Old Enough

Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging

Edited by Jay Lamar and Jennifer Horne

With Katie Lamar Jackson and Wendy Reed

Photographs by Carolyn Sherer

University of Georgia Press, 2024

Hardback: $34.95

Genre: Essay

Reviewed by Kerry Madden-Lunsford

I left my family in California in 2009 when I accepted a job at UAB teaching creative writing as the freelance life was not conducive to mounting college tuitions for our kids. I spent my first night in Birmingham in a new apartment on an air mattress with lawn chairs in the living room and an ironing board as a makeshift coffee table, quite certain I’d made a horrible decision. I couldn’t stop crying, so I decided I would drop off a note of sincere apology at the English Department for all their trouble and hit the road back west with air mattress, lawn chairs, and ironing board to my husband and family. Our fifth grader had wanted to stay in LA so she could graduate from the same elementary school where my husband taught, since this kid had been in that school since kindergarten. Our older two children were in college, a freshman and senior at universities on opposite coasts. 

But when I woke the next morning, I made coffee and thought I should at least teach for a week. Then I could go home. 

In a way, the collection, Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity, is like coming home to a celebration of stories of women who had to make impossible choices, live invisible lives, face illnesses, losses, financial struggles, family demands, and in every single essay, we find a home to step inside these wildly beautiful narratives and listen to the 21 stories of writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, quilters, and poets who have fully embraced their lives as creative artists in all fields and experiences. 

Or as self-described revolutionary poet Jacqueline Allen Trimble put it in her powerful essay, “I Have Seen the Promised Land and It Is Me,” when she writes of becoming even more creative with age: “I am a teller of truth, a witch, an oracle. If I claim a cloak of invisibility, it will be my superpower. Who will see me coming, looking all homey, until they feel the kick of my comfortable stiletto hit their gut?” 

The collection, Old Enough, opens with a sacred communion at the deathbed of a beloved father who receives his last request – a spoonful of coffee and piece of buttery Cuban bread administered by a loving daughter, exhausted and grieving by what is coming, a kind of last rites rendered with such love. 

This essay, “On the Art of Dying” by Carmen Agra Deedy, is only the first in this collection that makes the reader feel as if they are sitting across from trusted, cherished, and often hilarious friends, imparting stories told with urgency, honesty, and vulnerability, laced with wisdom and humor, tinged with deep layers of beauty in the chaos of figuring out how to live a life of creativity, curiosity, and purpose. They don’t leave the ugly voices of guilt or self-doubt or fear on the cutting floor either but face it all head-on in these essays about what it’s like to postpone, or worse, possibly talk yourself out of a dream.

“Grown-ass Latinas often call each other vieja. Just think of it as the women’s equivalent of dude,” writes Cuban author Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, whose essay “Here’s Looking at You – Fragments of an Older Southern Latinx Woman” describes being exiled to the badlands of Western Pennsylvania for eight years as the only Latinx professor at her university and the sweet relief of coming home to Florida and being addressed in Spanish again by strangers in the grocery store.

Janisse Ray writes with piercing clarity about “growing invisible” in so many ways as a writer and a woman. Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, writes in “A Question I Wrestle With,” of the glory years of her career, followed by dry spells, and asks the critical question many of us ponder, carving out a life of creativity and purpose: “What should I do with the last part of my life?” 

This book isn’t only for women of a certain age, but instead, it’s for anyone who has imagined a life where asking permission isn’t a requirement to make the most of one’s own precious time. The essays are written by a group of contributors from all walks of life, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation who have been there, quietly or not, raising children or not, forging their own paths over decades of creating books, songs, paintings, quilts, photography, and much more.

“Whenever possible, put your creativity first; if you don’t, unless you are very disciplined, it will come last.” These are the wise words that so many of us mean to heed with the best of intentions, and artist Patricia Ellisor Gaines reminds us of this in her beautiful essay, “The Mystery of Creativity and the Unmasking of Beauty.” 

Angela Jackson-Brown, who decided to focus on raising her son first before embracing writing “with no more excuses,” shares in her essay “Finding the Words: Writing Past the Age of Fifty” how she greets her muse each morning with the words, “Welcome. I am so glad you decided to visit me today.” 

“What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?” by Patti Callahan Henry takes us back to a long-ago afternoon between a mother and child whose reading time is sacred, and a single question changes everything.

From Jeanie Thompson’s deep dive into the life of Helen Keller through poetry to Patricia Foster’s tender care of her 97-year-old mother to Wendy Reed’s rescue of a ruby-throated hummingbird and her own funny-not-funny medical odyssey in the exam rooms of Alabama to Yvonne Wells’ journey of storytelling quilts to Mary Gauthier’s courageous move to sobriety and to Nashville to be a singer-songwriter at age forty to photographer Carolyn Sherer’s creating and nurturing an LBGTQ community in Alabama for decades as well as the first exhibit of its kind at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, “Living in Limbo: Lesbian Families in the Deep South,” to the hauntingly beautiful illustrations of Lila Quintero Weaver’s “Wet Leaves” to Nevin Mercede’s environmental justice work in Central Florida to Anne Strand’s elegy on illness and COVID to Jennifer’s Horne’s essay about summoning the voice of her fierce and funny eight-year-old self in her essay, “Past It,” which sums up the entire book in a way. 

All these contributors are long past waiting for permission or the right time or divine inspiration to strike. Reading their luminous words is like experiencing the breadth of life’s possibilities in one intimate, transcendent evening of conversation. It’s like experiencing “everything everywhere all at once,” to quote the recent film featuring Michelle Yeoh.

In Sara Garden Armstrong’s “A Movement of Time,” she writes: “I don’t have time to be old; I have too much to do.” 

The comedian, Kathleen Madigan, said recently she never could understand how producers insisted on material that catered to the 18-25 male audience because, as Madigan said, “What do they got? They got nothing.” 

Well, the contributors of Old Enough have everything, and they worked for every bit of it. Their time is urgent, and their time is now, and they show us how they did it and how they are continuing to do it. This glorious collection of essays is a roadmap, a joyful celebration, and an invitation to ask the universal question when considering time and art and creativity.

What are you waiting for?  

Kerry Madden-Lunsford is the author of the forthcoming middle-grade novel, Werewolf Hamlet, Charlesbridge Moves. She wrote the picture book Ernestine’s Milky Way, Random House Studios (originally published by Schwartz & Wade). She also wrote Maggie Valley Trilogy for children, which includes Gentle’s Holler, Louisiana’s Song, and Jessie’s Mountain, published by Viking Books for Young Readers. Her first novel, Offsides, (Morrow) was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age. Her book Up Close Harper Lee made Booklist’s Ten Top Biographies of 2009 for Youth. Her first picture book, Nothing Fancy About Kathryn and Charlie, about Kathryn Tucker Windham and Charlie Lucas, was illustrated by her daughter, Lucy, and published by Mockingbird Publishers. Kerry is a regular contributor to the LA Times OpEd Page. She teaches Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, and Writing for Children in the Creative Writing Program at UAB. The mother of three adult children, she divides her time between Birmingham and Los Angeles.

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https://www.uab.edu/cas/english/people/faculty/kerry-madden-lunsford