Late Beginnings and an interview with author Gail Lehrman

It's never too late to follow your passion

One of the more meaningful lessons of being alive on the planet Earth is the one where you learn that it is never too late to try new things. Nor is it too late to master them. Today’s newsletter features a few late beginners. Today’s installment of the Angry Dead Women podcast also features- albeit very, very briefly, two young girls whose ferocious debuts into the public sphere took place when they were only in their teens.

But my three late beginners are Grandma Moses who began her illustrious journey as a painter at 78 years of age.

Sugaring Off, 1955 sold at auction for $1.36 million in 1999

Evelyn Gregory began her second career (after retiring as the vice president of a bank) at the age of 71.

“Today on my flight from Detroit I was asked by a woman how long I’d been flying. I told her how fortunate I was that Mesa was willing to hire me at seventy-one and that I’ll be starting my fifth year this coming May. She said, ‘Maybe this is something I can do when I retire.’ She’s a registered nurse. It excites me to see someone get interested in the profession after watching me on duty. I even had a college president on one of my flights express a desire to do this when she retired. I always encourage people to pursue their dreams, no matter what their age.” -Evelyn Gregory, Mesa Airlines.

Finally, debut novelist, Gail Lehrman, has burst upon the scene with the brilliant, heart wrenching, family saga, Across Seward Park. She did so at an age which is somewhere in between Evelyn and Grandma Moses.

Here’s some of what we talked about that isn’t on the Podcast. Enjoy!

How did the idea for the story of Across Seward Park come to you and how long did it take to germinate in your imagination?

I can't point to an Ah-Ha moment when I knew what the book would be about. It was a process. It started with my main character, Irv’s voice, which came out of a two paragraph exercise I did in a writing workshop. It was a voice, an idiom that I left behind when I moved from New York City to the west coast, but I could still hear loud and clear in my ears.

There were other things that I missed from New York, like loud arguing. People on the west coast are so polite. I thought, I want to write a book about people who argue. There were pieces of my cultural history that I felt close to and the social and political energy of my parents' and grandparents' generations, as well. All those things were rolling around in my head when I started to write. A couple of characters came in and went or morphed into other characters, then I started to do the actual research and that shaped everything that came after.

Were there times while working on the book when you thought to just throw in the towel? What made you keep going?

The book took eight or nine years to write. Sometimes I’d spend weeks battling a single paragraph. But I discovered early on that all the time I spent working and re-working a single sentence, my good old subconscious was doing its thing. I’d wake up and, boom, there was not only the right sentence, but the whole next step of the book.

After a while, I started accepting those frustrating times as part of the process. Just get your butt in the chair, put down words, something, anything. Eventually, the answer will show up and you can move on. It’s so satisfying when it happens. I just really enjoy writing, even when I’m pulling out my hair.

Tell us about your research process and how you chose what bits of history to select and/or feature and which ones to throw away or simply disregard.

What I found available on-line blew me away...Oral histories recorded in the 1970s from the actual organizers... Every issue of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union newsletter from 1910 forward...the history of the garment cutting knife...a newspaper advertisement from 1920 on the correct way to answer a telephone... It was like digging up buried treasure. And, of course, one thing leads to another, so I could follow links from one site to the next and run into pieces of history I didn’t even think to ask about.

When we went home to New York for a visit, I was able to go to NYU’s Tamiment Labor Library. It was my first experience doing live research. I was sitting at a little desk and they wheeled out this carboard box full of original letters, pictures, pamphlets from 1910 through the 1950s. There was something awesome about holding the real things in my hands. Some of the information was completely new to me, like the fact that the International Ladies Garment Workers Union created an education department staffed by university professors to teach workers American history, philosophy, public speaking, writing, a complete curriculum. That went right into the book.

I had a similar experience researching the Spanish Civil War. I held the handwritten letter of a young man who’d run off to fight in Spain trying to explain himself to his mother back in New York. It was incredibly moving. That, too, made it into the book. It all gave me the rhythm of how people talked, what they thought about, what the world was like for them.

What advice would you have for someone who might have a novel inside of them and who is unsure of how to begin?

This is my first (and only) book, so I don’t know that I’m qualified to give advice. My experience was that the more I wrote, the more I wanted to keep writing. I guess I’d say just start and don’t worry about where it’ll end. Writing a novel is an exercise in delayed gratification. The trip is more important than the destination.

Describe a typical day’s writing for you. Do you manage to work on your manuscript every day, or have there been times where you just need to put it down for a while and then come back to it?

I’m retired, so I had the luxury of a free schedule. I worked on the book everyday, almost always starting first thing in the morning. I could go for about four or five hours and then I was fried, but I fell asleep most nights thinking about where I’d pick up the next day. Over the years, there were breaks of course, vacations and such. Mostly I wrote everyday, five or six days a week. As you know, this final year we had a Zoom writing meet-up every morning at 7AM. That was fantastic for the final push, not to mention the companionship.

What is the best thing that has happened to you as a consequence of your writing?

First: the friends I’ve made along the way. They’ve been an absolute gift. Second: I’ve learned to listen to my inner voice with respect. I’m not so quick to dismiss my thoughts as trivial or dumb. That’s a really big change.

To learn more about Gail, check out her website: GailLehrmanauthor.com