For the past nine years 5 Over 50 has featured authors who published their debut books later in life, authors who prudently used the fertile soil of their life journeys to produce works of poetry and prose that benefitted from their having moved through what one such writer, Deborah Jackson Taffa, calls the potential “callowness of youth” and into a space of patience, trust, experience, and healing. The following debut authors over the age of fifty share stories of listening to an inner voice urging them to be a writer, having a natural disaster bring them back to poetry, falling asleep with a pen in hand every night, honoring and exploring their inner child to the fullest, and coming back to the radiant energy of a manuscript shelved for years. “This is the point where you feel assured to bet on yourself,” Dorsía Smith Silva affirms. Below are excerpts from this year’s five debut books; read essays by the authors in the November/December 2024 issue.

Suzette Mullen, author of The Only Way Through Is Out (University of Wisconsin Press)
Dorsía Smith Silva, author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry Press)
Uchenna Awoke, author of The Liquid Eye of a Moon (Catapult) 
Deborah Jackson Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender (Harper) 
Parul Kapur, author of Inside the Mirror (University of Nebraska Press)

Suzette Mullen

Age: 63. Residence: Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Book: The Only Way Through Is Out (University of Wisconsin Press, February 2024), a memoir about awakening to one’s queerness later in life, coming to terms with deep-seated and decades-long desire, and risking it all to move through the world authentically, in previously unspeakable ways. Agent: None. Editors: Nathan MacBrien and Holly McArthur.

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“I don’t know what to do with these feelings,” I said to Alice, my therapist, after I told her that I realized I was in love with Reenie, my best friend. “Should I tell Reenie? It feels dishonest to keep this from her.”

“You don’t have to share every thought you have. It’s not dishonest to keep a zone of privacy,” Alice said.

I’d never thought about a zone of privacy, but wasn’t that exactly what I’d been maintaining all these years, living one life in my head and the other out in the world? “But what if I’m actually gay? What am I supposed to do then?”

“So what if you are gay?” Alice said. “You don’t have to do anything about it. You’ve made a choice to live a certain lifestyle, and if you’re happy with it, you don’t have to change.”

I closed my eyes and smiled. It didn’t matter whether I was gay or not. I didn’t have to do anything about it. Nothing had to change.

Evan, my husband, and I watched the Houston Astros at Minute Maid Park. A middle-aged woman in the row in front of us put her arm around another woman.

Were they a couple? I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Gentle touches to the thigh, an arm being patted. A brush of the lips. They were a couple. My body ached.

I wanted to sit with my arm around Reenie at a baseball game. I wanted to kiss her lips. I wanted to touch her thigh.

That was never going to happen. Not now. Not ever.

I have a good life. I love my husband. I don’t have to change anything.

Evan and I saw Hamilton the first month it opened on Broadway. Cheered the Astros at Yankee Stadium with our sons. Picnicked on cheese and bread from Zabar’s and sipped North Fork sauvignon blanc in Central Park.

Evan snapped a photo of me, supine on the lawn, plastic cup in hand, the sun hitting me just so.

Perfect summer night, I posted on Facebook.

My perfect life received lots and lots of likes.

After the picnic, we made our way to the band shell area, already packed with people, mostly younger than us, and settled into a spot close to the stage, behind a metal barrier. But the stage wasn’t where my eyes spent most of the night. They kept returning to two young couples on the other side of the fence. Women in sundresses rubbing each other’s backs, playfully kissing each other, swaying to the music. Did Evan notice them too? Did he know Ingrid Michaelson had a huge lesbian following, a fact I discovered when I Googled her after we returned home?

What I would have given to sway freely on that side of the fence, to have my whole life ahead of me, to satisfy this longing that wasn’t going away. But I was with my husband, a kind and loyal man who loved me. Where the world said I should be and where I had chosen to be.

“Isn’t this great,” Evan said, putting his arm around me.

I put my arm around him. Stop this, I silently scolded myself.

We went to see the Broadway musical Fun Home. The show had many poignant moments—a young girl singing about her attraction to a woman with short hair and a ring of keys on her dungarees. A thirtysomething drawing cartoons to make sense of her life. A college freshman, her hand on the doorknob, staring at a sign about a gay and lesbian support group.

“Please, God, don’t let me be a lesbian,” she pleaded.

I wiped a tear from my cheek, hoping Evan didn’t notice. I didn’t want to be a lesbian either. Because if that’s what I was, how could I stay in my marriage? And how could I possibly leave? It was much easier to keep acting as if nothing had to change.

From The Only Way Through Is Out by Suzette Mullen. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2024 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.  

Author photo: Ashleigh Taylor

Dorsía Smith Silva

Age: 51. Residence: Carolina, Puerto Rico. Book: In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry Press, November 2024), a poetry collection that serves as witness to a deadly Atlantic hurricane that hit Puerto Rico in 2017 and the “slow cruelty” of its aftermath, the literal and figurative drownings of marginalized peoples due to the natural world and modern-day colonialism. Agent: None. Editors: Joy Arbor and Jennifer Lee.

Drowning in 5 Parts

We have always been drowning—

With sweat.
With fear.
With debt.

How much for freedom? It’s a trick question. You can never pay
enough. You will always owe someone or something.

Haiti paid France $30 billion for its independence.

Puerto Rico: How much can I pay?

US: Give me your land, people, language, food, culture, and flag.
Maybe then we’ll talk.

Puerto Rico: No es justo.

US: Take it or leave it.

Our dreams are free.

We run like stray horses in the mountains. No light for good
luck. Who needs it anyway? When there’s no want of stars to
give us lifeblood.

Sometimes, every so often, a tourist drowns behind a hotel in
Condado. The ocean reclaims what it wants. Saying, Here is salt.
Take that back in your suitcase. How cruel. How unkind. What
does it come to.

I was taught to love water. Respect it like your blood. If blood is
red, then water is nucleus red. Like ATP red.

All things come from water. All things return to water.

Turn off the faucet. That could be your great-great-grandmother there.

Is it possible to have too much water? Ask the trees. Like during
hurricanes.

We should then love and fear water. How can it be both? A kiss
and knuckle? Hug and slap? Push and all pull?

You’ve seen the drowning. Rivers of trees and earth.

Repeat after me. Repeat after me.

Water is my first love.

Me: I ♡ you.

Water: I ♡ you too.

What comes next?

I thought you knew.

In the end, only water remained.

But even that was dangerous.

Look at Flint. Look at Standing Rock. Look at Puerto Rico.

What would the ancestors say?

How did we end up here?
 
They took our land away from us—
repackaged it with manicured lawns,
but kept the pillars and the names plantation and antebellum.
Some gringo names that sound good when you’re showing off
to the customer service representative. I live there.
Took our bodies away from us—
rebranded as one flashy R&B star and a basketball player. We
can’t all be like that. Even though many of us have dancing
TikTok fantasies and think we’re Dr. J’s dunking twin. Nope. Just
wounded ankles and knees.

Where are we?

It’s June. Water is coming. Let’s hope it’s not too much. We’ve been
drowning since forever.

What you say about water is what you know.

How can too much water be a bad thing?

Isn’t it like love? Having a lot of love is good?

Ask the flowers that go rootless.

Ask the worms that get plucked by birds.

Ask the slaves wa ter wat er waaaa t er.

You don’t understand. It’s answer D on the test. All of the above.

If hurricanes could speak. Give you the 5-star treatment at the
spa. Tell you the comeback story. Which everyone loves. To forget
the dry run drownings.

How you treat water is how you treat your mother.

Treat it kindly, gently.
Don’t abuse it.
Don’t take it for granted.
It is not going to stay up late and wait for you.
Don’t let it run forever.
Even water gets tired and needs a nap.
Sing to it. Be sweet. Tell it how pretty it looks on a nice day.
Bring it flowers just because. Not the $4.99 cheap ones from
Walmart. Something from the garden. So water would say, I
recognize my work. Thank you very much.
Take it to Splash Mountain and watch how people delight
when crashing in chlorinated-with-who-knows-what wetness.
Skip the museum though. There’s no need to see children slurp
fountain liquid that is the wrong color. Water would demand
better—How can I look like that? Where is the filter? Shakes head.

Go to church instead. A sprinkle across a baby’s bald head.
Time to save souls. Don’t ask, and how did the church save
you? To avoid any stink eyes and pops upside the head.
Remember to respect water.

Respect water. Always remember. In the ocean, don’t forget
about the undertows. Don’t swim too far. The currents.
Teaching you how not to drown. To breathe. Not to drown.
Respect. Respect is a motherfucker.

Reprinted with permission from In Inheritance of Drowning by Dorsía Smith Silva, published by CavanKerry Press. Copyright © 2024 by Dorsía Smith Silva. All rights reserved.  

Author photo: Antonio Silva Rosario

Uchenna Awoke

Age: 54. Residence: Iowa City. Book: The Liquid Eye of a Moon (Catapult, June 2024), a folkloric coming-of-age novel that details the journey of an adolescent boy who travels from his village in rural Nigeria hoping to take charge of his own destiny despite the limitations imposed on him and his family by a contemporary caste system. Agent: Annie DeWitt. Editor: Kendall Storey.

Twenty-two

Eke and I get hired after he returns from the village with stories of Christmas and how my family has missed me and wish I had come home, too. My mother even wrapped spices and asked him to bring them to me. She now carries a new Bible, Eke says, that’s as big as my tin box. Eke met my father sitting under the umbrella tree when he went to our house. My father wanted to know if I had sent him something for his snuff and ekpetechi. Eke ended up oiling his palm to make him stop groaning. My father laughed, blowing air from his nose, and Eke was sprayed umber. I cherish hearing stories of the village from Eke: my siblings whining about how they have missed me, Machebe’s curiosity to know the real reason I did not return like everyone does at Christmas and how Eke lied that the white men had requested me to do a special job for them, and Madam Bridget’s bar swarming with drunks who went wild when Eke showed up like a rainbow in their sky.

Eke and I are hired along with two other labourers to fill in the foundations of two new, large buildings in early January. What a lucky break! Eke figures it will take slightly over a hundred and fifty buckets of the tipper truck to complete the work, and about one week and a half to finish the contract if we manage to do sixteen trips a day. We are going to be paid a lot of money for this job, and Okike’s tomb is long overdue on account of the setbacks I suffered. If all goes well, I will be visiting home after we finish the contract to take care of the tomb and see my family I have missed so much. I don’t tell Eke about the woman we buried, though. I don’t want him blaming me for accepting the wrong kind of job even though it helped me to recover financially after the attack from the madman.

“She had been an outcast for many years,” Mama Obodo had said after hearing the story. “She became one after she killed a god reincarnated in a tortoise, or so they say.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You are foreigners, that’s why you were hired to bury her, as any indigene of that community who gets involved in her burial would be cast off, too. Her children would have been contaminated if she’d had any. They would belong to the god now.”

On the first day of the contract, Jerome, Nduka, Eke, and I manage to do fifteen trips, working from dawn to dusk. As usual, we spend the evening at Mama Obodo’s, to release our aching joints for tomorrow’s work. The next day we are back digging and hauling, smoking and chattering. We take turns to dig, to deepen the soft base of the quarry, leaving a peak hanging dangerously above us. A large powder keg sitting next to a fire.

I am in the pit digging for our ninth trip of the day when suddenly a large cube of laterite breaks off from the sagging peak and cascades noiselessly down. I experience momentary darkness. I have only seconds to puzzle it out, to haul myself free and out of the way of the avalanche before its arrival. I barely manage to escape being trapped. But we are excited by it. Tons of laterite falling at our feet like manna and quail falling from heaven for the people of Israel make our work easier for the day, as we do not have to dig and only have to shovel it into the tipper truck.

On the last day, we work until the sun labours up the hill and begins to ease down west, a red ball of fire the size of a large breadfruit head. We have worked fourteen trips, and we have only a few more remaining. Eke was almost perfect in his estimation of the number of buckets the project would gulp. In all, we have done a hundred and forty-six trips in ten days. We are sitting in the pit, fatigued, smoking and waiting for the tipper truck to return. Already the evening is looking good, as beautiful as the orange wash of the sunset.

Suddenly a deep crack tears my mind away from our evening at Mama Obodo’s bar back to the quarry, a cleavage so loud and sudden the earth appears to have fractured. The ground heaves from beneath us, whirling like a massive roller coaster, the heavens engulfed in a great blanket of darkness. It’s a nightmare in which the earth disconnects from heights and a landslide plummets from the skies. Dazed, I stare at death as it fountains down on us. I have the sensation of being pulled into an abyss, of drowning in a dark sea. We are a stampeding herd of buffalo, Eke, Jerome, Nduka, and I, as we scrabble in what will soon be our graveyard. For a fleeting moment I glimpse the face of Ezenwanyi’s priest and hear his deep voice: The connection between them is very strong, stronger than you can imagine, and that is why she comes to him in the dream, as a sign of that everlasting bond, a sign that she will be there for him if called upon in times of need or distress.

“O-ki-ke,” I cry out in a voice as loud as the great deep bellow of the sky now falling on the earth. And then I make a lunge for safety, diving, balling, and rolling away like wheels as the monstrous apocalypse arrives.

Excerpted from The Liquid Eye of a Moon: A Novel by Uchenna Awoke. Published with permission of Catapult. Copyright © 2024 by Uchenna Awoke.  

Author photo: Nnabest

Deborah Jackson Taffa

Age: 55. Residence: Santa Fe. Book: Whiskey Tender (Harper, February 2024), a multifaceted memoir exploring identity, inheritance, systemic oppression, assimilation, and American history through the lens of a mixed-tribe Native girl with an inviolable spirit. Agent: Samantha Shea. Editor: Jenny Xu.

When my parents left their wedding reception, Mom was sober. Dad, of course, drove. He sped towards Fourth Avenue, the main thoroughfare in Yuma, cutting into the opposite lane on corners, fishtailing with a groom’s finesse. Mom grew scared. She hiked up her wedding dress, reached her long leg over his thigh, and stomped the brake with her high heel shoe. 

The tires locked up. The car swung wide to the right, before spinning them all the way around to the left, showing them the surprised expressions of people in other cars. “It was like we were riding on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Yuma County Fair,” Mom said.

The car slammed into the side of a busy downtown bar. The Plymouth’s front end was mangled. Steam poured out of the radiator. It was a Sunday afternoon in April 1963, and the day was still light. Afternoon drinkers came flowing out of the bar’s smoky interior like rice throwers out of a cathedral in a haze of incense and prayer. Being the eldest of fifteen kids had made Mom conspicuous in this small town, and the bar was her father Juan’s favorite, so some of the regulars and barflies realized she was a Herrera girl and wanted to know if she was okay. 

Sirens started up in the distance. A couple of biker chicks helped Mom out of the car, and she stood with them on the sidewalk in front, staring at the damaged headlight and hood. In her hurry to get out, she’d caught the train of her wedding dress in the door, and it had ripped. When she saw the torn fabric, she started crying. She told us, “I could see your dad through the window of the car, with his forehead rested on the wheel, and I knew exactly what he was thinking.” 

Dad was from the Yuma Reservation, across the train tracks and river, and he was worried the town cops were going to book him again. But when the cops pulled up at the accident scene and looked at Mom—plopped on the curb in a puff of white satin, mascara running down her cheeks—they decided to be merciful and let Dad go. Mom said they felt sorry for her because she was a good local Catholic girl who’d married a crazy Indian. 

When Dad walked in the front door and heard her telling us the story, he laughed and said she was wrong. He said the cops let him go, not because they pitied her, but because Mom was beautiful, and pretty people got away with shit. He pulled off his black boots and lifted his holey socks onto the coffee table. He put his arm around her and said getting away scot-free on their wedding day was the first sign Mom’s charm would work magic in his life like a lucky rabbit’s foot or a powerful tattoo. 

He reminded Mom how romantic he’d been at their wedding, how he’d refused to let her sisters decorate the car with Do-It-Yourself flowers because the phony tissue paper looked too common for a woman of her caliber. Instead, he and his brothers had performed a top-secret midnight operation, sneaking into St. Thomas Indian Mission’s garden on the reservation where they cut a bunch of roses to string over the roof of the car.  

Mom groaned—“Don’t brag about stealing from the church!”—but the two of them laughed, and Dad went in the kitchen to grab a snack. 

Mom’s protestations never fooled me. She loved the memory of the stolen roses, as well as Dad’s claim that her beauty swayed the cops, but what made her light up especially was the way he called her his lucky charm. 

This is how my parents twisted bad things around, seeing the appearances of events in fun house mirrors, stretching memories tall and pretty when they were really goofy and squat. They knew a story could be told in various ways, and this is how they chose to shape theirs—and how they would teach me to shape mine as well—by molding their wedding day car accident into their first blessing as a couple.

Adapted from the book Whiskey Tender: A Memoir by Deborah Jackson Taffa. Copyright © 2024 by Deborah Taffa. Reprinted by permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.  

Author photo: Simone Taffa