Published by The Gay and Lesbian Review

Janell Moon. Salt and Paper: 65 Candles. RAW Art PRESS: California, 2010. 186 Pages.  ISBN 978-0-9819534-2-7. $15.00

The publisher’s note says that RAW Art PRESS is An Experimental Prose Series, “where language itself delivers content in new ways.” It mentions stream of consciousness, sensibility, innate patterns and construct language to offer insight, in this case insight in to aging.  However, it’s easier to talk about what Salt and Paper: 65 Candles isn’t than what it is. For example: it says it’s a journal, and it does have ascending dates as the year passes giving a day by day record of Janell Moon’s 65th year—sort of.  The record is written in scraps. These scraps aren’t geometrical, like a quilt, but a hodgepodge of words. They aren’t like poetry, but some parts have the overarching metaphor that each line advances to a new insight, so some of it is poetic. The rest are short paragraphs of narrative often structured with sentence fragments, interspersed with seemingly random words and phrases. In the acknowledgements, the author claims that “hybrid writing can allow a woman’s writing greater intimacy with her readers.” To be honest, the unusual structure didn’t hinder my understanding. Random and disconnected phrases grow to whole images as Moon records her sixty-fifth year. At times she addresses the many women (baby boomers) on the path with her:

We are the most educated, fit and psychologically aware people to enter our sixties. Still, our bodies are wearing out. I don’t like to be told the sixties are the new forties. It doesn’t feel true in my mind or body. Remember what I knew at forty and how my body felt. It’s not the same. [I] don’t want my ego invested in resisting a natural process. I’d rather be the woman who is her age.

Moon eventually comes to call this stage of life “the youth of old age.”

Like this author I’ve been a part of a large marketing demographic all my life. I grew up with Howdy Doodie, and hula hoops. When I was a teen, beach party movies, fast food and panty hose came to be.  When I had children, disposable diapers were created. But for boomers, whose mantra was “don’t trust anyone over thirty,” arriving at twice thirty is troubling. These days watching the nightly news we see cures for women with leaky pipes and blue pills for men with erectile dysfunction. So it seems natural to expect some literature to be crafted about growing older as we try to figure out who we are and how to be who we are one more time.

Salt and Paper is at once true and mundane. “Arthritis in hands and feet. Hurts to move, helps to move,” comes in a short entry that includes “winter pears and goat milk,” but there’s nothing about winter pears, the words stand alone. Challenges for the author include a broken bone, an only son moving to Colorado, taking her only grandson, a mother with failing health, who has always cared for a mentally ill brother, one friend in early stages of Alzheimer’s and another friend who is dying and wants Moon to be part of her “dying team.” Her mother shares that whenever she thinks it is time for death, the day goes on and something else happens. Moon doesn’t seem to instruct us. These problems and how she copes (mostly accepts) are her own. If we take anything from moving through the year with her, we might try to admit mistakes, forgive others, and most important, keep moving. “…each life stage is a time for growth.”

Moon doesn’t defend the past though she says she’s learned from it. She’s not forthcoming about her love life. (Is that what we call it as we enter our seventh decade?)  She is divorced, has a son and grandson. She does say, “A year after the divorce, when [I was] first with a woman, the combination lock opened and I was free to be myself the rest of my life.”  She mentions a woman she once met at an Over 50 Alanon meeting. There are lots of female friends and a mysterious “you” she addresses from time to time. One day she’s been out with friends and later writes, “A beagle wandered away from the market and came to the edge of the café. I threw a wafer that it ate without looking up. I thought, it was like you the morning we were talking—rather I was talking about love—and you ate throughout in silence.” This vagueness, among other specific detail leaves a void. So her quest for greater intimacy with the reader fails, at least in this area.

The problem isn’t the hybrid writing style, which is refreshing in a way. But Moon neither reflects on the past nor projects into the future. We see what she sees in front of her and must gather insight from those things.  She writes about her home, the ocean, the birds, the sunsets, the age spots on her hands and what’s going on with her cat. A KD Lang concert is disappointing, not KD “barefoot, full dress with a funny little waistcoat,” but poor seats behind the singer. So the author reveals a lot. The things she encounters and the sense she makes of it all she willingly shares. The writing as well as the reading experience is pleasantly original, but the author sticks with what is safe.

Bio: Martha Miller is the author of Retirement Plan: a Crime Novel new from Bold Strokes Books. For more information see her web site www.marthamiller.net�