Playing the Age Card

                                                            The Quiltmaker, by Wini Smart

 

I'm changing my life. At the age of 83,  I've put together a bunch of stories and articles I've saved in a file cabinet for years--and published the collection under the title Travelin' Light, which is the name of one of the stories. The book has gone on sale on amazon and the reviews surprised me. Readers saw what I hadn't--that the stories all reflected a point of view.

Obviously it was my own point of view. The stories looked back on a life that had been lived by a woman who came of age as the Feminist Wave of the early 1960s was just beginning to happen. The protagonist was navigating her way against the wall of power of men in business to carve out a place where she could speak. She wrote constantly; she aspired to be an actress, she did what she could in the world of journalism to stake out a place where she could be on a par with men. The stories are not polemic; they combine humor with a special mission of self-discovery--against a backdrop of political and personal transformation.

The response to the book from men in their sixties and seventies was a big surprise to me. Their reviews on amazon pointed out that I was letting them in on the way women think. I hadn't tried to do that. I was only working toward telling stories based on memories of my own life, and revising those memories in order to understand them better myself.

I rewrote the rewrites and revised the revisions from notes I had taken over the years. I decided to record the opus as an audiobook--and that was another surprise! My training and experience as an actor made  reading my stories more vivid to me that writing them had.

And the world of audiobooks is a different world than the world of books. People who don't read books do listen to audiobooks. They need a certain kind of voice and delivery, and, knowing the stories as well as I do makes my voice the right one. It was challenging and enlightening to read into a microphone, and the result is pretty fantastic. I have a web page now, with places to click to order the book or the hear a sample of the audiobook, and a lot of pictures of me and links to other books. The pictures are necessary because I have a brand--the brand is "83-year-old female who's lived an exciting life and has a lot to say to you." 

To get your attention, I'm playing the age card.

Revising Memories

 

My stories lived in cartons, filing cabinets, closets--wherever I might store them in my travels. I've written compulsively for years, never knowing quite why or thinking what might become of my literary efforts. I had self-published a novel and a couple of books of memoirs of my hometown, and a little over a year ago I wrote a long story about my first year in college, not attempting a personal memoir; however, that was what it came out to be, with a few changes of names and revisions of situations. It was not quite enough to stand on its own as a novella, so I added some of the stories that had languished in my files over the years. With the participation of some of my friends I was able to cobble together a collection that had a surprising coherence and garnered praise from my friends who read it.  I called the whole venture "revised memories," and entitled the collection Travelin' Light which was the title of one of the stories. 

It's always a delight when readers praise your work, but I'd have to say my biggest surprise was the unanimous kudos I received from male friends who found something in my stories I didn't realize I had put there. Rex Anderson, a really manly man who is a first-rate writer as well wrote: "I was given a brave look inside a woman’s mind and a glimpse of what it was like to know that the epoch she is drawing from.

"The persona gradually revealed between those covers is of a shy, self-conscious, and sensitive soul attempting to wring worth and glean meaning out of the experiences she was given, a much more tentative personality than the self-assured woman I see on Facebook or I remember from life."Another dear man wrote that he found my stories "enchanting."  And Richard Bey, a former television celebrity and actor, wrote , "Although the stories are imbued with a feminist understanding of women thwarted in the 1950s, no story hits the reader over the head with it. Except possibly the first one which struck me as to self-pitying and obvious. My guess is it’s probably the one that is closest to home for you--still, it’s well written with a fleshed out character. For some reason, the student who wants to grow up to be like her teacher, and that grumpy man eating the hambone are images that still stick with me. On the other hand, the story about the liaison in Paris is a nice travelogue, but adds nothing to the better, deeper story that precedes it." And I got this yesterday from Scott Isenberg, a Facebook friend who was hesitant even to read the book in fear it would be disappointing, 

"Bravo. Well-done. I liked all the stories, and several, 'The Opening Curtain' and 'Breaking the Guitar/Four Days in a Diary'—I thought were superb. 'Breaking the Guitar' was just perfect structurally, jumping back and forth in time, broadening then narrowing then broadening again so that, in the end, the story the reader’s been told is not quite a saga but considerably more than an anecdote—the Goldilocks sweet spot.

"I was quite taken by the title story as well. So much is said with so few words. This story seems to subscribe to Hemingway’s iceberg theory, which is not a bad compliment. Lots of nicely-turned phrases and passages. Clever without their cleverness drawing attention to itself. Examples: 'Spending her days at a keyboard lining up words to tell a city what she thought it needed to know.' And: 'All the years I’d known her she had that thick, straight brown hair and big eyes the blue green color of the Gulf when you get to Florida.' And: 'A piece of my mind or yours?' she said. Homer shrugged. 'You know what I mean,' he said. 'You know just what I mean.' 'Pretty much,' she said. She did not always know what he meant, but it felt good that he always seemed to think she did.

"By the way, 'A Better Life,' although a bit of a departure from the other stories, was a nice stylistic contrast to the other stories, which were either from the point-of-view of a young girl or of an urban sophisticate. In a “Better Life” you execute the story in a way that reminded me of Flannery O’Connor, which I have to think was an influence, and you do it in a way that I believe Flannery would have approved of."

High praise from unexpected places. I'm feeling good today. By sharing my own long-buried inner thoughts I have have exposed some members of the opposite sex to at least one woman's way of thinking.