A literary salon for men over fifty
I’m getting a small group of men together to read about life and the writing life, and to use creative journaling to vent and to get at the heart of aging and getting wiser.
The plan: read aloud, talk through some incredible work, write a bit, and then read some of our own work back, but only if you want to. There will be zero pressure to perform. From there, the conversation can go anywhere: the day, the future of mankind, whatever’s on your mind. Reading and writing are just the way in.
Our first group is forming in the Baltimore/DC corridor. This will be a live, in-person gathering.
The Vent, ten minutes in. Your own page stays in your notebook unless you decide to read it.
“Every line and word is vitally connected with my life, my life only.”Henry Miller, “Reflections on Writing”
Men past fifty, I think, have a lot to say, or at least a lot on our minds. Stories, opinions, half-finished thoughts from the drive home. But sometimes there’s just nowhere to say it, or anyone to say it to.
Well, here’s a place. If you’re interested, join us.
Who is this for
It’s especially for men who like to think, read, and trade ideas in good company. Maybe there is no crisis to report. The job is fine or finished, your children, if you have them, are grown or nearly so, and still something in the middle of all this life has shifted, the way the house sounds different, quieter, once the kids have gone. Or maybe the big games aren’t holding your attention this week, baseball season is running long or boring you, and you’re looking for something different.
You needn’t call yourself a writer, but if you do write, or have always meant to, this is a good place to work at it. Essays, stories, poems, a journal you keep in the drawer: no genre required. We’ll read good books, look at what other writers have said about the craft, and try our own things on the page.
The evening
A short essay, story, or poem, read aloud so the words are in the room. A diverse range of modern writers and voices.
What did the piece stir up, and why? Just some guys thinking out loud together, wandering wherever the talk leads: the day, the past, or whatever comes next.
Fifteen minutes to get the pen moving. BYOJ: Bring Your Own Journal. Some nights we’ll vent; on other nights we’ll work through a memory, a list, a letter, or a lie we told well back in the day.
Whoever wants to can share what he wrote, rough edges and all, and then we talk till nine.
A little history
Men have always written to let off steam. Marcus Aurelius filled a private notebook, much of it on military campaign, addressed to no one but himself. Kerouac typed On the Road in about three weeks on one long scroll of paper. Stephen King wrote Carrie at a makeshift desk in a laundry room and threw three pages of it in the trash; his wife fished them out the next day. His rule from On Writing lends our evening its shape: “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.” During the Vent, your page is yours alone, even at a full table. Reading aloud afterward, if you choose to, is the door opening.
The reading
One season to give you the idea, though we can choose our own as we go, and anyone can bring in a piece he loves. Some will be funny. Some will be serious. Each is short enough to read in one sitting.
Fathers
A son buries his father in the summer Harlem burns, and finds the two events will not stay apart.
Getting older
Vanity, mortality, and turtlenecks, handled with a comic's timing and no self-pity at all.
Work
Steelworkers, waitresses, and stonemasons on the work that made them and the work that wore them down.
Self-respect
Character as the willingness to answer for one's own life, argued in a few cool, exacting pages.
Grief
Two parents, a hospital vigil, a baker's bread in the small hours, and what strangers can still give one another.
Attention
A brief encounter with a weasel becomes a meditation on how to hold fast to the one necessary thing.
Marriage
A father rehearses the sentence that will end his family as his children know it.
Memory
On memory, invention, and the way a flooded river remembers where it used to run.
Delight
A poet resolves to write a small essay of gladness every day for a year, and learns what attention costs and repays.
Joy
On pleasure, which comes easily, and joy, which is rarer and asks more of us.
I’ll pull the chairs together
My mother spent thirty years teaching people that what they had to say was worth saying. I've spent most of my working life as a writer and editor, and lately I've wanted a different kind of room: a table of men who like to think, to swap ideas, and to try something new. A good piece of writing will get us started, and after that we’ll talk about our own writing adventures, experiments, or whatever else comes up.
Billy Treger, organizer
The research
None of this is required reading. But since you scrolled this far.
I’ve never been a guy with a card game or a football-watching crew. I’m a high-school extrovert gone a little introverted in my later years, and I’ve done some reading on men and aging.
What I’ve learned is that a lot of us aren’t great at keeping friends. In 1990, 3 percent of American men said they had no close friends. By 2021, that number had grown to 15 percent.1 The usual explanation is that we made our friends at work, and then the work ended, or moved to a laptop on the kitchen table or, in my case, the basement. Scrolling and scrolling. Nobody decided this. It just sort of crept up on me. I don’t know if any of this sounds familiar to you, but anyway.
What I’ve also found, at least for me, is that a good remedy for creeping isolation, and the nagging fear of feeling lonely, can be pleasantly low-tech. One review of 148 studies found that people with strong social ties live measurably longer, an effect researchers compare to quitting smoking, and which seems to me a good deal more fun.2 A Harvard study that has followed a group of men since 1938 reached the same conclusion: the men who stayed close to other people were the healthier and happier ones, and it counted for more the older they got.3
As for the writing: in 1986 the psychologist James Pennebaker had people write about something hard for fifteen minutes a day, four days running. For months afterward, they turned up at the doctor less often.4 When the early studies were pooled, men seemed to get more out of writing than women, possibly because we had more stored up. More to vent.5,6 Fifteen minutes in a journal is less time than it takes me to find parking on my street in DC.
The truth is, older American men are no lonelier than men anywhere else,7 and like most research, the writing studies come out stronger in some places than others, so take it all with a grain of salt.8 But I think there’s something to it. I’ve always found putting pen to paper cathartic. It lets off steam, keeps the temper in check, and it feels good. Hence this group: I think sharing a good piece of writing with a table of other curious gents can make for a better evening than most.
Anywho.
The tradition
Nothing I’m proposing here is new, which is part of its appeal. Wiser Writers draws on a lineage of scientists, teachers, and writers who spent their working lives demonstrating what a pen and an honest page can do.
1973
Writing Without Teachers
The great advocate of freewriting: ten minutes without stopping and without judgment, on the theory that the maker and the critic work best in shifts. He also championed the plain, generous practice of writers reading aloud to one another.
1975
At a Journal Workshop
A depth psychologist who carried the journal out of the bedside drawer and into the workshop, and found that people write more truthfully about their lives in a room of others doing the same.
1986
Writing Down the Bones
Writing as practice in the Zen sense, done daily and without fuss. Keep the hand moving, she teaches, and let the inner editor fall behind.
1990
Opening Up
The social psychologist who brought expressive writing into the laboratory and found that putting the unspoken into words leaves measurable traces in the body. His work is the Vent's scientific spine.
1992
The Artist's Way
The Morning Pages: three longhand pages each morning, written for no reader at all. Cameron understood that the clutter on the surface of the mind has to be cleared before anything true will rise.
1999
Writing as a Way of Healing
A Virginia Woolf scholar who read Pennebaker and asked what his findings meant for writers. Her answer: set down the feeling and the facts together, and keep at it until a shape emerges.
2005
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
A Jungian analyst on the questions that arrive in midlife and decline to leave: who am I apart from my roles, and what is the rest of this for? In Under Saturn's Shadow he wrote about the wounds men carry and so rarely name.
2017
Writing to Awaken
His premise is simple and severe: tell the truth and your story changes, and when the story changes, so does the life. He leads writers into the shadow, toward the parts of ourselves we prefer to keep offstage.
Join
Our first group is forming now in the Baltimore/DC corridor. No forms to fill out, no mailing list. Just shoot me a note, and I’ll answer it myself with the date and place of the first salon.
Let me know which describes you best