In this, our sixth annual feature on authors whose first books arrived a little later on what we are often led to believe is the timeline for a debut author, we reaffirm our stance on the notion that youth is a bellwether of literary excellence: It is time to reset the clock. Better yet, let’s just throw the clock away. It is well past time to stop using “new and emerging” as a synonym for “young,” to stop considering age as some kind of helpful gauge of new literary talent. Instead, we should marvel at the countless different routes writers take on their way to publication, such as the ones traveled by this year’s 5 Over 50, including seventy-one-year-old debut author Vinod Busjeet, who reminds us that “you’re never too old to publish that debut novel.”

Here are excerpts from the debut books by this year’s 5 Over 50. 

Calabash Stories (Pleiades Press, April 2021) by Jeffrey J. Higa
An Indian Among los Indígenas (Heyday Books, April 2021) by Ursula Pike 
The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child's Memory Book (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press, May 2021) by Megan Culhane Galbraith
Wordly Things (Milkweed Editions, June 2021) by Michael Kleber-Diggs
Silent Winds, Dry Seas (Doubleday, August 2021) by Vinod Busjeet

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Jeffrey J. Higa, author of Calabash Stories published in April by Pleiades Press. 

The Shadow Artist

The Shadow Artist knew himself to be a relic. A walking anachronism in the forgotten uniform of his profession: the black top hat, the formal doublet and waistcoat, the black bowtie. He knew the cartoonish figure he cut, a wandering aristocrat dragged from the previous century, traveling the red dirt roads from sugar plantation to sugar plantation in West Oahu. And yet, all of this—his clothing, his art, his manner—he assumed with a solemnity bordering on the sacred, as if his very existence were some kind of offering to a deity long discredited. This reverence silenced those who might ridicule him, and instead, they looked on in silent curiosity, stopped in the midst of their activities, waiting for him to pass before restarting the sweep of their lives.

He had once made his rounds in the cooling heights of Mānoa, received at front doors and ushered into homes with the fuss due a visiting regent. Girls would don their finest dresses, mothers would slick back the hair of their unruly sons, even fathers would venture down in their Sunday best for a session with the Shadow Artist. He had used the finest French papers then, blanc et noir, ordered from a distributor in Tahiti, and after hanging the white sheets behind his subject, he would create shadow profiles from whatever illumination was available: candle, gas lamp, and later, electricity. He would then sit with the subject and talk with him or her for nearly an hour as he cut constantly, reducing the white life-sized outlines smaller and smaller until the very last minute, when he slipped a black sheet under the white and cut the final portrait. In this way he had been different from his colleagues, competitors who boasted of their speed—“Portraits cut in under ten seconds! Families in under a minute!”—and relied on their flashing scissors and scraps of flying black paper for their drama. The Shadow Artist relied on the subtle drama of transformation, the movement from rough outlines to definitive portraits, from working white to final black. He allowed his subjects to talk about themselves, their words shaping changes to a line here, a minimizing of features there, until he revealed to them the silhouette that they themselves had always desired. 

His colleagues had ridiculed him for it, for in their time, they could make more in fifteen minutes than he could make in a day, but here, now, it was this difference that made him the last. He watched them get squeezed out of the piers where the cruise ships docked, and replaced on the downtown street corners by dabblers in what would come to be known as photography. At first, the Shadow Artist believed that there would always be a place for his skills beside this new dirty science with its arcane processes, stinking chemicals, and exploding elements. But people seemed to clamor for these frozen moments of time, these portraits of merciless detail, so unlike his timeless silhouettes with details combed and edited over with an eye to eternity.

Now all he had left were his weekly appointments at the plantation death houses in the sugarcane fields of West Oahu. These sojourns, another relic from earlier times, were at the behest of the Japanese and Filipino labor unions who paid him a small remuneration for capturing the likenesses and personal histories of their valetudinary members. He mailed this information once a week to the unions, where, eventually, the information would be used in the obituary sections of the Filipino- and Japanese-language newspapers. The Shadow Artist did not know why he was still on the union payroll—even the newspapers would not print silhouettes anymore—but he figured that he was being tolerated out of pity, not unlike the pity shown to the residents of the death houses. These unmarried, family-less men who had worked themselves until they broke and had lost all of their money to whoring, gambling, and foolish investments had nowhere else to go and lived out the remainder of their lives in the communal charity of the death houses. As a younger man, the Shadow Artist had contemplated the death houses with a kind of superstitious dread, but now, nearly the same age as these residents, he approached them with almost an obscene comfort as the final witness to these men whispering out their lives without notice—a fitting metaphor, he felt, for how he and his art would go.

From Calabash Stories by Jeffrey J. Higa. Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey J. Higa. Reprinted by permission of Pleiades Press.  

Read Jeffrey J. Higa’s essay about writing Calabash Stories in the November/December 2021 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

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Ursula Pike, author of An Indian Among los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir, published in April by Heyday Books. (Credit: Stephanie Macias Gibson.)

I arrived in La Paz as four rum and Cokes joined forces with an altitude-induced headache. The other volunteers in the group had accepted the airline’s complimentary drinks, and I assumed this was what people did on international flights. Now I stood in the tiny airport that teetered on the rim of the bowl-shaped valley of the city, feeling exhausted and unprepared. Wood-paneled walls didn’t keep out the chilly air blowing across the high plateau. The T-shirt I had put on the night before in Miami provided no warmth. I forced myself to stand up straight despite wanting to lie down under something soft and warm. It was 7 a.m., and I was thirteen thousand feet above sea level.

I stepped into a quickly forming line leading to a Bolivian immigration official. His pale pockmarked face and broad unsmiling cheeks made me wonder whether he was part Indian. Native. Indigenous. Bolivia had four million Indigenous people. That was almost twice as many Natives as in the United States. In Bolivia, Indians were the majority. I bit my lip to keep from grinning.

The Bolivian official scanned passports without a greeting or a smile, quickly looking at each person’s face, then back at the passport. I stepped in front of the table where he sat and pulled my stiff passport out of the fanny pack my mother had given me before I left Oregon. Behind him was a shawl-sized painting of the red, yellow, and green Bolivian flag.

The other volunteers shuffled toward the immigration official. I had met them only forty-eight hours earlier, but I already knew exactly how many brown people were in the group. It was a tally I always made. A cute Latina from Texas, a midcareer Mexicano, a bleary-eyed Puerto Rican man, an athletic Filipina from California, and a broad-shouldered Filipino who was quiet except for the occasional self-deprecating joke. I didn’t like the term minority, but in this case we were. The remaining twenty volunteers looked like those combinations of Western and Eastern European identities that qualify as white in the United States. Did anyone wonder what I was? My dark brown hair and olive skin gave me a vaguely ethnic look. Teachers and curious grocery clerks usually guessed Hispanic or maybe Greek. My identity was a tailless donkey they had to pin the right kind of brown to.

The immigration official looked up at my face and then down at my passport. I was excited to be standing in front of a Bolivian for the first time, but the formality of the moment made me nervous. His thick eyebrows moved up and down as he scrutinized me. Then he stamped it, handed it back to me, and reached for the next one. That wasn’t what I had expected.

“Thank you for coming to my country. I can tell you are more serious than any of these gringos,” said No One. I looked around at the other officials. Didn’t my sincerity show through my olive skin? Maybe it was too early in the morning. Maybe they were rushed. I waited an extra moment to give him a chance for a second look or a nod of his head. Certainly, the Bolivians would eventually recognize that I was different from the others arriving from the United States that day. They would see that because I was an American Indian, we shared a connection. Coming to a country like Bolivia, a country full of Native people, had been the secret wish held in my heart as I filled in the spaces on the Peace Corps application. Couldn’t the Bolivians see that we shared a connection? Couldn’t they see that my commitment was more meaningful because I was Native? The person behind me sighed, and I reluctantly moved forward.

The training group’s luggage sat in a heap on the floor. My backpack, which had seemed so big in the REI outlet store back in Portland, now looked ridiculously small. The tiny straps and water-resistant pockets held two years’ worth of tightly packed clothes and supplies. As the other volunteers pulled their luggage from the pile, I tried to recall who everyone was. Even after ice-breakers and introductions, I could not remember anyone’s name.

Bursting leather suitcase—the athletic girl from California.

Floral-print handbag—Latina chick from Texas.

Worn North Face backpack—blond guy from Minnesota who had been smiling nonstop for two days.

The woman from Texas pulled another suitcase and more floral-print bags from the pile. Her name was Laura. The impracticality of her luggage choice made me love her. I had found my first friend. I hadn’t known what to bring, but had assumed everyone else had it all figured out. Laura must have brought everything she owned in case she needed it. She was an interior designer from El Paso, which sounded exotic to me, but she assured me it wasn’t. With a Marilyn Monroe figure and the longest eyelashes I had ever seen, she was glamorous and the opposite of what I expected a Peace Corps volunteer to look like.

“Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not fluent in Spanish,” she confessed over beers in Miami. Her mother taught her to speak English without an accent. We’d both been raised by mothers who taught their children to be proud of their heritage without appearing too “ethnic.”

“I won’t, if you don’t tell them I’m too fat,” I said. She laughed long enough to erase the embarrassment attached to the invitation letter informing me that I was three pounds above the acceptable weight for my height. For months, I worried there would be a scale at the airport with a trap door underneath ready to whoosh me back home if the wrong number appeared.

We followed the blond volunteer with the smooth southern drawl who was leading the way into the main part of the terminal. Round faces and short women wearing bulky skirts were everywhere. Long, dark braids hung down from black bowler hats that sat askew on their heads. They were Aymara women, Indigenous celebrities. Like the immigration official, none of them gave me a second look. I hoped that once I was apart from this gaggle of North Americans, I would be noticed.

In the parking lot on the high plateau where the airport stood, the sun felt a few miles away. I shaded my eyes with my hand and squinted to see a rumbling school bus waiting to take us to the Peace Corps offices. That’s when I saw Mt. Illimani. The mountain’s triple peaks loomed over the valley beneath us. It peeped over the rim of La Paz like the Abominable Snowmonster in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special. The wind pushed into the side of my face, whipping my hair from the barrette holding it down. Between the sunshine and the frozen wind, I was now fully awake. My heart beat faster from a combination of altitude and excitement. I was finally standing in Bolivia.

From An Indian Among los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir by Ursula Pike (Heyday, 2021).  

Read Ursula Pike’s essay about writing An Indian Among los Indígenas: A Travel Memoir in the November/December 2021 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

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Megan Culhane Galbraith, author The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book, published by Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press in May 2021. (Credit: Beth Mickalonis)

Prologue

Children play to control the world. When I was a child, I wanted to control my world because as an adoptee I felt I had no control. I created small universes populated by all sorts of figures: friends to have tea with, monsters to defeat, and new miniature realms to explore. It was empowering to make all the decisions, so I built dioramas and imagined myself into another life. It didn’t matter that the stage was tiny. These were worlds into which I could disappear.

I’d just given birth to my first son when I found my birth mother, Ursula. I have changed her name to respect her request for privacy. I was twenty-nine years old. I learned she’d become pregnant with me and was sent away to a Catholic home for unwed mothers—The Guild of the Infant Saviour—in Manhattan.

Years later, I began playing with a tin dollhouse I’d found at a local antique shop; A ’60s-era Louis Marx “Marxie Mansion” of the same time period in which Ursula was sent away to have me. I found a set of dolls from that era called The Campus Cuties. They were made from molded hard plastic like the toy soldiers of the time. I purchased some from eBay and then Etsy. The dolls had vacant stares and bullet bras like tiny, hyper-sexualized blank slates. Little girls had painted some of my favorites: their eyes black blobs; their clothing peeling off. I find them weirdly endearing. Their arms and legs are frozen in position and their names imply the roles society cast for women in the ’50s and ’60s—“Nighty Nite,” “Lodge Girl,” “Stormy Weather,” “Dinner for Two,” and “Shopping Anyone?” If The Campus Cuties were rendered in the flesh they’d have 40-inch inseams, 12-inch waists, and breasts the size of beach balls.

I hadn’t been given dolls to play with as a child—no Barbie, or Baby Alive. I had no doll to feed, nor did I ever change a doll’s diaper. Yet here I was a grown woman (a feminist!) besotted with these booby, leggy, plastic dolls. I was also in love with the tiny, delicate baby dolls. They too were made from plastic, although they were fragile as eggshells and the size of a three-month-old fetus. I collected them with obsessive zeal.

The dollhouse became a visual art project called The Dollhouse. I staged the Cuties and babies in household situations and photographed them from the outside looking in. I realized it was a voyeuristic way of seeing a situation from an angle of removal. It gave me the space I needed to examine my adopted life through a different lens. It emphasized a dystopia perhaps that was right there before my eyes.

I’d been the subject of many photographs—my dad being the photographer—but now, playing with these dolls, I realized I’d also been an object: a doll. Behind the lens of my camera, I am the director of my narrative. I’ve reclaimed a sense of control. Play calmed me down, allowed me to turn off my brain, and when I did, thoughts flooded in; memories returned. I became curiouser and curiouser. I began to ask uncomfortable questions. A window opened to a new way of seeing my reality. Ursula and I have now known each other for nearly twenty-five years, and after hearing her tell me stories—shot through her lens of memory, grief, and trauma—I realize we have more in common than just the circumstance of my birth: we had both disappeared into our fantasies. Mine was tiny, imaginary, and voluntary; hers was all too real.

We’d both been pregnant with shame.

“No one gets a dollhouse to play at reality,” said the child psychologist Erik Erickson, “but reality seeps in everywhere when we play.”

As an adult, I see myself in early photographs and can identify the feeling of being fragile, helpless, and adrift. Like many adoptees, I’ve moved through depression, suicidal ideation, an eating disorder, anxiety, and sexual acting out. I’ve identified gashes of grief and shame: wounds I’d been licking instead of healing.

Adoption is what author Nancy Verrier called “the primal wound,” and the resulting feelings of abandonment, shame, and loss are due to the severed connection between birth mother and child when a baby is taken away.

“Children are innocent before they are corrupted by adults,” said Erickson, “although we know some of them are not and those children—the ones capable of arranging and rearranging the furniture and dolls in any dollhouse—are the most dangerous of all. Power and innocence together are explosive.”

I realize now that I don’t need to apologize for my exist ence.

The Dollhouse became a lens through which I could see my birth mother and myself. I could safely question my personal history and interrogate the myths of adoption, identity, feminism, and home. As an adopted child, I’d felt like a thing to be played with instead of a person with her own identity. I’d felt looked at, but not seen. I liked the idea of reclaiming what home meant to me by playing in my dollhouse because I’d never felt truly at home anywhere, not even in my own body.

Holding those fragile plastic babies in the palm of my hand made me realize I had to hold myself with the same delicacy.

Play helped me unlock ways of expressing the paradox of my identity as an adoptee while exploring intergenerational trauma, erasure, abandonment, and the myths and family lore that factor into many adoptees’ origin stories. The Dollhouse photos in this book are recreating the original photos I curated from my Adopted Child’s Memory Book, among other places. The original photos—like artifacts—appear at the end of each essay.

In The Dollhouse I created a world where women rule on a 1:12-scale: a portal to imagine myself into my birth mother’s life and her into mine.

Our stories are fractured.

Our narratives double back on themselves like an ouro boros swallowing its tail.

From Megan Culhane Galbraith’s The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book, used by permission of Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press.  

Read Megan Culhane Galbraith’s essay about writing The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book in the November/December 2021 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

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Michael Kleber-Diggs, author of Wordly Things, published by Milkweed Editions in June 2021. (Credit: Ayanna Muata)

I Love My Neighbors As I Love Myself

I drive around admonishing strangers.
Hurry up! I tell them. Or, Wear a helmet!
Kids needing parental guidance get it from me.
Teens in black clothes at midnight, sensed
but not seen like owls, receive my words as care.
When I spy an elderly woman with her coat worn loose,
I don’t hesitate to yell: Button up! I want the best
for her. I learned of love in harsh commands, curt
rebukes and tired, ravenous hands. The rearview
holds ancestral eyes, ravaged, not mine; the hard
hand sending the window down isn’t mine—its
mine. Love is history plus desire. Love is dominion.
It is supposed to attack you. When you send it out,
it stings you back like a slap of cold air.
Sometimes it arrives in the form of a man,
driving away, shouting.

Gloria Mundi

Come to my funeral dressed as you
would for an autumn walk in the woods.  

Arrive on your schedule; I give you permission
to be late, even without good cause.

If my day arrives when you had other plans, please
proceed with them instead. Celebrate me

there—keep dancing. Tend your gardens. Live
well. Don’t stop. Think of me forever assigned

to a period, a place, a people. Remember me
in stories—not the first time we met, not the last,

a time in between. Our moment here is small.
I am too—a worldly thing among worldly things—

one part per seven billion. Make me smaller still. 
Repurpose my body. Mix me with soil and seed,

compost for a sapling. Make my remains useful,
wondrous. Let me bloom and recede, grow

and decay, let me be lovely yet
temporal, like memories, like mahogany. 

From Worldly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Michael Kleber-Diggs. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org [4]. 

Read Michael Kleber-Diggs’s essay about writing Worldly Things in the November/December 2021 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.