All of the published authors who appear in the pages of this magazine have roads behind them—paths to publication that are as unique to each writer as their own poems, stories, and essays. Some of these roads cut a straight path, while others turn this way and that; some double back and crisscross, while others are under construction, redirected by detours and bypasses. Sometimes there are shortcuts, but other times there are long scenic tours through many of life’s most notable markers: births, deaths, loves, families, travels, careers. Periods of joy and contentment followed by episodes of darkness, difficulty. Achievements and failures—all of it informing, inspiring, delaying, or precipitating the writer’s work in some way, directly or indirectly.  

The authors featured in our second annual 5 Over 50 have followed different paths as well, but their routes to publication are perhaps a bit longer—and, one could argue, more nuanced, often more complex, and even more, dare we say it, interesting—than those of “younger” writers who have the spotlight in today’s youth-focused culture. If our 5 Over 50 authors have one thing in common, it’s a sense of patient determination to create something meaningful, beautiful. And it really doesn’t matter how long that takes. As Peg Alford Pursell says, “There exists only one moment—the last—at which it’s too late for anything.”

Here, in their own words, we present five authors over the age of fifty whose debut books were published this year.

A Small Revolution (Little A, May) by Jimin Han
States of Motion (Wayne State University Press, May) by Laura Hulthen Thomas
Getting It Right (Akashic Books, June) by Karen E. Osborne
Ground, Wind, This Body (University of New Mexico Press, March) by Tina Carlson
Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow (ELJ Editions, March) by Peg Alford Pursell

Jimin Han

Age: Fifty-one.
Residence: South Salem, New York.
Book: A Small Revolution (Little A, May), a novel that unravels the intertwined narratives of a hostage crisis on the campus of a college in central Pennsylvania, two young people finding love, and a student uprising in South Korea.
Editor: Vivian Lee.
Agent: Cynthia Manson of Cynthia Manson Literary Agency.

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Recently I was invited to speak on a panel about literary friendships at the annual alumni festival at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. The panel was scheduled for a smaller auditorium than where the other events were being held, and one of the other panelists, my longtime friend Patricia Dunn, author of the novel Rebels by Accident (Sourcebooks Fire, 2015), joked that no one would show up. She was wrong: It was standing room only. I spoke about how important it is to find spaces to protect and nurture my writer self and that the most significant space for me is my writers group. 

Alexandra Soiseth, author of a memoir, Choosing You: Deciding to Have a Baby on My Own (Seal Press, 2008), was the other member of our panel. Patricia, Alexandra, and I have been in a writing group with four other writers for nearly twenty years, ever since we left our MFA program. That small fact made the audience collectively gasp. A number of people asked how our friendship had helped us write and publish. 

The answer wasn’t just about how we critiqued one another’s work, although we all had something to contribute in that department; we’ve all taught at some point and shared revision techniques and writing prompts in our weekly meetings. The answer also had to do with how we support one another, how we celebrate birthdays, pregnancies, marriages, divorces, new loves, anniversaries, graduations, new pets, and how we’ve leaned on one another through infertility, cancer, miscarriages, abortions, IVF, depression, menopause, restraining orders, deaths of parents, deaths of pets, job changes, surgeries, periods of drought and indecision in our writing, and periods of doubt when we thought we’d given up for good.  

Four years earlier, at one of our Friday-night writers group meetings, at essayist Kate Brandt’s house (we meet at one another’s homes or at local cafés), it was my turn to announce I was quitting writing. The manuscript I’d been working on seemed to be at a dead end. Maybe it seemed so because my mother had recently suffered a stroke and I was preoccupied with what she needed. Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer, author of Informed Consent, End Days, and other plays, said that she’d write alongside me for as long as it took for me to feel connected to my book again. She meant it; she met me every day until the way seemed possible. 

My writers group helped me realize I had to address the inner despair that got in my way—personal work that required a therapist. It took three false starts before I found the right one. We talk a lot about the future in our sessions. This is a simple truth: The future is unknowable. I never knew whether I’d have a book published, but I knew the act of writing sustained me. During one session, after I told my therapist that I hadn’t written that day, she replied, “Why not? If it helps you, why not? Who knows where it will lead?” 

I was inspired by her question. I found myself feeling entitled to say what I wanted to say again in my writing. The therapist worked with me to unpack the origins of self-doubt that plagued me. It wasn’t easy, it still isn’t, but I was able to push through and complete the novel. Waiting at the end of that process was my agent, who was enthusiastic about my manuscript. She was able to sell it to an editor who loved it and understood what I was trying to accomplish. This last part—publication—is so much about luck. I’ve read many compelling manuscripts written by brilliant writers that have not been published. But that isn’t a reason to give up.

The only part we can control is writing and accepting that we don’t know where it will lead—which is all the more reason to keep trying. 

Laura Hulthen Thomas

Age: Fifty-one.
Residence: Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Book: States of Motion (Wayne State University Press, May), a collection of vividly rendered stories set in small-town Michigan that follow characters broken by economic hardships, betrayal, and conflict in the mess of real life.
Editor: Annie Martin. 
Agent: None.

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The day my dream editor, Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press, called to reject the manuscript of States of Motion was the day I decided to give up on fiction. The no should have been business as usual. A writer like me works for many years before hearing yes to even a single story. My long stories shatter nearly every literary magazine’s word-count ceiling, so acceptances are rare. That this editor had read my collection at all felt like a one-hit wonder. I’d contributed to her press’s anthology, so she was a sympathetic, generous reader. Her rejection felt like the end of the line. Besides, real life was throwing one of its tantrums. My husband had lost his job in the recession. Our closest friends, too, were losing their jobs and homes. Writing fiction seemed…well, unaffordable. The editor extended a kind invitation to resubmit the manuscript when the stories did more than coexist. I wondered whether my life as a writer could continue to coexist with my life outside of fiction.

Several months after I stopped writing, I called my great-aunt Joan, who was dying of cancer. She’d always led a quiet life in her small New Hampshire town, but on the phone she recalled a grand adventure. In the spring of 1939, when she was five years old, Joan traveled with her mother on one of the Queen Mary’s last voyages before the ocean liner was retrofitted as a World War II troopship. A terrible storm outside New York almost swept Joan overboard. “The waves were sloshing the decks something wicked,” she said. “Then suddenly Mother lifted me up and held me out to the storm.”

“Wait,” I said. “By ‘held out’ do you mean she dangled you over the railing?”

“Oh, yes. The clouds were black and folding over each other like snakes. The ocean was crashing into the hull. The waves seemed to come right up to my ankles.”

As a protective mother, I was aghast. Who was this reckless great-grandmother I’d never met? A woman who decided to take her continental tour alone, with her five-year-old daughter in tow—when the continent in question was approaching war?

This was a woman who didn’t merely coexist with her life and times.

I saw then that abandoning my work was just a safety railing. I set aside the collection to write new fiction about Southeast Michigan’s troubles. I invited my dearest writing buddies to an inspiring DIY retreat at a cabin on Lake Huron. Years later, when my stories were no longer coexisting, but conversing, I resubmitted States of Motion to the dream editor. 

The book came out just before I turned fifty-one, well after the hope for dreams you might achieve matures into the acceptance that you just might not. I have found, however, that not publishing earlier in life has been a gift. By hearing yes only rarely from editors and readers, I discovered how to say yes to my work, today, right now. I no longer seek the writer I should be, but the writer I am.

Several days after my great-aunt told me of her greatest adventure, Joan passed peacefully. Before we hung up for the last time, I had asked why she thought her mother had thrust her over that railing. “Laura, she just wanted me to be able to see,” Joan said. How courageous of my great-grandmother to show her daughter the terrifying beauty of risk, even when no one else is on deck to share the view. 

Karen E. Osborne

Age: Sixty-nine.
Residence: Port Saint Lucie, Florida.
Book: Getting It Right (Akashic Books, June), a novel about half-sisters—one the product of an abusive foster-care situation, the other of dysfunctional privilege—who finally meet during their father’s final days.
Editor: Marva Allen.
Agent: Marie Brown of Marie Brown Associates.

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Writing was always my dream. As a girl growing up in the Bronx, I told my friends stories I’d made up but pretended were true. I wrote my first short story when I was twelve. In middle school I’d submit book reports on my own stories with fake author names and receive As. Under my graduation picture in the Evander Childs High School yearbook, next to “Ambition” it said “Writer.” 

Of course, I also read over the years, often consuming a novel a week in spite of a husband, two small children, and going to college full time. I squeezed in moments to read for pleasure, and every novel made me yearn to write my own. 

For forty-two years, like the protagonist Kara in my novel, I suffered the consequences of childhood sexual abuse, before finding a therapist who helped me navigate a healing journey. During the years of gut-wrenching work, I freed secrets and worked through their aftermath. Along the way I met dozens of other survivors. I explored their narratives, motivations, successes, and setbacks. I learned the restorative power of gratitude, redemption, and forgiveness—major themes in my writing. But my goal for Getting It Right was to write a page-turner, not a book about abuse. One early reader described it as a “genre-bending mystery and family saga.” I kept the chapters short and the action fast, and I let Kara and her half-sister, Alex, lead the way. 

My career as a consultant, executive coach, and presenter specializing in philanthropy, opinion research, and organizational management led me all over the world as I taught, spoke, and consulted with nonprofit leaders. Storytelling infused every engagement. In each city, in every new country, I jotted down scraps of thoughts, words, and ideas in small notebooks stashed in my briefcase. Writing on airplanes, in airport lounges, and hotel rooms, I finished the first draft in a year. It took a long time to rewrite.  

Once I was finished—after I had shared the manuscript with trusted readers and revised and polished it—I took the next scary step: I sent the manuscript out in search of an agent. I networked, went to writing conferences, and took classes that included an agent’s review of the first ten pages. I sent it out and then sent it out again, and again.

Everyone says it because it’s true: Rejection is hard. I’m not sure which moments in the long process are the most memorable. The day my agent said she loved the book and wanted to represent me, or the day she told me that she had an offer from a publisher. We ate lunch and discussed the contract. I asked questions, took notes, thanked her, walked out of the restaurant—all quite professional. Once I hit the street, I cried all the way to the parking lot. 

I held my book launch in Australia, at the open-air restaurant at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Sydney Opera House gleaming in the background. It was an intimate affair. My husband joined me, along with two women I’d been writing with online for fifteen years but had never met. We hugged, laughed, and celebrated. In the weeks since, my readings, talks, and signings continue to fill my heart with joy as I keep writing. So far I’ve written two more books, and I’m working on a fourth. 

Another thing everyone says because it’s true: You’re never too old to realize your dreams. 

Tina Carlson

Age: Sixty-four.
Residence: Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Book: Ground, Wind, This Body (University of New Mexico Press, March), a poetry collection exploring the vestiges of war and redemption as a traumatized soldier returns home from WWII carrying a legacy of violence and abuse.
Editor: James Ayers.
Agent: None.

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I watched Lucille Clifton, well into her fifties, perform: “these hips are mighty hips. / these hips are magic hips / i have known them / to put a spell on a man and / spin him like a top!” She danced and swayed and made the words into music in a small auditorium at Pacifica University in the late 1980s. I did not yet consider myself a poet, but I could not forget the sensual power of her words.

Ground, Wind, This Body began with the last poem in the book, “Embryo of Light,” which consists of dream fragments from the two and a half years it took to adopt my daughter Mia from China. The dreams came feverishly and took the form of my “pregnancy” with her. A beautiful poet and mentor, Laurie Kutchins, encouraged me to let the language and poems be as strange as the dreams. That permission allowed me to begin the book. I was in my early forties and just beginning to feel I had something of value to say. I am amazed at younger poets who find their voices early and are so strong. My voice, like my life, was fragmented and numbed for much of my early adulthood. In order to find it, I had to begin the long hard work of trauma and substance abuse recovery. My daughter, with her fragmented history, encouraged me to look at mine, and I started to write about how the war that lived inside my father was a force in our family.

This book was written over many years. It was made possible by community and endurance. New Mexico hosts a vibrant and active poetry community, and through workshops, readings, and writing groups, the poems were born. I sent out poems and most were rejected, as was the manuscript, multiple times. It was the power of communal work and exploration that encouraged me to keep going. It is so easy to give up, especially as an older woman with little confidence. I honor my teachers: Joy Harjo, Laurie Kutchins, Joy Jacobson, Valerie Martinez, Margaret Randall, Lisa Gill, Hilda Raz, Lynn Miller, and many others both at the University of New Mexico and in private workshops who bore witness to my efforts and encouraged me to keep going.

Writing and publishing are not competitive sports. Writing is the most important, but reading aloud brings the writing to life and allows for an audience. Listen to and read as many other poets and other writers as you can. Join a group that will root you on through the muck. Keep working on the craft with good teachers. Submit to paper and online journals, newspapers, art shows. Find local presses by talking to poets you know, noting which presses are publishing the books of poetry you love, and doing online research. I was able to publish my first book through the University of New Mexico Press, which has an honorable history of publishing books related to the Southwest. Encourage other poets to publish, to read aloud, to be heard. Buy their books when they come out, go to their readings. We live in a culture that doesn’t read enough poetry, so invite those people who don’t know poetry to go with you to readings. Send them poems you love. Animate the world with your words.