Dear writer, the despair of a dream that will seemingly never be realized is real,” writes Alma García in her essay for our eighth annual celebration of debut authors over fifty who have recently published their first books. The essays that follow encompass tales of fate—both encouragements and setbacks—as well as stories of commitment, hope, nerve, confrontation, transformation, triumph, travel, revision, luck, self-confidence, and, of course, writing, always back to the practice of writing, which is necessary to pursue one’s work over the years, come what may. These first-time authors, who range from their early fifties to early seventies, remind us that time, and its inevitable passage, is a gift that enriches our personal and literary lives and that age can make us both robust and nimble, ready to persevere, to put words on the page.    

Alma García, author of All That Rises (University of Arizona Press) 
Bernardine “Dine” Watson, author of Transplant (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) 
Tommy Archuleta, author of Susto (Center for Literary Publishing) 
Chin-Sun Lee, author of Upcountry (Unnamed Press)
Donna Spruijt-Metz, author of General Release From the Beginning of the World (Parlor Press)

Alma García 

Age: 52. Residence: Seattle. Book: All That Rises (University of Arizona Press, October 2023), a novel exploring the entanglement of two neighboring families in El Paso, Texas, revealing unexpected alliances and the permeability of presumedly fixed boundaries as the cast of characters search for where they belong in the confluence of history, border politics, their homes, and the outside world. Agent: Stuart Bernstein. Editor: Rigoberto González.

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I am one of those people who was pretty much born a writer. I wrote my first story in kindergarten. By high school I’d cemented my reputation as that girl who writes, and exactly no one was surprised when I went on to double major in creative writing and journalism in college. I planned to have a first novel written—and published, naturally!—by the age of twenty-five.

When that age came and went I acknowledged I was a bit behind. It was understandable. I was working full-time as a journalist, which was a sure recipe for mental exhaustion, and so eventually I made a leap of faith, left my job, and entered an MFA program. By my program’s end my first story was published. With great energy I began to assemble a story collection. As my collection neared completion, close to seven years in the making, I landed my agent in a fairy-tale scenario, when—prompted by one of his clients, whom I’d never met but who had read my work—he contacted me and asked if I had a book in the hopper. Did I ever.

The book was not ready, my agent very kindly informed me. The book really needed to be a novel. Deep in the pit of my intuition, I knew he was right. Slowly, painfully, I started over.

By this time I was married. A cross-country move followed soon after, then motherhood, and a serious back injury. I could only manage a trickle of writing, instead of a torrent, through those years, but I was always creeping through my novel’s draft. Until, at long last, it was done.

When the book went out on submission to the Big Five, it was rejected. Roundly. Everywhere. What followed over the next three years was a revision so massive, I eliminated a whole book’s worth of material. It went out on a second round of submissions. Hope again inflated my heart.

Crickets. Did publishers find the novel’s border setting and culture too unfamiliar? I wondered. Did they struggle with characters who unapologetically spoke English and untranslated Spanish in the same breath? Was it too political? Not political enough? Or was it just…me?

Dear writer, the despair of a dream that will seemingly never be realized is real. So is the embarrassment you feel (oh, who are we kidding: It’s humiliation) when some of the people in your life say, “You’re still working on that thing?” So, too, is the obstinate, hubristic, instinctual understanding that—even if you haven’t yet found the key that will unlock it—there is still something worthwhile about your story.

Sometimes hope will unfurl its tendrils the moment you let go of it. A year or so into a new writing project, when my agent called with the astonishing news that the University of Arizona Press wanted to publish my novel, we both erupted with joy. The series editor, Rigoberto González, understood the book. On its own terms. Completely.

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Writing a book over a very long time is sometimes a deadly enterprise. Ideas drift. The end point disappears. A lack of urgency can overtake you. You might find yourself appalled when you pass your own characters in age. You become aware of your own mortality, of the soul-sucking thought that your best creative years already might be behind you.

But if you listen quietly, sometimes you’ll hear the truth of your own creative being whispering in your ear. The truth is, no matter my proclivities or achievements or intentions, I didn’t have the ability to write my novel until I wrote it—three times, over the course of almost two decades. The truth is, the writing leads you back to yourself and to the knowledge of who you have become because of it. The writing leads you to what never could have been written without your life experiences and to what you can offer those who are coming up behind you, for you are wiser now than you once were.

When you come to the end of something, dear writer, whether or not it’s how you hoped it might end, no matter your age when you arrive, you know what you have? A beginning—one that’s as mysterious and wild and wide-open as you want it to be.

Bernardine “Dine” Watson

Age: 72. Residence: Washington, D.C. Book: Transplant (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, October 2023), a memoir about becoming and overcoming, about one woman’s resilient journey in fighting kidney disease, braiding together the underbelly of the American health care system with a story of love and family. Agent: None. Editors: Caroline Bock and Kathleen Wheaton.

In 1963, when I was in sixth grade, I wrote my school’s Christmas play, which was performed in the auditorium to great applause from students, teachers, and parents. Everyone congratulated my family for having a “budding writer” on their hands.

My parents were proud of me, and I remember being quite proud of myself. I was, however, from a poor, Black community in South Philadelphia. Being a “good writer” meant little. There were no creative writing classes in my neighborhood to nurture my talent. While learning was important in my family, and my parents did their best to make sure their five children received good public-school educations, attending college, where I might pursue my writing, was hardly a given. After high school, I went to Community College of Philadelphia to study secretarial sciences so I could get a “good job.”

Later in 1971 fate intervened to hand me what seemed like a major setback; my son, Robert, was born before I was out of my teens. But one look into my baby’s face only made me determined to improve my life. Fortunately, the early 1970s came on the heels of LBJ’s Great Society, the largest expansion of social programs in the country since FDR’s New Deal. I took advantage of every possible program that was still in place and radically changed my trajectory. I left my secretarial studies, transferred to Temple University, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in urban studies. With this additional education I launched a successful career in the social-policy field, which catapulted me into the middle class.

In the social-policy world, having good writing skills meant a lot. Over the years I wrote proposals, concept papers, and articles for foundations, think tanks, nonprofits, and newspapers. Still, I never considered myself a “real” writer, or experienced the pride I felt in sixth grade when I wrote the Christmas play. Back then I dreamed of being a published author of plays, books, and poems—whatever my heart desired. But when I became an adult, my writing meant a steady income so I could care for my son, and employer-sponsored health insurance when, as fate would have it, I developed a rare kidney disease. At that point I all but forgot about my dreams.

However, by 2013, at age 62, I was in an entirely different situation. My son was an adult. I was retired, recuperating from a second kidney transplant, and married to a loving, supportive man. Over dinner one evening, a new friend and I were exchanging stories about our lives. As I told her about my struggles with a kidney disease that primarily affects Black people, my five years on dialysis, and my kidney transplants, her eyes widened. “You should write a book about your experiences. You’re able to do that now.”

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I often wonder if fate spoke through my friend that evening and once again changed my life’s direction. Ten years after the portentous conversation with my friend, and sixty years after my writing debut at twelve years old, my memoir, Transplant, is being published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House.

I’ve traveled a long, often tough road to achieve my dream, sometimes impeded by my own life circumstances, but also by the publishing industry. Numerous agents declined to represent me, saying that, while they liked Transplant, publishers wouldn’t be interested in my story because I wasn’t famous. I was about to put Transplant aside when I saw an announcement for WWPH’s inaugural creative nonfiction prize. A quiet but clear voice inside my head encouraged me to enter. After so many years of dreaming, what did I have to lose?

Now I tell writers of any age to, as Langston Hughes wrote, “hold fast to dreams,” especially those carried deep in their hearts from childhood. Who knows what fate has in store?

Tommy Archuleta

Age: 58. Residence: Cochiti Reservation, New Mexico. Book: Susto (Center for Literary Publishing, April 2023), a collection of poems—enfevered incantations—hailing from the desert mountains and spanning such topics as loss and death, motherhood, survival, and remedios/remedies, both rooted and surreal. Agent: None. Editors: Kazim Ali and Stephanie G’Schwind.

As a fifty-eight-year-old Latino poet whose first collection was published earlier this year, a fair question to pose to me would be: What took you so long? Believe me, I got here as fast as I could. Yes, I first fell in love with writing at the age of twelve as the result of receiving a dark blue mini-memo book, a gift from my maternal grandfather. I recall writing anything that came to mind, caring little about spelling and grammar—even content. As for why I set down my mini-pen for six years, I blame baseball, beginning with Little League. As for why I stopped oiling my glove and hung up my cleats at age eighteen, I blame rock and roll music.

For the next fifteen years I performed, recorded, and toured the country as the drummer for two alternative rock bands. Being that both bands wrote and produced original work, I was able to pick up my pen again, this time to write song lyrics, as I also sang while tending to my timekeeping duties. As such, I see my lyric writing and drumming years as a kind of boot camp for writing poetry. The former calls for saying much with very little. Consider the following song lyrics and poem, for instance:

And I’ll keep this world from draggin’ me down
Gonna stand my ground
And I won’t back down

and 

I took my Power in my Hand—
And went against the World—

Mr. Tom Petty and Ms. Emily Dickinson both deftly wield the powers of brevity, respectively. Second, drumming taught me how to hear the music that words offer when strung together. This came about by recognizing the strong correlation between the rudiments of snare drumming and the principle of meter as it pertains to poetry. Both methods rely on varying patterns of stressed and unstressed events, enacting rhythmic sentences.

Despite such artistic epiphanies, as can happen to touring rock musicians, drug and alcohol use advanced to abuse, eventually sacking my love of performing and writing music. As my alcoholism and drug addiction progressed—to the point of dependence—so too did the consequences, which included a few jail sentences. Thankfully, at the age of thirty-three I sought residential treatment and have remained alcohol- and drug-free for twenty-four years as of March 12 of this year—essentially three weeks prior to the publication of my first collection of poems, Susto.

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Really, I can’t thank Kazim Ali enough. He championed Susto so selflessly dating back to 2019, when I first began submitting earlier drafts of this work to first book prizes and such. Nor can I speak highly enough of Stephanie G’Schwind, director of the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, for the deft guidance and warm support I received during the process of transforming my manuscript into the book before us today. Process and transformation, funny how these two principles pervade addiction as much as they do recovery—not to exclude, of course, their presence in the practice of writing.

Raymond Carver believed he had been given two lives, one ravaged by active alcoholism, the other the polar opposite of the first. This is my story as well, one filled with learning firsthand that it’s okay to hit bottom, only to be dragged off into the darkening gray for who knows how long. I’ve learned too that it’s okay to fall down as many times as is necessary to learn how to rise and move forward, one step at a time; that it’s okay not to know what the poem you just wrote is venturing to say; and that another word for rejection is assessment, which rhymes handily with commitment.

Chin-Sun Lee

Age: 59. Residence: New Orleans. Book: Upcountry (Unnamed Press, November 2023), a Northern gothic novel following the converging lives of three women with varying socioeconomic statuses and religious beliefs who become bound together in a whirlpool of suspicion, animosity, gossip, and a local drowning. Agent: Pamela Malpas. Editor: Chris Heiser. 

I was an early, avid reader and always considered writing to be the ultimate vocation—but my path to becoming a published author was long and circuitous. For twenty years I was a clothing designer in New York City, successful enough that my eventual walking away was difficult. My desire to write always niggled at me, so when I turned forty I started taking writing workshops at the New School, eventually earning my MFA there in 2009. For five more years I juggled writing with my design career, but I finally left that profession—and New York—in 2014, going straight to my first writing residency, PLAYA at Summer Lake in Oregon.

It changed my life. For two years I lived out of a suitcase, going from artist residencies to the homes of family and friends. It was chaotic, but I began getting more stories published and met so many other artists who are now part of my creative family.

In 2015 and 2016 I spent two consecutive summers in the Catskills, and a novel emerged from the rural community and landscapes I observed there. I turned what was a blissful, bucolic experience into an unsettling tale about class, race, religion, and fate, themes that have concerned me for much of my life. The novel also centers around three women from vastly different backgrounds, because focusing on women’s stories was and remains important to me.

By 2018 I had settled in New Orleans and finished writing Upcountry. I began querying and signed with my agent eight months later. The novel went out on submission in the summer of 2019, during which I encountered the unique hell of that emotional roller coaster: a cycle of hope, patience, revision, and crushing disappointment. When the pandemic hit, things slowed way down. What saved my sanity was starting a new novel—and I recommend this to any writer with a book on submission. I never gave up on my debut, but it was important for me to move on to another project, because when one manuscript stalls, you need to put your hope elsewhere, and hope is essential so you don’t give up.

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It is also important to go into this work with clear expectations and for the right reasons. Writing is an art form; your primary incentive has to be about making and finessing your art. Believing in and committing to your work is the only thing that will sustain you through the challenging times. Publishing, on the other hand, is a business, and a tough one, so you have to learn not to take rejections and disappointments too personally.

It takes only one person saying yes to change everything. That yes happened for me over two years after my debut first went out on submission. It prompted other editors to perk up and pay attention (this happened when I queried agents too), and in the end I had five offers for publication. I have no idea why my luck changed so dramatically. Luck isn’t something we can control; all we can control is how long we stay in the game while we wait for it. I know I’ve worked hard, and, whether through optimism or sheer obstinacy, I’ve always felt something would finally crack open.

One advantage of being older is that, having taken calculated risks in the past, I have some confidence in my resilience. It has enabled me to be nimble and patient. I think those qualities helped me to stick around until luck finally rolled my way.