Introducing The Old and The Young interview series:

Wide-eyed wisdom that helps us keep making things

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

“Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.” – David Bowie

“Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

One way I'm a lot like L.M. Montgomery, the author I wrote about in After Anne, is that I like writing characters who are either old or young. I am at work on a second novel, and my midlife characters have been the hardest to write. As I try to make their lives and struggles important or at least interesting, I am facing all the ways I judge my own life and struggles as not important or at least interesting. Which I then get to work on.

As someone who is about to turn 40 and staring middle age in the face, I see how part of the problem is how myopic and frenetic these years can get. Life can feel like there’s hardly time to complete a conversation or to prepare basic meals, let alone prepare a cup of tea to sip while thinking about what really matters.

Maybe this is why old and young characters feel like such a welcome distraction to me right now. These characters have their heads up, and they are looking wide. I don’t want to live in the past or in the future, but I could really use an extra shot of perspective in my coffee each morning. 

In search of that perspective, I decided it would help to have more voices than just mine on the questions these posts have been circling the past few weeks. So I’m starting an interview series for the next few months focused on old and young connections, including how they feed our creative work. I’ll be asking what people of different ages have learned from their most significant grandparent or elder relationships and what they have learned from their kids or younger acquaintances. I’ll also be asking the questions I've been asking myself in my last few posts (here and here): What would your younger self have to say to you today? And how are you becoming the person your younger self (including your shadow self) needed?

I’ll reflect on each interview in an essay the next week. And I’ll be peppering in essays on other creative sort-y topics too.

I hope you enjoy the wise and wonderful lineup of voices I have in store.