Notes of a Middle-Aged Baby Writer

For ballet, it may be too late. For writing, it never is.

I was 13 when I got my first rejection from The New Yorker.

Most bookish adults have a story about getting in trouble for reading as child — in class, or at a party. I don’t recall that happening to me, maybe because I was a child of bookish people. What I got in trouble for was writing. Constantly.

I scribbled obsessively, in a Harriet the Spy kind of way, observing everything going on around me, recording every detail and then bending those details into fiction.

It unnerved people.

I was an ambitious kid, precocious. And I knew I was on to something. Every once in a while, among hundreds of pen-smeared pages, I would write a single turn of phrase, a small description, maybe even a whole sentence, that rang with truth, that made the blood thrum in my veins the way it did when I read something stunning and pure. The magic of those rare and tiny moments fueled me. Call it talent or call it luck, but I knew what it felt like to hit the note just right, and I was spell-bound by the possibility.

What would it feel like, I wondered, to have a poem published in The New Yorker at age 13? Or 14, perhaps 13 had been too lofty a goal. Certainly by 15? If not a poem, then…