But I more often consider the live oak tree arching over our house that might be three hundred years old. The trunk shows no signs of heart rot, but the branches fall from time to time. The big ones are called widow-makers. I hope its lifespan surpasses mine, and I'm able to forgo that particular grieving. But perhaps we'll pass on together, the tree and I, each of us having trimmed away the superfluous.

Acknowledgments: This essay was pulled together from panels, workshops, and interviews including the 2019 AWP presentation “Better Later? Success and the Late Blooming Woman Author” moderated by Ellen Meeropol which included Celeste Gainey, Cynthia Robinson Young, and Cynthia Bond as well as myself. Later, this panel formed the basis of an article in the July 2021 Writer’s Chronicle. When Stacy Russo interviewed me for her upcoming anthology BEYOND 70: The Lives of Creative Women it required me to say out loud what it meant to have been a “striver” and now be questioning that. And at the 2021 Sewanee Writers’ Conference I gave a master class titled “Old Broads and Geezers: Coming to Writing Later in Life.” As I had hoped, it was more of a conversation than a lecture. And in preparation, I had posed the topic on social media which elicited a kick ass Facebook thread. To all of these people, thank you.

END OF ESSAY

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