Stories and Poems About Family
“Adventures of an Old Dude” describes the months leading up to writer Thomas E. Kennedy’s 65th birthday, at the start of which his girlfriend of fifteen years breaks up with him for her analyst. A bachelor again, we bear witness to the inner workings of an older single man. He enjoys getting hit on by a young woman, but muses, “This girl is half your age, less than half…you’re an old man to her.” Kennedy turns a subject that could be cringe-inducing and depressing into, if not life-affirming, at least an interesting and at times playful meditation on what it’s like to date after many years.
“Are they really dates?” he says. “What exactly is a date, anyway?” He goes to coffee shops, bookstores, and taverns where he talks to single women, tries calculating ages, and finds reasons to stay single (“You notice there is something about her voice and the tip of her nose that repels you. Are you that shallow as to be repelled by a voice and the tip of a nose? you wonder.”). Do we really care if he ends up with another woman? Of course he will, whether he describes it (he doesn’t, actually) or not. Still, it’s a journey worth taking with an old dude, who, “…after all, still has a trick or two up his gold old sleeve.”
New Letters Vol. 76 also includes an interview with poet Maggie Anderson, who discusses the idea of poetry of witness—poems as reportage on wars and political oppression, as “a way of acting in the world.”
Anis Shivani reviews Eric Miles Williamson’s latest novel of the working man, WELCOME TO OAKLAND. Shivani lays waste to writers who pretend to know what it’s like to be a poor, working class man and champions Williamson as an authentic chronicler of the repressed, how his writing reminds us how the other America (“to which the rich America consign the working poor”) lives.
The issue features photographs by Gina Kelly and ink and watercolors by Steve McClure, all of which not only articulate the theme of family, but add to it—Kelly’s series of vivid color photos captures a sense place while McClure’s work presents the family as community.
