40

Forty
    I have never been poorer than when I was forty. I was living in an alley on Vancouver’s old skid row, in a tiny wooden house that overlooked the dumpster where the junkies and prostitutes congregated to shoot heroin and turn tricks. I owed nearly forty thousand dollars to Visa after using the card to finance a film. I’d secured a small grant to write another filmscript, only I was using the money to pay the rent while I wrote a novel instead. I’d never written a novel, but my plan was to sell it and pay off my debt. It seemed like a reasonable plan, and I was happy.
    I’d always wanted to write a novel. I’m not sure why it had taken me forty years to get around to it. Perhaps I’d never been sufficiently desperate. Or perhaps it was just that at forty, I had enough failure behind me so I wasn’t afraid any more. On the eve of my forty-first birthday, I finished a draft and printed it out just before midnight, so I could truthfully claim to have written a novel by the time I was forty. When I looked at the stack of pages, I was stricken with horror, both at the extent
of self-exposure that a novel requires and at the extremity of self-delusion. What have I done? How could I have been working on this manuscript for an entire year and never once realised how awful it was?
    In the year that followed, the remorse and horror subsided, and My Year of Meats was duly published. I paid off my debt, got married, and we moved out of the little house on the
alley, which later turned into a crack house and burned to the ground. I’ve forgotten many of the details of that fortieth year, but I’ll never forget how insanely happy I was, living in a strange city, teaching myself to write a novel. No one knew what I was doing. No one cared. I was free in a way that you can only be when you’re still a beginner. I remember walking backwards down the street on our way to Chinatown to buy groceries, bouncing on my toes and recounting to my husband in extravagant detail how the novel would work, how this
or that image would resonate through the storyline, how
metaphors would accrue. I remember lying in bed, listening
to the hookers hooting in the alley and the howl of the wind coming in off the inlet, riven by my paradoxical desires:
wanting so badly for the novel to be done and published;
wanting my fortieth year to go on forever.

    Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being

FORTIFIED

    January 1973
    To the Canons
    Forty years ain’t shit. I’m a time machine man. // I’m the first black Dr Who. // It can send you crazy in here ’cause all past is in the present, the future too. I get books in here. Books are portals to all time. That’s right. The future is now and then. What did Malcolm do inside? He read books. Man books bend time. // Maybe there’s too much dope in here. Ha-ha. //
    Outside they’ll talk about giving us a voice. They can’t give us a voice. We already have voices. // They bound our mouths shut now they want to give us a voice. They need to get up on their listening skills. Damn. //
    They’re holding us down man, stealing our stories and sealing our mouths. They’re punishing the children // of the South //: buying us out, closing us down, breaking us up and tearing us apart. They make their living by killing us off. I can’t take it. We CAN TELL OUR OWN STORIES MAN.
    // Stevie’s high on billboard right now. He says there’s “very superstitious writing on the wall”. (If I heard that last year I wouldn’t be in here). We are the stories that make us. If they steal our stories we are nothing. But // it’s like Abidoun said “I am not serving time. No way. Time is serving me.” That’s right.
    Books man. Books are the tail tale in the sting. The // Pro // Duct out of dystopia. The sting is what trumped up charges are. Sting is what lies do. The sting is how Malcolm was killed. But we got the tale You dig.
    Story man. We got stories of story. Canongate. The canons at the gate. G-A-T-E. // We have no canon. Build it… // I await release. I look forward. I see you out there bringing us out. We are beloved, you are loved. We are FORTIFIED.
    Heron
Prison number A65789
Louisiana State Penitentiary
United States of America
    Lemn Sissay, author of Listener
    Text enclosed in // has been scored out.

A Woman Who Just Turned Forty . . .

    Rebecca Miller, author of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and Jacob’s Folly

Forty minutes
    Time . . .
    to listen to both sides of a