Generations used to
build on the shoulders of the high-fliers than came before them, even when they
didnt venerate all of their guides beliefs. These days, though,
descendants dont 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 its 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
societys confused. Womens early decades might be optimal for
inventiveness in music or in math, but their later lights 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 theyve hit upon subjects that interest them and have
found their voice. Theyve 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 yesterdays diction with
approximations of todays 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. Whats more, because long toothers are hardly
invested in proving themselves, they dont 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, theyre 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 fictions 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.