Neal Rubin: Metro Detroit seniors become authors with new book about older adulthood

I get asked a few times a month how to become a writer. The answer isn't complicated:

Sit down and write.

Or, if you prefer, stand up. That's what Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway did.

Whatever your posture, maybe start the novel whose plot has been bounding through your head since 1994. Maybe devote 200 therapeutic words to describing your annoying neighbor.

Maybe tell the story of how you wound up laughing in front of a funeral chapel the day after your husband of 61 years died and a police car spontaneously combusted.

That's how Edie Blumer did it ... finally.

Blumer will turn 99 in a few weeks. She lives at the Meer Apartments in West Bloomfield, one of six nondenominational senior residences operated by Jewish Senior Life.

She's one of 39 contributors to a new book called "Don't Write Me Off! Thirty-Nine Stories of Older Adulthood," available at amazon.com and a Tuesday evening fundraiser where the authors will happily sign copies of their work and show you pictures of their grandchildren.

Breaking the tech barrier

Beth Robinson, the instigator of the project, patterned it after a collaboration she'd been part of with her pandemic writing group. Among the differences was that they'd had lots of practice linking words together and they knew how to use computers.

Only 4 of the 39 people whose faces appear on the cover of "Don't Write Me Off!" were remotely tech-savvy, said Robinson, whose multifaceted day job starts with managing the Jewish Senior Life volunteer program.

“I would run to the building next door to send myself documents from their phones,” she said, having struck out on the more time-saving methods: “Can you email it to me? Put it in Google Drive? Carrier pigeon?”

But the sprints were worth it, because the newly created creative writers knew how to do other valuable things, like deal with loss and tragedy and loneliness.

Searching for perspective

The flyer Robinson sent to 200 Jewish Senior Life residents only five months ago asked them to write about something that happened in the last 10 years. She was willing to concede that their glory days were glorious; what she wanted was to take a look at a demographic that's frequently invisible.

"Taken all together, I figured it would make a mosaic of older adulthood," she said, and she was correct, even though she personally has the wisdom of only 59 years. "It's got everything from skydiving to a leg amputation."

Edith Birnholtz, 94, who was rescued from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, miraculously recognized her brother in a Russian army uniform shortly afterward in Budapest, Hungary. She touched on old losses, but also new friends.

Toni Curtis Fontana, 60, a former Christian missionary, wrote about embracing God and ignoring her own mortality: "I'm not in a race to see who will live the longest."

Ruthe Levy, 72, said creativity is a goal, gratitude is a choice and the impediments of aging only make her more determined to be appreciative.

Ann Torf, 95, keeps the hundred or so greeting cards from her last birthday in a paper sack near her favorite chair, and plucks some out every day for "a dose of happiness and joy and kindness. That's the best medicine there is."

It wasn't a quiet death

As for Blumer, her husband Nathan, 91, decided to laze a bit longer in bed on a November Sunday 14 years ago.

She read the newspaper, ate breakfast, went to rouse him and discovered that she had become a widow.

A call to 911 brought forth five Oak Park police officers and two EMTs, piloting an ambulance they parked in the driveway. Not long after, a neighbor tapped on the door.

Blumer assumed he was curious about the hubbub, “but no,” she wrote, “I was mistaken. He was there to say that one of the patrol cars was on fire.”

The driver had parked atop a pile of leaves. The blaze sneered at the other officers’ fire extinguishers, shattered the vehicle’s glass, melted its tires and sent a thick black plume into the sky.

By the time two fire trucks responded and doused the flames, a TV cameraman was on the grass in the middle of the street, shooting footage for that night’s newscast.

At some point in the tumult, a funeral director had arrived from a chapel in Southfield. Accompanied by her daughter-in law, Blumer visited him the next day.

“No disrespect to you, Mrs. Blumer,” he told them, “but when I came to your home yesterday and saw all those police cars and two fire engines, I thought, ‘Oh, my G-d, she killed her husband.’ “

They were laughing when they left, and she laughed again committing the story to paper.

Back to the beginning

Blumer writes in cursive on long legal pads. For the book, or for the much-beloved writing class at Meer that volunteer Shari Cohen launched two years ago, she does an early draft in pencil and then switches to a fine-point Cross pen.

“Right now, I’ve been writing about Clementine Churchill, Winston Churchill’s wife,” she said. “It’s just a fun thing to do.”

Blumer has determined, she said, that “everybody has a story to tell, and everybody’s story is different."

Approaches are as different as postures and writing implements. Truman Capote wrote in bed or on a couch. "I am a completely horizonal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down," he said.

But again:

Just sit down, or stand up, or recline, and write.

Make it a habit. Write a few paragraphs a day describing a scene or a conversation. Break the seal and let the words flow, or at least trickle.

Poof. You're a writer. "And the more you write," Robinson said, "the better you get."

Reading helps there, too. A police officer I met last spring in Melvindale, Jessica Winward, put it perfectly — "To be a better writer, be a better reader."

Pay attention to what moves you and what intrigues you and what bores you. Take notes if you're inclined, but even if you don't, you'll improve by osmosis.

Getting paid for what you write, I should note, isn't always so easy. Then again, it isn't always the point. Sometimes, words are just straining at your fingertips, and you need to let them out.

You could do that at 90, and you'd be a writer just the same. But why wait?

The authors of "Don't Write Me Off!" will sign books as part of JSL's annual Lives Well Lived event at 7 p.m. Tuesday at The J, formerly known as the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield. Other highlights will include a tribute to the late filmmaker Sue Marx and a screening of the Oscar-winning short documentary she directed with Pam Conn, "Young at Heart." For information, email brobinson@jslmi.org.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 'Don't Write Me Off!' book has stories from metro Detroit seniors