Coming May 2024
Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging
"How do women artists and writers of a certain age defy prescribed identities and roles to sustain their creativity?"
In Old Enough, twenty-one women artists and writers write about the experience of aging. Gay, straight, unmarried, partnered, widowed, Black, white, Latinx, retired, and working, these women are not squeamish about the challenges of growing older, including ageism, health concerns, and loss. And they are frank about how received notions of female aging can be restrictive and diminishing. But in lyrical, sometimes wry, often inspiring essays they explore what growing older can offer: self-knowledge, insight, and acceptance. Striking portraits by award-winning photographer Carolyn Sherer, who is also a contributor to the volume, accompany each essay.
At the heart of this invigorating collection is the bold championing of creative practice. Some contributors look back to their girlhood to recall their first powerful connections to art, while others show how they have refreshed their commitment to maintaining a practice. However, all are still driven to create and to investigate, to stay committed to the processes that work while finding new ways to stay creatively alive. Old Enough aims to honor the limitless variety, depth, and scope of being “old enough” and will resonate with readers who want to understand and find purpose, meaning, and comradery in their creative journey.
Reviews
This book is a gift! It confronts clichéd thinking about “women of a certain age” with grace, humor, and candor. The idea that our creative pursuits can continue to nurture the best in ourselves and others, especially as we age, is inspirational.
As a working journalist, mother, wife, and daughter (and Southerner) who has just rounded 60, I want to thank these remarkable women for sharing their beautiful stories and encouraging us to embrace the now, and beyond.
—Debbie Elliott, National Correspondent, NPR News
This beautiful collection of essays captures the process of aging from multiple points of view. Its wise writers can help us all navigate aging with courage, wisdom, and joy.
—Mary Pipher, author of A Life in Light and Women Rowing North
Old Enough is an extraordinary collection of observations, musings and hard-earned insights about creativity and aging from an equally extraordinary group of diverse, bold and brilliant women writers and artists—women who once blazed their own trail and now pause to reflect on the journey. Carolyn Sherer's stunningly beautiful photographs of the contributors, which accompany each piece, is not only a delightful surprise but also a creative touch which adds an intimacy and truth to the individual stories. This is a book to cherish, to hold close and contemplate, then to recommend to others: this one is a must-read. Whether their own journey is just beginning or in progress, they will thank you for it.
—Cassandra King, award-winning author of Tell Me a Story: My Life with Pat Conroy
In Old Enough, twenty-one creative women “of a certain age”—writers, painters, sculptors, a quilter, a photographer and a singer-songwriter, ages 57-87—share their stories about aging, illness, caretaking, and loss, and permission to carry “play” from their childhoods into their adult and older lives. There are amazing essays here, about following your obsessions but keeping your balance, and about redefining, redoing, and finding purpose beyond the roles and structures we’ve used to keep ourselves safe. It’s all here, y’all—wisdom captured in prose that flows like honey while cutting through tough topics with literary candor.
—Susan Cushman, editor of A Second Blooming: Becoming the Women We Are Meant to Be and Southern Writers on Writing
The spark may start early, but the real fireworks in late-life artists explode with the focus of age. Couldn't they have done it earlier? If this or that had happened in their lives, couldn't they have made their art when young? The answer is a resounding 'No.' Experience leads to experiment. 'What-others-want-me-to-do' fades in the glow of the finally acknowledged inner drive that fosters the brilliance of at last being splendidly Old Enough.
—Molly Peacock, author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
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