By Jessica Goodfellow
FROM: Barrelhouse

Members of the Los Angeles Glass Table Collective consider the topic “late-stage writing” in the essay collection What Falls Away is Always: Writers Over 60 on Writing & Death. The title was taken from Theodore Roethke’s oft-quoted villanelle “The Waking,” while the subtitle suggests that these two favored subjects of all writers can be expertly addressed by the over-60 cohort.

Since they have attained “more than a thousand years of writing among us,” surely they must have enhanced experience with both writing and death, must have “learn[ed] by going where I have to go,” to borrow a refrain from Roethke’s poem.

A 2019 AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference panel on this topic sparked the collection. The first four essays, written by the original panel members, are described in the attending catalog as a response to the prescient realization that “The body, like the world, is a dangerous place.” Enthusiasm for the panel resulted in the collective’s decision to assemble this volume; however, the second section is colored by the advent of the pandemic, so that the world and the bodies in it, one’s own and those of others, have become ever more dangerous places. As Diane Seuss writes, “This little essay was going to be one way. Now it has to be another way. […] I could be semi-wise about writing toward death when death was not a looming reality. Now I’m wiping down my mail with bleach.”

Smack in the middle of my own fifties, coping with both a newly emptied nest and menopause in the midst of a pandemic, struggling in solitude with whether my current poetry manuscript is “relevant,” I am always looking for advice on how to live the dwindling remainder of my days and how to write despite this awareness. This volume of short essays (averaging four pages each) seemed exactly what I needed. I would learn strategies for how to thrive as an aging writer, I supposed. Read Rest of Review Here