OUR FIFTH ANNUAL 5 over 50

For the past five years we’ve dedicated this space to featuring five debut authors who have lived a good deal of life before publishing their first books. From the start our aim was to highlight not one path—not some mythical road, paved with youthful intentions, upon which so many “new and emerging” authors travel— but rather the countless individual routes, some considerably longer and circuitous than others, that lead to the publication of a debut book.

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After all, there isn’t one way to be a writer, and “new” and “emerging” are not synonymous with “young.” In this, our fifth annual 5 Over 50, we meet five authors—ranging in age, from early fifties to early seventies, and published by presses large and small, from Cleveland’s independent Belt Publishing to New York City’s Big Five imprints—who followed their passion, dedicated themselves to their craft, and pursued with dogged perseverance a dream undiminished by career building, child rearing, and the joys, sorrows, responsibilities, and challenges of lives well lived. As one of this year’s debut authors, A. H. Kim, whose dream to publish a book revealed itself relatively recently—only eight years ago—puts it: “To those of you who have a dream I say, ‘Go for it.’”

Elizabeth Wetmore

Age: 52. Residence: Chicago. Book: Valentine (Harper, March 2020), a novel that explores the lingering effects of a brutal crime on the women of a West Texas oil town in the 1970s. Agent: Samantha Shea of Georges Borchardt, Inc. Editor: Emily Griffin.

DO SOMETHING beautiful. These words, which appear in the final frame of George Saunders’s 2015 short film, “On Story,” have graced the wall behind my desk for years. When I wrote Valentine, I set out to tell my characters’ stories, to bear witness to their lives and their quiet, flawed, often accidental acts of courage. But mostly I wanted to do something beautiful.

Lately I have a reply ready when someone asks why, at the age of fifty-two, I am just now getting around to publishing