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Saggy Skin’s Beauty Queen Prose
by KJ Hannah Greenberg

 

 

Generations used to build on the shoulders of the high-fliers than came before them, even when they didn’t venerate all of their guides’ beliefs. These days, though, descendants don’t embrace their predecessors’ views, shoulders, opinions, derrieres, dogmas, or armpits. Youngsters (that term being relative) regularly deride texts known to have been generated by advanced counterparts and regularly deride those silvered colleagues, themselves.

 

Such tension typically builds when it’s determined that tatty writers have “audaciously” allowed, or, worse, offered their words to be published in hip venues. It is considered scandalous when grannies fess up to “doing it,” but it is considered shoddier when they dare to recount their experiences. Once women are postmenopausal, the world deems their brain cells, like their uteri, as incapable of producing fresh or elsewise useful engines.

 

The problem is that society’s confused. Women’s early decades might be optimal for inventiveness in music or in math, but their later light’s better for writing. Composition skills, like blue jeans, like compost piles, and like smelly cheese, tend to improve with age. As word players mellow, they become capable of tweaking texts behind their backs with their nondominant hands, all while being blindfolded. No whippersnappers can accomplish comparable ends - proficiencies cost years.

 

Further, by the time that authors are hoary enough to qualify for AARP membership, they ordinarily have stopped all namby pamby kowtowing to editors’ whims and whistles. In most cases, well used women of letters have ceased to accordingly comport themselves because they’ve hit upon subjects that interest them and have found their voice. They’ve furthermore discovered that social flash is transitory and that wealth, likewise, eventually disintegrates into something akin to dust. So, many elder word jocks dictate their own missions.

 

Granted, wrinkled sorts deign to mix metaphors and to change up yesterday’s diction with approximations of today’s street. Equally true, when oldsters err with contemporary nuance, they offer no apologies, insisting, alternatively, that their mad swirls of language are imperative for actualizing marvelous juxtapositions of meaning. What’s more, because long toothers are hardly invested in “proving” themselves, they don’t limit themselves to evergreen topics or to politically correct ones; instead, they write about vital issues. Whereas white hairs might be regarded as “cantankerous creatives,” they’re helping humanity by sounding off.

 

In balance, matriarchal professionals value fun. Beyond passing on moral legacies, ripened vanguards of less-than-popular themes enjoy ratcheting up fiction’s limbo pole. Perusals of their biographies reveal that cross-genre fiction and slipstream are among their favorite channels. Many outworlder stories, romantic tales, and mysteries, correspondingly, have been written by grandmas. Wordsmiths, advanced in years, reign as the beauty queens of narrative and as the gnarly champions of all things poetry.

 

Despite those gifts, sadly, too many “broadminded” others fail to appreciate senior wordies. Golden-agers’ tens of years of ringing ‘round the verbal rosy is not yet sufficiently prized. Folks still need to become aware that nana writers’ talents are more than the sum of their saggy skin.

 

 

 

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