Why Fiction Needs Older Characters: Inside 20 Over 60

Beth Weinhouse: Confetti Club Chat

[00:00:00] 

Beth McMullen: Hi friends, I'm Beth McMullen

lisa: And I'm Lisa Schmidt

Beth McMullen: And if there's one thing we know, it's how much work goes into getting a book out into the world, and we think that work deserves to be celebrated. So welcome to another episode of The Confetti Club. This is the Writers with Wrinkles segment where we give some extra love to authors and their brand-new books because publishing a book deserves a little fanfare and, of course, a whole lot of confetti. So today we are welcoming Beth Weinhouse, who is one of the editors of the short story anthology 20 over 60 that just came out. So welcome, Beth. We are very happy to have you.

Beth Weinhouse: Thank you. I am happy to be here

Beth McMullen: So to get started I... There's actually some stories in this anthology that I wanna talk about, but I would love for you to just give us an idea about what the book is about so our audience can be on the same page as, as we all are when we start talking about it.

Beth Weinhouse: Okay. The Elevator Pitch is it's a collection of 20 short stories by writers who are over [00:01:00] age 60, or 60 and over, writing about life at that time. And it's a mix of well-known authors, lesser-known authors, but all very talented writers with lots of different experiences and perspectives and literary genres.

Just a real mix

Beth McMullen: I've been making my way through it, and I was telling this to Lisa earlier that feels refreshing to see these snapshots of people who aren't 30 and beautiful, and the hardest thing in their life is that, they spilled their latte on their, white shoes or something. Do you know what I mean?

I feel like so much fiction nowadays is just this particular person. And so I'm going through this and I'm like, "It's like a breath of fresh air," even though some of the stories are quite sad.

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah.

Some of them are funny, some of them are sad, and actually what you're saying is how the book came into being in the first place because about more than 20 years ago, David and [00:02:00] I were reading a collection of short stories called 20 Under 30, and it was all writers who were really hot and trendy and had lots of buzz around them.

And the stories were great. They were all very talented, but we were kind of 40-ish around then and we were thinking, "So our work doesn't matter anymore and we're not worthy of extra attention and we're not trendy and hot?" And we thought somebody should do 20 Over 40, and that was the first book we did together, was 20 Over 40, a collection of 20 short stories by writers over 40 talking about life at that age.

And people said, "Oh, in 20 years you're going to do 20 Over 60." And we said, "No, probably not." We couldn't even really imagine ourselves at that age, and we thought, the last thing we want to do is edit a book about disease and decline and death and then, we hit 60 and we're like, "Wait a minute, that's really not what our life's about.

It's just as rich and varied and all our friends have these interesting lives, and, this [00:03:00] needs to be celebrated, too." So we took our words back and we decided to do 20 Over 60.

lisa: This is hitting close to home right now. It is such a funny time period in your life, you just, y- you just feel I don't know, one foot in, one foot out of the grave. I don't know if that sounds

horrible. So dire. So whatever stories are in that book, I'm gonna relate to.

Beth McMullen: I feel like there's this sense of freedom with the charac- and I love the short story f- format, I always have, because It's almost like a picture book in that every word has to do a lot of work, because you just don't have a lot of space to convey a full character, a full story arc, a, a, a moment.

All of these things have to come through, and I feel like that that it's just like the, the intensity is it's so layered, so multilayered, because [00:04:00] these people are carrying so much to that moment when they show up on the page, which is just rich

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah. I and again, the more you've lived, the more you have a story to tell, and I think that's the advantage that older story writers and older authors have. They have so much more to draw on, good and bad. But it just I'm not saying younger writers shouldn't write about older people.

I don't believe that at all. I think it's fiction, and people use their imaginations, and there are some really wonderful books that have come out lately with older protagonists that are written by younger writers. But that said, there is something to be said for experience, too, and I think that comes through on the pages.

lisa: How

Beth Weinhouse: That-

lisa: find this collection of authors? Like, how did that process work?

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah, it was the same for 20 Over 40 as it was for 20 Over 60. We tried to cast a very wide net, and we asked professor friends, because David's an English professor, and writer friends to just give [00:05:00] us the names of their favorite authors. We also asked just avid reader friends in book clubs.

We went and read through tons of literary magazines and looked at other story collections because we were open to reprinting stories we really liked. And then we also put out a call for submissions to the Authors Guild, which was wonderful because that's where we got a lot of the writers who we probably wouldn't have found any other way, but they are very accomplished and really wonderful.

And we got hundreds. It was overwhelming, and we just started reading. We just spent a lot of time reading and comparing notes. It was a long process.

Beth McMullen: How did you work together to decide what you're gonna put it? If you were saying, "I really like this one," and David was saying, "Nah, I don't know." Like, how did you work out those, those moments?

Beth Weinhouse: What's amazing is that there were almost none like that. We would s- separately read stories [00:06:00] and take notes, and then we would have regular meetings to go through batches that we'd read and compare notes. And we were so in sync on them. With the other book too, 20 Over 40, it was really amazing because people had warned us, writing, working together is really hard, and this is gonna take a toll on your relationship, and you're gonna argue over things, and that hardly happened.

There was almost never a story that someone loved and someone hated or vice versa. At most, there was like, "You like this one a little more than I do," or ... But it was so in sync. The hardest part actually was deciding we couldn't have too many stories on the tha- same theme.

You didn't want, a book full of grandparent stories or a book full of hospital stories or whatever. And so sometimes that was the hardest. There would be a number of stories with that theme we liked, and it was really hard to pick which one would go in the book because certain themes did come, repeat, and we wanted to show a very varied experience and also varied genres.

We [00:07:00] have a ghost story, a science fiction story a fantasy story. There's a lot of humor. We just really wanted to make it a, a hodgepodge of stuff. Yes, there's literary fiction in there too, but

lisa: I've always wondered this, and because I was part of an anthology that was getting pitched that never got picked up. How did that process work? Like, how did d- were you approaching the same house, publishing house?

Did you have an agent that pitched it?

Like, how did that work for you guys?

Beth Weinhouse: This was-- it was interesting because Twenty Over Forty, David was teaching at the University of Mississippi and had a contact at the press there, and we wound up publishing with the University Press of Mississippi. And, it was a university press. They didn't do a lot of fiction. It got good reviews.

It got no promotion, and that was that. And that wasn't what we wanted to do this time. So we both approached agents who we'd worked with before and got the same response, which was, "What a great idea. [00:08:00] What an important book. But, I'm not sure I'm really the right person to represent it. Short story collections are such a hard sell.

I don't know." So we started going to indie presses and getting the same thing. "Wow, what a great idea. What a great book. But, we're really not right." And we do suspect ageism because it seemed like if it's so great an idea and so important, why don't you wanna publish it or represent it? But we stood back and said, "What's holding this back?"

And I'm a journalist, so I said think like a publisher." Publishing is a business, after all. And we prepared a whole presentation with how much more money older people spend on books, and how much more time they spend reading, and how many book clubs they're in, and how many adult communities have book clubs or book groups.

And we just did a whole presentation about why you want this book, and you can sell it, and Regal House Publishing got it instantly, and they've been very supportive and really terrific to work [00:09:00] with.

Beth McMullen: I want that slide presentation that you did because I swear to God, I just wanna put it up for... Because it's true. When you look at the demographics of who buys books, it is the people that are being written about in your anthology. This... And always talk about, wanting to see yourself in books, and I think that i- in addition to, to, the that's super popular, and I get you wanna publish that because that's who's gonna support everything else, I think you do to serve up something to this audience that is buying so much of the, the books that are purchased.

It just seems crazy to me. And when you say it to people, they're like yeah, know, but..." It's almost like they're afraid to show their roots, right? We're out there.

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah, and there were so many books where the older people were the minor character or the sidekick, or they were a cliche. The wise older [00:10:00] grandmother, or the crotchety old man, or someone who can't deal with technology or doesn't know how to work their iPhone, or just isn't into pop culture. And just thought, "Who," "who are these people?"

They're not the people I know. I'm this age now, and these aren't my friends or my professional colleagues, and they're just not really being represented. Was the other thing we wanted. We wanted the characters in this book to be a little bit surprising, like not what you would necessarily expect in a book about older people.

Yeah.

Beth McMullen: read a book not that long ago called "The Road to Tender Hearts," and I'm blanking on the author. It was and it was the first book I'd read in a while where the characters were 50s, 60s, most of the characters. There were a couple kids in there, but they were minor, and I had that moment at the end.

I loved the book. I read it in no time at all, and then afterwards I was trying to figure out why I felt like it just really got under my skin and that was the reason. It [00:11:00] was because I hadn't seen, at least, in the last however long, any books that really brought those characters to the front and let them tell the story. So yeah, I've been much more aware recently, I think because of that experience, okay, where are these books? And you do, some crime capers and mysteries coming out that have older people in the lead, but they're more the genre, they're following the same genre conventions, they're just older protagonists.

So yeah, I was very excited to s- to see this book.

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah. The books, the two recent bestsellers, The Correspondent and also Remarkably Bright Creatures, feature older women as the main character, and they were written by younger writers, which as I said, I'm perfectly fine with. But but I think it's becoming, getting more into the consciousness.

Hollywood is using more older protagonists. A lot of the stories that were submitted to us initially, even by the older authors, had the older characters, it was from the point of view of a [00:12:00] younger character relating to an older character or living with an older character, and we wanted the whole point of view to be from the older characters.

So we didn't use

Beth McMullen: much, some of the stories you said are reprints by pretty well-known authors. I

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah

Beth McMullen: a bunch of names in there. Were you going for a balance between stuff that was original and new, maybe from lesser-known authors, and also these pretty well-known household names as well? Was there some thought process behind that?

Beth Weinhouse: We wanted some well-known names both because we liked the authors, but also 'cause we thought that would make the book more accessible to people. And there was no way we were gonna get an original submission. We weren't giving people much time and, so we had to go with previously published.

And it's it's just about half and half reprints and original, which I think works. We would've been happy to have more original stories. We would've even taken more previous. We didn't have a bias against anything, so it w- whatever we liked, whatever, whether they'd been [00:13:00] published before or not.

lisa: And

divide it, like who worked with who and as you were editing this book and because that's gotta be an interesting process. Were you, like, doling out the stories and-

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah it was whoever... Honestly, we- David has a full-time job. He's a, an English professor. He runs the creative writing program at Montclair State University. I'm now a freelance journalist. I used to be on staff, but I work for a lot of magazines and websites, and I also have a part-time job at the university.

So it was really, I don't like the word bandwidth, but it was really whoever had bandwidth at the time. We would just pass things back and forth, and we did that anyway. If I, went through a story, I would then run it by him, and vice versa. And the writers, they were all lovely to work with.

Everyone in this book was just a joy to work with. The only thing that was difficult were some of the permissions with the more famous writers. That was difficult

Beth McMullen: ask you about that. I was gonna ask you how it is to run that gauntlet, because there's always a lot of baggage, for lack [00:14:00] of a better word, attached to these things that you've gotta navigate

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah. Some of them, David is acquainted with Joyce Carol Oates. He actually studied with her at Princeton when he was an undergrad, and knew Richard Bausch a bit also, and so that was easy. Nick Delbanco we knew. But the people like Jane Gardam, Paul Theroux, we had to go through, I think it was Europa Editions, and they were nice, but it's like wending your way through a bureaucracy.

You get to the agent first, then you go to the publisher, but then it's gonna take a while to get you the contract, and, the press was getting ready to move ahead, but they wouldn't do it unless everything was signed, sealed, delivered. And we lost one story we really wanted just because we didn't get the contract in time.

It was a Tessa Hadley story, and it was called Coda, and we thought, "Perfect last story for the book." It was just, lovely and sh- they said yes verbally, but we weren't getting the contract, we weren't getting the contract. We had to go to press, and you'll see that David [00:15:00] has one of the stories in the book, and he said, "I don't wanna publish my story in the book."

Most editors don't do that. And I said, "We need a last story, and I love your story, and we should put it in the book," and I twisted his arm, and that's why his story's in the book. And I have to explain that to everybody 'cause it wasn't him trying to promote himself. He really didn't wanna do it.

So if we... It could've been Tessa Hadley.

Beth McMullen: No, I can't imagine, like, all of the, the balls you have to keep up in the air with 20 different authors, agents,

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah.

Beth McMullen: Is

Beth Weinhouse: There was another one that fell through that we still haven't figured out. I'm not going to name the name of that writer, but it was a science fiction kind of fantasy story, and it was really good, and the writer was really excited about it and really happy to be included.

And she said, "Just go through the legal stuff with my agent," who just ghosted us. He wouldn't return any emails or anything. We tried to get back to her, and [00:16:00] then she wouldn't answer us, and we think he didn't want her being identified as older. That's the only thing we can come up with is maybe her fans, because she's, a science fiction genre writer, maybe her readers were younger and they didn't want her identified that way, which, a- again, I'm just guessing

Beth McMullen: I could totally see that though. And I feel like I wish publishing in general would stop the ghosting stuff. Just say no. It's

Beth Weinhouse: Just exactly

Beth McMullen: grownups here. can handle

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah.

Beth McMullen: the ghosting thing makes me

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah. Yeah.

Beth McMullen: boy, that's a bummer

lisa: I just had this conversation yesterday with my agent. We were on a Zoom call together, and we were talking about this very subject, and she just said, "No is a complete sentence. All you have to do is write back and say no." And I'm

Beth McMullen: Yeah.

lisa: so true."

Beth Weinhouse: Yeah

lisa: don't do that with me."

Beth Weinhouse: I want a letter. I want a proper email.

Beth McMullen: [00:17:00] Seriously, we're old enough, we can take it. No is fine. In your experience, I know you've worked as a journalist is editing an anthology with all these moving parts that much more complicated than working on a single piece? Is it the kind of thing that when it's over you're like, "Whew, survived that,"

Beth Weinhouse: well, early in my career, I worked at some of the mainstream women's magazines, like Ladies Home Journal, magazines that don't even exist anymore. And there, the magazine had a voice, so individual writers couldn't have a voice. They had to sound like the magazine. So editing was like making it sound like the magazine.

And editing an anthology with 20 different writers, you want all those writers' voices to be really strong, and I like that. I didn't like stifling people's style. So this was more fun. And the first time I did it for 20 over s- over 40, I was a little bit nervous, 'cause I hadn't done a lot of fiction editing.

I had done some short stories for the magazines. [00:18:00] But one of the writers had her story published in The New Yorker, but she sent us her original, and we were going to reprint. And so I was editing from her original, and then we realized we could also, use the version in The New Yorker, and we were comparing them, and I had done a lot of the same editing The New Yorker did, and then I felt better.

I thought, "Okay I'm doing this right," so that's... Yeah. Yeah. I try not to be what I used to call in magazines the big large school of editing, where editors just want their hands all over it. So if you use the word big, they change it to large. And if you use the word large, they change it to big, just 'cause they need to do something.

I was... I, we kept a pretty light hand on it, we queried a few things. We corrected some grammar. We didn't do-- We a- asked, for a little bit of clarification in spots. But it was a really light hand, I think. Yep.

Beth McMullen: And you can tell. They all sound unique. You can feel the voices coming through. I read somewhere that you [00:19:00] worked for the Reader's Digest at some point

Beth Weinhouse: I do. I actually haven't been on staff there. I filled in the office twice for editors out on leave, and then for a while I was handling their health and medical pages because I do a lot of health journalism. And I still write for them. I have a article coming out in the February issue. So yeah.

Beth McMullen: my first job after college. I worked in the the Pleasantville offices,

Beth Weinhouse: Oh, yeah.

I heard those were gorgeous. Yeah.

Beth McMullen: were pretty crazy. They had this insanely large art collection where there was, like, Van Gogh and Modigliani and Picasso just hanging on the walls, and they weren't alarmed.

You could literally go up, pick it off the wall, and walk out the door if you wanted to. It was such a crazy place. That was, yeah, that was my first job, and I was like, "Are all magazines like this?

Beth Weinhouse: I, they're really unique because I've worked at so many [00:20:00] different magazines and, like any company or any staff, there are people who are nice and people who aren't nice and people who are emotional. And at Reader's Digest, I've worked there through several different editors and different staff people and editors in chief.

Everybody has just been really nice and charming and lovely, and I thought, h- do they hire for that? It's just incredible to me, 'cause everybody on that staff is so nice. 

Beth McMullen: Yeah, it was a fun experience. I was there probably a two years maybe before I moved on, but a lot of fun. I just was like I would've been happy just hanging out with the art.

Beth Weinhouse: They let the staff, they let the staff bid and buy on some of it before they left that office, the headquarters.

Beth McMullen: You to go to the storage where they kept all the art, and you could pick out pieces for your office. Now,

Beth Weinhouse: Wow.

Beth McMullen: so I didn't get the good stuff, but still, even you could just walk around and, 

Beth Weinhouse: amazing

Beth McMullen: it was so incredible.

I never had that experience anywhere else that I ever [00:21:00] went after that. So 

Beth Weinhouse: yeah

Beth McMullen: it was pretty great. This has been so much fun. The book is available anywhere people buy books, correct?

Beth Weinhouse: Correct.

Beth McMullen: Okay,

do you have a website that you want to share where they can learn more about it?

Beth Weinhouse: Sure. David and I both do. I have bethweinhaus.com and he has davidgalef.com. And we're actually... The book just came out last week, and we need to put up some of the reviews and events and things like that. So it's not quite up to date, but yes, you can read about the book, and there's links for ordering it and all of that.

Beth McMullen: Okay, great. I'm gonna include all of that in the podcast notes so people can find you, can find the book, can find events where you're going to be. I hope everybody picks this up because I have really enjoyed what I've read so far, and I'm just gonna keep working through it, and so I'm sure there are more gems in there that are waiting for me.

We're really happy that we got the chance to chat with you today.

Beth Weinhouse: Thank you so much. This is fun. Thanks very [00:22:00] much.

Beth McMullen: And listeners, Lisa and I are back next week so until then, happy reading, writing, and listening