As with public art installation or sculpture or mural, Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity (University of Georgia Press, 2024) invites conversation. Old Enough, 20 essays and photographic portraits, was created by editors Jay Lamar and Jennifer Horne, with the assistance of Jay’s sister, Katie Lamar Jackson, Wendy Reed and photographer Carolyn Sherer, who each contributed an essay. It is an example of collaborative art and is greater than any of its individual components.
Layered with epigraphs and quotations, with essays of whatever length is fitting; references to other art and artists; stories of family and places that inspire these women; an introduction and photographs; and contributors’ biographies as rich and interesting as the women (“gay, straight, unmarried, partnered, widowed, Black, White, Latinx, retired, and working,” as stated in the introduction) and their essays, Old Enough delights and instructs. Sherer’s photographs, full-page color portraits of the contributors, demand that we see each woman — really see her — to acknowledge that she is old enough to know a few truths about the South, life and creativity, to see her complexity as well as her simplicity so as to summon our understanding that these women have arrived at knowing themselves and have come to this project eager to share.
Reading and viewing Old Enough, I am inspired, challenged, despondent, encouraged, old, not old, confident and surprised. Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity reveals a world that seems on some pages familiar and on others, shockingly new.
One additional woman is instrumental in making this book a work of art: Erin Kirk, who designed Old Enough. As each essay begins, we simultaneously see its author in her photographic portrait. The typefaces, sizes and colors of the titles, subtitles and authors’ names are artfully chosen and arranged. Even the indicators of time breaks or topic changes in the narratives (a “dinkus” to professional designers) attract my eye and make me know that this book is art.
A coffee table book? Sure. Old Enough is gorgeous to look upon. It can be perused by title, author or portrait or an essay at a time. Reading two or more essays (chosen randomly or by the artist’s medium) in a sitting, one begins to see the larger story, the narrative of creativity, survival, fight, art, activism, pain, recovery, purpose and contentment — the tapestry that these women weave. For example, confronting death and illness and writer’s block, Patricia Foster plumbs her memory until she learns to be “both selfless and selfish” and gives herself permission to start writing again. And after years of “wandering,” visual artist Nevin Mercede finds herself old enough to settle in a Florida beach town to start anew painting native flora.
A how-to-guide? If you wish. But the answers, after the loss of father, mother, career, health, self and/or purpose, differ as greatly as the voices gathered here. Some take years to find new paths; others risk new directions entirely. Many of the women refer to Covid and the consequent isolation that led to disruptive change and noticeable aging. Collaboration became the imperative technique for “getting through.” With this, the readers and viewers of Old Enough can identify. Individually and together, we attest to the historic pandemic that ruptured our lives, a time when family, work and play necessarily took on new definitions. Fortunately, art-writ-large and Old Enough in particular help us to understand and to adapt.
In 1998, novelist Ellen Douglas published her first nonfiction and penultimate book: Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell. Douglas’ sister artists, gathered by Lamar, Horne, Jackson and Reed, are also old enough. Narrating their fears of failure and of success, the mysteries of body and bodily traumas, the acknowledgment and unraveling of insults, abuses, and aggressions, the creatives of Old Enough are old enough to write and show truth. Horne channels her 8-year-old brave-and-brash self to say “no” to dismissals of women over 60. Georgia children’s book author Carmen Agra Deedy is old enough to understand the fable her Cuban father told. Others are old enough to curse, to cry, to quit, to start, to try — and all find a way through to new purpose, even the fresh goal of enjoying this day, in and of itself, without worry about a distant future of making a mark, being a mentor or missing a deadline. Reading Old Enough, I entered each woman’s world, found likenesses and traveled inward to ask myself questions and probe my own memories. I thought of my women friends who would love to meet these women and read their stories. I listed their poets, teachers, philosophers, musicians and artists who had inspired or showed them trails that previously had been obscured. I thought of my own heroes, sisters, mothers and friends. How relieved I was in the final pages to read that today’s and tomorrow’s observations and makings, small as they may be, are sufficient.
Creativity begets creativity, ideas beget ideas and, with women, this means collaboration — our superpower. In addition to the editors and contributors, Lifetime Arts, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, University of Georgia Friends Fund, NewSouth Books and the University of Georgia Press are all to be congratulated on Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging. Together, they made the book a reality, and it feels as organic as growing old. The result is a work of art to be enjoyed and learned from in parts or as a whole. We listen eagerly to a familiar piece of music. We revisit a favorite painting. We search our shelves for the book that holds a particular passage. This is the manner in which I plan to look again and again into Old Enough, seeking joy and nuance revealed afresh.
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Pearl McHaney, Kenneth M. England Professor of Southern Literature Emerita at Georgia State University, is a former associate dean of fine arts at GSU, an avid reader and appreciator of the arts. She is the co-founder of Revival: Lost Southern Voices festival and founding editor of the Eudora Welty Review.
