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This Is (Almost) 67: Brian Morton Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire

This Is (Almost) 67: Brian Morton Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire

Section titled “This Is (Almost) 67: Brian Morton Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire”

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  • Also, at this point I’ve published enough that I no longer have to ask crippling questions about whether I’m “really” a writer, and at this age I don’t have to worry anymore about whether the well will run dry. Maybe the well will run dry! Maybe it already has! But it doesn’t worry me anymore. Running dry at 40 or 50 would have felt like a tragedy, and would have made me feel like I’d failed. Running dry at 68 or any time after that would feel natural, and wouldn’t be bothersome at all.
  • I think the main surprising thing is that it doesn’t feel all that different. When I was in my forties, I wrote a novel, Starting Out in the Evening, whose protagonist was a 71-year-old man. I think I’d be embarrassed if I looked at it now. When I was writing it, I think I imagined old age as a foreign country. It isn’t a foreign country. I notice the same thing in the writing of my students when they try to imagine old age. When you’re young, you imagine that every time old people look down at their hands, they think, “My God! All these wrinkles! How did this happen?! Where is my youth?”
  • I’m not sure this is about getting older per se, but I no longer think of myself as a writer first and and everything else second, as I did when I was young. My views on this started to change shortly after we had our first child, Emmett. I was reluctant to have children in the first place, because I feared it would distract me from my writing. And indeed it did. But that turned out to be a good thing. I remember one afternoon when Emmett was about nine months old, just starting to crawl, and I thought, “I could be writing right now…but I’m much more interested in watching him learn to crawl than I am in whatever I might write this afternoon.”
  • This is my favorite age, by far. When your kids are grown and doing well, it’s a deep relief. And, as I said, it’s a deep satisfaction to feel like I’ve spent my life doing the work I was meant to do. Whatever the merit or lack of merit of what I’ve written, I’ve given what I’ve had to give.
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