INTERVIEW: "JOURNEYWOMAN" EVELYN HANNON ON THE ART OF AGING DISGRACEFULLY

      Female travel bloggers now abound on the Internet, but Evelyn Hannon was a pioneer.  In 1997 at age 57, she launched journeywoman.com, an online travel resource just for women. Before then few people acknowledged a simple fact: Women have different travel concerns from men when traveling solo.

  Journeywoman first appeared in print in a mini-magazine Hannon started in 1994, but the real genesis of the site came in 1982. Hannon and her husband recently had been divorced. They had fallen in love at 14, married at 19 --  “Way too young,” she says now – and had two children. At 42, they knew they were going in different directions and had agreed to an amicable parting.  They would remain friends, but the pain of breaking that tie was “incredibly distressing,” says Hannon. “I felt that I had to go into the world by myself.”  She took a trip to Europe – alone.

    That solo journey would be the seed that would grow into Hannon’s late-blooming career as a travel writer and Journeywoman.

Evelyn Hannon

     As a writer, Hannon has had plenty of life experiences to tap into. During her marriage, she founded and operated a children's camp, worked at a recreational center for older adults and launched a company called Sorties that took older adults on trips to North America. After her divorce, she went back to school to study film and television. At 49, she got a grant to go to China to do research for a film on the way women do traditional Chinese medicine. In her fifties, she moved to Toronto where she started journeywoman.com. On her 65th birthday, she celebrated by running in a 10K race.

     

     Now 73, Hannon isn’t ready to slow down yet. Dubbed the Grandmother of Women's Travel (and now a real grandmother of four), she still manages (with only the help of a webmistress) her far-reaching network of female travelers (the website gets one million visitors a year) who keep each other informed and sometimes even meet up with each other in various parts of the globe. The site is peppered with good advice and articles written by contributors about their experiences. Hannon writes about her own travel adventures like the time she traveled to China with her daughter Leslie when she adopted a Chinese baby named Lotus.

Graphic from journeywoman.com

     Hannon tweets several times a day to her more than 22,000 followers on Twitter and writes a weekly blog – “Aging Disgracefully” – that appears on YummyMummyClub.ca, a website founded by her other daughter, Erica.

     This week, I caught up with Hannon by telephone at her home in Toronto. The following is an edited transcript of our chat:

     Creativity and travel have a lot in common. Both involve a certain amount of risk and putting yourself out there. How has aging changed your approach to your creative life as a travel writer and your actual traveling?

     As I get older, I get bolder. At this point I’m 73 years old and I pretty well speak my mind. I’m not afraid anymore. I’m not afraid to approach people. I’m not afraid to be playful. You know that whole thing about “when I get older, I’ll wear a purple hat.” Things don’t embarrass you and you know that you have the expertise and people know you are not just fooling around.

      You talk with admiration about your mother as someone who knew how to grow old gracefully. But your blog is called Aging Disgracefully.

     That’s right. My mother was an absolutely lady. I am a maverick. I don’t think anybody can accuse me of not being a lady. I’m never rude. I’m friendly. But my mother was a very sophisticated lady. I am a funky lady. I’m aging disgracefully  -- doing it a little differently than people expect.

     You started Journeywoman at age 57. What are the advantages to starting a project later in life and what are the disadvantages?

      I don’t think there are any disadvantages at all. The career moves that I had had in place before I started this company all gave me terrific background and access in order to create the new one.  So I was bringing forward all this lovely experience. I was saavy enough at that point. I had business acumen.  Yeah, it was perfect. I think that your excitement when you’re older is so much more because you understand that you are taking this on because you really really love the idea.

     What was your first travel piece about?

      My first travel piece was about Amsterdam. I didn’t really know how to do any of this then. So I cold call the Netherland Board of Tourism and said, “Hello. My name is Evelyn Hannon. I am going to be the first Canadian woman to start write about travel from a woman’s point of view and I’d like you to send me to Holland.” There was silence at the other end and then a woman said, “Evelyn, who are you? That’s not how you get assignments. Would you like me to explain how you do it?”  I eventually faxed her a letter of introduction and at the bottom of the letter I wrote: “Remember I’m a Journeywoman. My bags are always packed.” Four days later, the phone rang: “Evelyn, is your bag really packed? One of the journalists on our press trip just called to cancel, would you like to replace him?” That was my first travel story. It got incredible coverage. It was the first time someone had written a piece that said, “This is how you look at Amsterdam from a woman’s point of view.”

     In your piece Girl With a Grandmother Face, you describe your grandchildren’s negative reactions to your wrinkles. To counter that, because they called you old and weak, you challenged them to an arm wrestling match, which, of course, you eventually let them win. What can we do to change our society’s negative views of “girls with grandmother faces”? Or it up to us? Do we need to change attitudes out there or do we need to change attitudes within ourselves?

Graphic from journeywoman.com

      The concept of aging and of grandmother sitting in her rocking chair and knitting and all of the stereotypes are still in books. But our generation is slowly changing that. We’re living longer. We’re healthier. Many, many of us are single and therefore are working longer and choosing to work longer because it’s our way of being out in the world. I think we’re changing attitudes without really understanding that it’s happening. There are too many of us not to be changing the concept. Just by what we’re doing. I don’t think there’s a fight. When I meet up with younger travel bloggers, everyone is excited to see Journeywoman because I was the first one to start travel writing from a woman’s point of view. But when kids who are 40 years younger than I am say they cannot believe that I am 73 years old, I say, “Why? Age doesn’t have to do with your face. It has to do with what’s going on in your heart. It has to do with your spirit.” I think there are way more of us with that gumption, with that spirit than ever before.

     At 68 you joined 750 students and a dozen 50 plus lifelong learners for a 108 day voyage around the world with Semester at Sea. What did the younger students teach the elders on that trip?

    The energy. The excitement. The creativity. The crackling in the air because they were always so curious and wanting to change the world: It just invigorates you to be around that kind of energy. That’s what they taught me: Just get out there and try.

Some of the older people tried skydiving because all the other kids were doing it.

    What did the younger students learn from you?

   

     I was only supposed to be on that trip for half the time.  I had done some mentoring on board and given a few lectures. But when the kids learned I was getting off – six weeks into the journey -- they told me that they didn’t want me to go. “My cabin is being taken over by someone else,” I told them. “That was the contract.” Then one young woman, a medical student, came to me and said, “I’m not letting you go. I have a cabin with an extra bed and I want you to stay with me.” “It’s such a delight to have this invitation,” I told her, “but it’s going to be like having your grandmother in your room. Why don’t I just stay for one more port.” She said, “If you don’t stay for the whole trip, I’m not inviting you.” So I stayed. Oh, the fun we had. They just took me in. Nobody cared how old I was.

     I have noticed that the eligible ages for senior discounts vary wildly – ranging from 55 years on up to 70. Is that an example of society’s unwillingness to deal with age or is it a good thing that we don’t have a set idea of when old age begins?

     We have young…why shouldn’t we have old? But old has so many layers. It’s like the Eskimos who have many names for snow. There are so many interpretations of what old is. I think we can say what retirement age is – as long as it’s not mandatory. We can give people the option of stopping their profession at a certain time and collecting their pension, if they choose to. But in terms of society deciding what’s old is. No.

What is the age of your oldest contributor?

    I don’t know. So many of them are just a name. They send in their tips from all around the world. We have a deal. I don’t charge anything for my newsletters, but everybody who receives them needs to be prepared to send me one tip a year. That’s all I ask. And it’s amazing. This network is like the Little Engine That Could. And they just keep sending in their stuff.

Have you ever thought about writing a travel memoir?

      I can’t wait to put my story down on paper. But I’m waiting until I retire. I am so busy. I wake up at 5 a.m. and I force myself to stay in bed until 7 but for those two hours my mind is racing about everything that needs to be done. Because it really is more work than one person should be handling. I’m also blogging. I’m the resident grandmother on my daughter’s website, which incidentally just won a Digi award, the Oscar of the digital world. Then trying to be a good grandmother. And people are always calling me to ask me to give a post on this or that. I finally have gotten to the point of saying, if it’s a paid position, yes I will do it. But I can no longer do it complimentary. It’s too much for me.

      Wife, mother, business woman, divorcee, solo traveler, filmmaker, grandmother, travel writer, Internet personality, teacher, blogger, tweeter, Journeywoman: Evelyn, who are you?

     Every seven years, I kind of change. You know what drives me? I take on things that I know nothing about. I’m an absolute novice. I work at it until I perfect it in some way and get some recognition or an award or whatever and then I close the door and I say, okay I know how to do that. Life is short.  I want to learn how to do something else.

   So are you due for another reinvention?

  No. Journeywoman, it’s my love. I found my love.

How Late Does a Bloomer Have to Be to Make a Late Bloomer List? Not That Late.

       The new list of late bloomers -- "10 Great Literary Late Bloomers"  -- just posted on the internet has me wondering: How late does a bloomer have to be to make one of these lists? Not so late, it seems.

Emily Temple

    The current roll call was compiled by Emily Temple, the literary editor at Flavorpill, an internet city guide started in 2000. According to Temple's Linked-In profile, she graduated from Middlebury College in 2008.

    Which may explain why most of the writers on her list are just barely showing their grey.

      One of them  -- Anthony Burgess -- was a boyish 39 when he made his fiction debut. (Oh, okay, he was 45 when he hit the literary jackpot with "Clockwork Orange," but that's still younger than all but two of our U.S. presidents).
   
     The older I get, I guess, the higher the age a late bloomer needs to be.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

     Five more on Temple's list (Deborah Eisenberg, William Burroughs, Helen DeWitt and Raymond Chandler) were only in their early forties when they bloomed on the literary scene. And two more (Charles Bukowski and the Marquis de Sade) were barely into their fifties.  Literary late bloomers? I tend to think of them as writers who either started or found success in their fifties and up.

     So, yes, for me the last two on Temple's list definitely quality: Donald Ray Pollack was 55 when he debuted with a short story collection and 58 when he published his first novel last year. And, Laura Ingalls Wilder -- the only silver-haired among the lot -- was without a doubt a late bloomer. She published her first novel -- "Little House in the Book Woods" when she was 64.

      Temple says she was inspired to create her list of literary not-so-late bloomers after she discovered a "cool website dedicated to the discussion of writers who published their first major work at age 40 or later." The website, called Bloom, is indeed cool, a place "where you'll encounter the work and lives of authors ... who bloomed in their own good time."


      

     But consider this: That site was founded by Sonya Chung, a novelist who once told an interviewer that she considered herself a late bloomer because she only began writing in "her late twenties." 

Sonya Chung

     Chung is also the force behind the inspiring "Post-40 Bloomers" series at The Millions, which was launched in 2011 in the wake of the outcry over that year's New Yorker "20 Under 40" list. "Why do the kids get so much of the good stuff?" asked Martha Southgate in "Older and Wiser," also posted on The Millions.

     Chung wanted writers over 40 to get some good stuff, too. In her first column introducing the Post-40 series, Chung said she appreciated Malcolm Gladwell's distinctions among "late bloomers, late starters and late-dicoverereds," in his popular New Yorker article on "Late Bloomers," but admited her own bias was toward late starters -- "people who have lived a whole life, or two, or three before seriously devoting themselves to write a book."

     But it's hard to imagine that those she and others have profiled in the "Post-40 Bloomers" series have had time to live three lifetimes. Like the writers on Temple's list, most were already successful by their forties and early fifties:

     * Spencer Reece who had been submitting his poetry for 13 years and was rejected some 300 times over before both a publisher and The New Yorker recognized his work when he was...40.
     
    * Walker Percy who published "The Moviegoer," at 44 
     
    * Novelists David Abrams and Anna Keesey who were 49 when they published their first novels
     
    * Mary Costello who finally found success with her short stories in her mid-40s
                                             
    * Short story writer Susan Starr Richards who published her first collection at 49 
                                            
    * Isak Dinesen whose literary star started to ascend at 50, just as her physical deterioration accelerated
                                           
    * David Orozco whose "debut" collection at 52 was 16 years in the making

      
     To be fair, the Post-40 series hasn't completely overlooked writers who have achieved success in their late fifties, sixties and seventies. The fact that one of them didn't actually live long enough to see that success was a bit disconcerting. But let's not quibble. We late late bloomers will take all the role models we can get:

William Gay

    * William Gay, a self-taught wrier who finally managed to publish two short stories at age 55 and then was offered a book contract for his novel the next year

     * Stephen Wetta who took 56 years to learn to write in the voice of his 12-year-old self
     

Harriet Doerr

     * Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa who began working on his one and only novel, "The Leopard," when he was 58 and finished it when he was 60 (alas, only to die before it was published posthumously the next year)
      
     * Mary Wesley who found success publishing young adult fiction in her 70s

     *  Harriet Doerr who won the National Book Award for her first novel when she was 74
     
     And I'll give this to Chung: She was on to something when she deliberately left out the word "late" and "older" in her "Post-40" title:  "Late relative to what and according to whose definition of early or on-time?" she asked.

     

     Indeed. Will I still think of Laura Ingalls Wilder as a late bloomer when I am in my seventies and eighties? 

     
     Perhaps not. Clearly, late is in the age of the beholder.

     10 Great LIterary Late Bloomers

Fifty Shades of Grey for the Grey-Haired Crowd: Books About Sex, Love and Aging

    Here's a delicious story: Rejected for 20 years by the old, traditional publishing route, an older woman is hitting it big with a novel about sixty-something romance, thanks to the upcoming, new kid on the publishing block: the ebook.

Hilary Boyd in north London. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

    English journalist Hilary Boyd had published six non-fiction books on such subjects as pregnancy, step-parenting and depression, but she never gave up writing fiction. Finally, last year she published her first novel, the story of a romance between 60-somethings who meet in a park while the woman is looking after her grandchildren. Alas, Thursdays in the Park, didn't exactly fly off the shelves; it sold under 1,000 copies. But this year Boyd's publisher, the independent imprint Quercus, posted the novel on Amazon as an ebook and something surprising happened.

    As an ebook, Thursdays in the Park began selling like crazy, topping more than 100,000 copies. Now Boyd has sold translation rights to the novel, which is also available in paperback, in France, Sweden, Finland and Germany and English director and actor Charles Dance (he once played a Bond villain) wants to make a movie of the story. At 62, Boyd has a bestseller on her hands.

      Obviously, there's an untapped market for novels about middle-aged love among Kindle readers. "Old people falling in love and having passionate relationships is not a story that's had much exposure before, but I'm in no doubt that the market's out there," Boyd told the London Observer. 

       It's the same market that flocked to "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" and "Hope Spring."  It may even be the same audience that has been reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Why should the rules be any different for an older crowd? If you get the packaging right, sex obviously sells.

       

     The London Observer heralded Boyd's ebook success as a sign of a rise in gran-lit, but books addressing the subject of sex, love and aging are not really new. What is new is the packaging. As baby boomers get comfortable with using Kindles and Nooks, I suspect there will be more demand for ebooks -- both novels and memoirs -- that speak to the challenges that sex and love pose as we age. Meanwhile, here are some of my favorites that I read in old-fashioned book form: 

NOVELS

My Dream of You, by Nuala O'Faolain

On the eve of her 50th birthday Kathleen a writer living alone in a basement apartment in London, has all but given up on love. She returns to her native Ireland and researches a 150-year-old mystery about an infamous love affair and ends up finding her own unexpected path to love in the process.

Julie & Romeo, by Jeanne Ray

What would you do if your widowed mother or father began dating? The children of Julie and Romeo are not thrilled with that prospect in this light-hearted novel about steamy late-in-life romance. with a nod to the Bard, the trysting widow and widower hail from two bitterly feuding families who own the town's rival florist shops. But don't expect a tragic ending from Ray, who is the mother of novelist Ann Patchett. Age does have its privileges.

The Leisure Seeker, by Michael Zadoorian

John and Ella Robina have been together for more than 50 years. Now in their 80s, they both face serious illness. Ella has cancer; John has Alzheimer's. They decide to escape from their doctors and adult children and go off on a final adventure, running away from Detroit for a cross-country trip.

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Boy meets girl. Girl rejects boy. Boy waits fifty years to get his chance again. Marquez's classic novel begins with a comical death and ends with the long-delayed union of Fermina Daza and her old sweetheart, Florentino Ariza. The two chapters point to the unexpected twists life offers. But they also bookmark a tale that unexpectedly offered something that had been rare in literature: sensual scenes of late-in-life romance. "It is life more than death that has no limits," writes Marquez.

MEMOIRS

A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, by Jane Juska

The author ran a personal ad in the New York Review of Books: "Before I turn 67, I would like to have sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." She then wrote this refreshingly honest account of what happened next.

Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman, by Alice Steinbach.

Middle-aged and seeking adventure (but not too much), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steinbach ventures alone to Europe to let her hair down. She wants to experience life, not just observe it. This divorced mother of two grown son finds romance with a Japanese businessman in Paris, goes ballroom dancing in Oxford and almost gets mugged in Rome. "This is what I will have forever," she says on her last day. "The memory of this moment, of rain falling on Venice."

Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir, by Diana Athill

Long-time publisher Diana Athill in her 90s takes a hard look at growing old and concludes that its advantages outweigh its disadvantages in this funny, brutally honest chronicle of her own loves and long life.

The Virginia Monologues: Twenty Reasons Why Growing Old is Great, by Virginia Ironside (based on her stage play)

Ironside embraces her inner (and outer) oldster. She thinks growing ancient is a gain not a loss. So much the better if your memory is going. You can forget the bad times, like all the creepy men you slept with in the other sixties. She gives plenty of advice: Take lots of drugs, and not just those prescribed by your doctor. Talk about your various ailments ("I take so many fish oils I'm thinking of joining an aquarium"). Enjoy your grandchildren ("The reward for not killing your children.") As for sex, she's over it: "I have to admit that, at 65, I think I've had enough sex to last me a lifetime -- and I know I'm not the only one...I've found one can have so much better relationships now sex is out of the equation."

Post Scripts: A Writing Life After Eighty, by LaVerne Hammond

LaVerne Hammond (my mother) wrote this collection of columns and essays for senior section of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times). Hammond sold her first piece to the newspaper when she was 86. Many of her columns address the subjects of love and old age and, yes, even sex. In one column she describes how she managed to keep the sexual fires burning in her own long marriage of 52 years. In another, after the death of her spouse, she offers advice on dating in your eighties and nineties. Hey, it really is never too late.