DON'T CRY OVER SPILT SHRIMP - Umberto Tosi

The other night I found myself in a crush of shoppers at a big-top market. Its cavernous space cheerfully illuminated: Murmurs blended into the ambient up-music amid a kaleidoscope of kiosks, redolent with exotic victuals. I was bringing an order of barbecued prawns to my inamorata and a couple of friends who sat at a food court table chatting merrily.

As I approached, someone informed me that I had dropped something. Shrimp were falling from the soggy bottom of my bag, one-by-one, leaving a trail behind me. Then the bag gave way and the rest plopped to the tiled floor in a slippery mess at my feet. There was a hush. People tried not to stare. No use attempting to salvage anything.

I could just hear, “Clean-up on aisle 4,” over the loudspeakers.

“Tooozi again! Get that Toozi off the court!” I remembered my red-faced high school basketball coach blowing his whistle and yanking me out of practice games for passing the ball to opposing players.

I grinned feebly at my friends and went back for more shrimp. On my return, the same thing happened. Jumbo shrimp all over the floor! Back for another order. Same thing. On and on, over and over: bright pink prawns and gooey orange sauce everywhere!

UT confers with staff

Then I woke up.

Just like writing, I thought.

It was a typical anxiety dream, of course. With seafood – but at least I still had pants on.

Another May and I begin my 80th year on this iffy green earth.

Even in reasonably good health – knock wood – I'm wondering how many more books, short stories and shrimp I can bring to the table before the Big Top closes down.

Rationally, I realize that such thoughts are pointless – scripted neurotic distractions from my inner anti-writer. I could just as easily been hit by a bus after high school basketball practice on my 17th birthday. But that was when I still thought myself immortal.

The merry month of May also marks a year that I have been privileged be a regular with this accomplished, innovative circle of 29 indie writer-publishers at Authors Electric.

Conclusion: One is never too old for new beginnings.

Pablo Picasso
Self-Portrait,
as a young genius, 1907

I haven't been exactly a prolific writer – not of fiction anyway. I didn't undertake the art of storytelling in earnest until seven years ago. Even pro-rating that, I can't say I've filled bookshelves.

Not that I'm new to writing itself. But decades of journalism, feature writing and other nonfiction forays in print and later online have proved a mixed blessing when it comes to storytelling. I gained confidence or temerity, discipline or rigidity, clarity or obviousness, authenticity or preoccupation with petty details, passion or obsessive-compulsive disorder – all depending on the day of the week and how I'm doing with a given story.

Paradoxically, though "the days grow short when you reach September," as the classic song by Kurt Weill says, I have a lot more time to write creatively now in my dotage than I did in my younger days behind various desks woking to keep the lights burning and kids fed best I could.

I've read up on late bloomers – a popular subject among aging baby boomers looking for a second act. Me? I'm on my third act. We're familiar with the roll call. Joseph Conrad wrote his greatest masterpieces between the ages of 40 and 50 as a retired merchant seaman.

The list of revered writers who started late and/or did their most memorable work later in life is impressive – George Eliot, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Laura Engalls, Orwell, Anthony Burgess, Bram Stoker, Robert Frost, Frank McCort, Toni Morrison, Charles Bukowski, Helen De Witt, Deborah Eisenberg, George Saunders to name a few.

And there are the directors who've given us their best films in later life - Ang Lee, Hitchcock, Terry Gilliam and Hayao Miyazaki for examples. And consider the late-blooming artists:  Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Louise Bourgeois, Bill Traylor, Mary Delany and Noah Purifoy and so on. The Internet abounds with such lists to buoy the spirits of aging surfers, it seems.

George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans)

It gets a bit harder to find examples of those doing their best work well past 70 like Verdi or Delany. But 70 is the new 40, or something like that. Right?

Malcolm Gladwell did a fine job sorting myths from the actualities of creativity and age in his 2008 New Yorker piece, Late Bloomers. “Genius, in the popular mind, is inextricably tied up with precocity,” Gladwell wrote. “Doing something truly creative, we're inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth” (I could use a little more of that energy myself, I thought, reading Gladwell's piece.) 

He cites the “incandescent prodigy” of Picasso and, of course, Mozart. Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at 25, Melville, turned out a book a year through his 20s, T.S. Eliot wrote The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (about getting old) at all of 23.

Paul Cézanne
Self Portrait 1880

On the other hand, Gladwell says that proves nothing. He goes on to cite plenty of plodding, experimenting, persistent, artists like Cézanne who created their most powerful works late in life. In typical nerdy Gladwell fashion, he points to corroborative statistical studies, most notably, that of University of Chicago economist David Galenson, author of Old Masters & Young Geniuses.

I was a newspaper reporter working with daily deadlines on whatever my editor assigned when I was in my 20s and early 30s. Comparing that with my writing routine today would be apples and oranges – or fast food and pot roast.

My inamorata, artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, one of whose many symbolist images graced the cover of Ophelia Rising,  continues through her seventies creating and showing her fantastical narrative paintings. We discuss issues of age and creativity a lot, alternatively talking each other down from the occasional edges of frustration and discouragement endemic to our respective trades. She could write a book on the subject, and in fact, has taught drawing to adult students – many of them reviving creative callings at midlife – for many years at Evanston Art Center just north of Chicago.

Eleanor Spiess-Ferris

In many ways, it's no different now than when I was younger. Half the time I think I don't know what I'm doing. The other half I believe I'm an impostor with a soggy bag of barbecued prawns, who is about to lose it. But I keep dreaming and going back for more.

A few days ago, a dear friend, writer, designer, marketing consultant Marsha Coupe, sent me a quote from Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost that sums up what writers of any age need:

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”

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Umberto Tosi is author of Ophelia Rising, Milagro on 34th Street and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been published in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. During the 1980s and 90s, he played with several improvisational theater groups in Northern California, while editor of San Francisco magazine. He has written extensively for newspapers and periodicals nationally.