The stories of the debut authors featured in our fourth annual 5 Over 50 trace the unique, sometimes long, and often winding paths that lead to publication. “There’s rarely an easy path to success,” writes seventy-year-old debut memoirist Peter Kaldheim. “But as I can testify, without persistence there’s no path at all.” And while much attention is paid to how long it has taken (“What kind of nut keeps at it for twenty-seven years without success?” asks fifty-six-year-old debut novelist Julie Langsdorf), it’s important to consider that these first books would not be what they are without the experience—the joys, sorrows, struggles, and achievements—that their authors picked up along the way. These books are special for many reasons, not least of all because of the time—and patience—that went into writing and publishing them.

In our November/December 2019 print issue you can read essays by each of these five authors about their paths to publication and below you can read excerpts from each of their debut books.

White Elephant (Ecco, March 2019) by Julie Langsdorf
Ridiculous Light (Persea Books, April 2019) by Valencia Robin
Cornelius Sky (Kaylie Jones Books, August 2019) by Timothy Brandoff
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (Milkweed Editions, July 2019) by Margaret Renkl
Idiot Wind (Canongate, August 2019) by Peter Kaldheim

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Julie Langsdorf, author of White Elephant, published in March by Ecco. (Credit: Robin B. Langsdorf)

AUGUST 31—MORNING 

Allison Miller lay in bed in the dim light of early morning thinking about sex. It was the hammering on the new house being built next door that was responsible, the rhythmic pound, pound, pounding that ought to have chipped away at any nascent amorous thoughts instead of inspiring them. She slid her hand across the sheet, touching her husband Ted’s thigh, but it was clear from the set of his mouth that sex was not in the offing this morning.

“Do you know what time it is, Al?”

The question was rhetorical. Their digital clock was of the large-numeral variety, designed for people like them, in their forties, eyes just beginning to go.

“We hardly need the alarm clock anymore, Cox is so loud,” Ted said. The revving of a chain saw made him leap out of bed as if stung. He opened the window—with effort. The Millers’ house was old and its parts had settled.

They’d lost the battle for the trees. Ted couldn’t accept it. Nick Cox, neighbor and builder, had been given the go-ahead to cut down more trees on the property next door. The town only had jurisdiction over trees that were twenty inches in diameter or more. There were a surprising number of these junior, cut-down-able-size trees on Cox’s property, a small forest that had sprung up over the years—trees not strong enough for climbing or genetically programmed to offer fruit or flowers, but still welcome for providing a little buffer of green between the Millers and the adjacent property.

Allison watched Ted with fond familiarity, the gentle curve of his rear end and the rush of red in his neck from the effort of opening the window. She waited for him to yell, to open his mouth and to really let loose. He’d threatened so many times.

She imagined Nick Cox in his jeans and hard hat, his blue eyes sparking as he yelled back. She pictured the two of them engaging in a twenty-first-century duel, fought across the yards, a battle of words over the fortress Nick was building to their left, a four-story monolith complete with battlements and a double front door that begged for attending knights in armor. It was even bigger than the faux stone castle he’d built to the right, with its many turrets and spires, where Nick, his wife, Kaye, and their two pretty blond children lived. One half-expected to see fireworks shooting into the sky above the house—if one could see the sky above from inside the Millers’, which one no longer could. Allison and Ted’s little house was wedged between the two, a pebble amid boulders.

In the meantime Tunlaw Place was in disarray, the air tinged with the stench of diesel. A construction truck and a dumpster were parked along the curb, along with Nick’s little yellow bulldozer, which looked like a brightly painted toy.

Allison closed her eyes and stretched her arms and legs toward all four corners of the bed imagining that she—not the neighborhood—was the one at stake, she the damsel in distress, she the one for whom Ted would slay Nick Cox. Or vice versa. The winner would bed her. She was ready to make the sacrifice.

Ted stood at the window, on the verge of shouting. Allison waited, excited at the prospect. Today, it was finally going to happen. Today, blood would be spilled. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs, waiting, waiting—but Ted seemed to think better of it. He slammed the window shut and stomped off to the shower.

The alarm beeped then, an unrelenting tone that increased in volume until Allison silenced it with the flat of her palm. She set off to face the last day of August. A day that was neither summer nor fall. A day neither here nor there. A day that promised to be nothing more than betwixt and between—just like she was, Allison thought. Just like her.

From the book White Elephant by Julie Langsdorf. Copyright © 2019 by Julie Langsdorf. Published on March 26, 2019 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

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Valencia Robin, author of Ridiculous Light, published in April by Persea Books. (Credit: Jennifer Walkowiak)

Crash

What she hates is when there’s a form
that asks his name, how

without warning,
she’s no longer the sleepy driver

of her life, how that one word,
Father,

will muck up the autopilot,
a red light where there wasn’t

even a stop sign, a head-on collision
with, of all people, herself, how

even now, knowing his name, 
she leaves the space blank.

Semester Abroad

A room in a house just outside of Paris,
no idea I’d be sharing the bath with José, a little Brazilian
who could’ve passed for one of my cousins, that particular mix
of African, Cherokee and empire. I couldn’t understand a word he said,
French poured through a Portuguese accent, plus the landlady
didn’t like him, all I needed to justify my annoyance
of the bathroom situation. But weeks in and the landlady en vacance,
the power went out, so José lit candles, invited me to share
his pasta with crème fraiche. He’d never met his father
either, though his mother’s boyfriend bought him art supplies,
paid for drawing classes. I was surprised he was vegetarian, 
too, that French was his third language, that I was the provincial.
Nothing happened between us, not even after the bottle of Beaujolais, 
not even though I’d been looking for someone to save me
from being bored and lonely in Paris of all places,
only our shadows touching across the walls of that tiny kitchen,
city lights blinking through the foggy window and the realization
that I was no longer translating each word he said, that I understood
him, but even stranger, us—our faces, our very names
the spoils of conquest—our passports and the languages
we spoke and why, our fathers and fathers’ fathers, the back story
of millions whittled down to a few pages in high school,
the cowboy and Indian movies my mother refused to stop watching,
that I’d rent for her years later when she was dying,
flying across the Atlantic over the bones of God knows how many Africans
and forgetting to even look down, to remember them if only for a few seconds.
Yes, the unimaginable absence and lack and yet the unknown alive
in that kitchen, too, its contradictions, its silences
and hysterics, the blackness in our voices as we laughed
and talked through the night—a keening, but also a kind of space,
a clearing we could move through.

From Ridiculous Light by Valencia Robin. Copyright © 2019 by Valencia Robin. Used by permission of Persea Books, Inc. (New York)

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Timothy Brandoff, author of Cornelius Sky, published in August by Akashic Books. (Credit: Reuben Radding)

He sat alone in the dark, save for the snow on the television screen. He got to his feet and considered this question: how does a nonalcoholic get ready for bed? He decided to brush his teeth. He reserved toothbrushing for the morning as a rule, but given the night’s events he thought he’d brush before bed as a demonstration of his nonalcoholic nature. People of an alcoholic nature go to bed without brushing, he figured, and given the fact that he was not an alcoholic, he probably should brush. And then he thought, What else does a person who’s not an alcoholic do? His mind drew a blank. Then he thought, I know what I can do, I can prepare my clothes for the morning. I can lay my clothes out so when I wake up I know what I’m going to wear. People of nonalcoholic natures do such things. If I’m not an alcoholic, he thought, and I’m not, I can lay my clothes out like a nonalcoholic in preparation for tomorrow’s nonalcoholic day. Granted, I like to drink. Vic Morrow probably enjoys a drink himself. He got up and looked at his clothes in the closet and thought, What a strange thing to do, and decided against it. I’m not going to put my clothes out for tomorrow just to prove I’m not an alcoholic. If I’m not an alcoholic, why do I have to prove it? I don’t have to prove my nonalcoholic nature to anybody. And who would I be proving it to anyway? And even if I am an alkie, whose business is that? 

They had tried to help his father, those men in suits. They came up to the house, spoke to his mother, the half-heard conversations lodged in Connie’s memory. A strange word when you’re seven years old: anonymous. Their clean-shaven faces, their pressed suits, a lucidity in the eye. Whispered words between his mother and those men, seeping through fabric hanging from doorway curtain rods, one doorless doorway after the next in those railroad flats, curtain after curtain through which muffled words floated.

Did they know Connie’s father killed himself? Of course they knew. They came to the house, tried to help, prior to the move uptown. They knew Sammy. And then, back in Chelsea, after the six-month nightmare that was Harlem, they paid Connie and his siblings special attention. They bought out Connie’s stack of newspapers nightly, tipped him heavily, gave him cold bottles of Coca-Cola from the red machine that tasted so good. Those men in suits, that AA clubhouse right there on 24th, they tried, didn’t they? 

Motherfuckers at that diner, and David playing dumb. Go ahead, David, keep playing dumb, see what happens. 

He decided on some light housecleaning like a nonalcoholic might. He picked up the ashtray, escorted it across the room, and was going to dump its contents out the window—but caught himself about to perform the act of an alcoholic. Your first night in the house and you want to dump your ashtray directly over the entranceway? 

He laid down and prayed aloud: “Lord God Father, please hear my prayer. Bless Maureen and Artie and Stevie, grant them peace and watch over them, Father.” He called his god Father because he liked it that way. He never did have too much of an earthly father. 

That man for a time up in Harlem, after Sammy and Edward passed, the man who taught Connie how to find the constellations in the sky. From that spot in St. Nicolas Park, surrounded by the night, away from the streetlamps (to let the stars shine more bright, the man said). The man’s breath on Connie’s neck, crouching behind him, the heaviness of an arm on Connie’s shoulder. The smell of talc on the man, a porkpie hat on his head. Did the man show Connie care and concern—was he really about astronomy? Holding Connie in a specific manner by the arms, directing his body to face a certain angle, to line up a constellation in the sky. The guy had his hands on me quite a bit: like that priest who taught me how to make free throws. They always position themselves behind you, these short eyes. They sure know how to pick out a fatherless kid, let me tell you. Eagle eyes for the fatherless ones. See a kid with no father coming a mile off, a short eyes can. The special talent of any moderately gifted pedophile. 

I cannot picture life without it. He tried to feel out in his mind for an image of himself as a person who did not drink, and nothing came. The construct of a character named Connie Sky who lived a sober life eluded him, terrified him down to the ground, made him shudder.

An alcoholic walks into a bar. 

He felt his consciousness abandoning itself, the gears of his thoughts slipping, failing to catch altogether, and his last internal ramble came as a refrain, a fervent appeal tinged by the martyrdom of his suffering. 

Let me go, Connie’s heart cried, let me go, let me go.

Excerpted from the novel Cornelius Sky, by Timothy Brandoff. Used with the permission of the author and Akashic Books (akashicbooks.com [3]).

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Margaret Renkl, author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, published in July by Milkweed Editions. (Credit: Heidi Ross)

Barney Beagle Plays Baseball

BIRMINGHAM, 1968

It was already dark outside but not quite suppertime, late in the year we moved to Birmingham, and I don’t know why I was alone with my mother in the grocery store. If my brother and sister weren’t tagging along too, then my father must have been at home with them, but if Daddy was home, why did I come along with Mama to the Piggly Wiggly at the very worst time of day, when the store was swamped with husbands stopping on the way home from work to pick up the one missing item their wives needed for supper? I might never have been in the Piggly Wiggly at night before, but I knew that men did not understand the rules of the grocery store, did not understand which direction to push the cart to stay in the flow of traffic, did not recognize that standing perplexed in the middle of the aisle is bad grocery store citizenship, especially right at suppertime.

My mother was surely in a hurry. Maybe I was slowing her down as she tried to zip around the bewildered men standing despondent among the canned goods, and maybe she sent me off to pass the time in the corner of the store where books and toys were displayed. Or maybe I wandered off on my own, in those days of retail on a human scale and no thought at all that kidnappers could be lurking in the Piggly Wiggly.

The toys were a familiar, paltry offering—dusty cellophane packages of jacks and Silly Putty eggs and paddleballs and green army men—but the books were mostly new to me. The few children’s books at our house belonged to an old-fashioned era of read-aloud classics, fairy tales and nursery rhymes and Bible stories and my own favorite, Poems of Childhood. The Piggly Wiggly display featured what seemed to be a vast array of Little Golden Books and early readers. I reached for a green book with a picture in the foreground of a dog wearing a cap turned sideways between its floppy ears. We didn’t have a dog ourselves. I had not yet made friends in our new city, and I wanted a dog more than I wanted anything.

I scanned the rest of the book jacket, pausing at the picture of boys in baseball uniforms. I had heard of baseball, but I’d never seen a game, in person or on TV, and did not recognize the outfits the boys were wearing. Why were these boys wearing pajamas outside on the grass? I only glanced at the words at the top of the book jacket. I was learning in first grade the sounds that letters make, but I could not yet read, and words in a book meant nothing to me.

But then, as I stood in the bright light of the grocery store with darkness pooling outside, unable to reach me, the letters on the cover of that book suddenly untangled themselves into words: Barney. Beagle. Plays. Base. Ball. Barney Beagle Plays Baseball. Oh, I remember thinking. Oh, it’s about a dog who plays baseball, and opening the book to see what happened. And only then did I realize I was actually reading the words. I was reading! I went racing to find Mama, dodging despairing fathers peering at can labels, to show her how I could sound out all the words on every page and understand each one. And she was so happy about my happiness that she told me we could bring the book home, even though we had no money at all, and it had not even crossed my mind that she might buy it for me.

From Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Margaret Renkl. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. [5]