Letter from the Editor #12
Recalling an earth-shattering (literally) New Year's Day past; Finally, explanations for decreased alcohol tolerance with age; How to jumpstart your art-making and writing this January...
Readers,
Happy New Year! I hope everyone’s 2026 is off to a great start.
And thank you to everyone who’s just converted to paid subscriptions. I’m grateful! I’ve got lots of plans for Oldster this year, and you are helping to make them happen.
An earth-shattering (literally) New Year’s Day past
What a strange and auspicious occasion the first day of the year can be. It brings with it so many mixed emotions—regret for over-celebrating the day before; hope and excitement for the promise of a fresh start; anxiety about whether we’re prepared or equipped to fulfill that promise.
You’d think with all that’s riding on that one day of the year, each instance would be memorable—or at least some of them would be. But when I sat down to write this, I realized I could only remember what happened on one of those days out of the 60 I’ve lived through so far: January 1st 1979.
I can remember how I celebrated most New Year’s Eves. But I can recall only one first day of the calendar year.
New Year’s Day 1979 stands out because I was in an earthquake. I was visiting family in Los Angeles, a trip given to me as a present for my bat mitzvah in late September, 1978.
We’d started out the day doing something weird: handing out pamphlets for The Hunger Project, an off-shoot of Werner Ehrhard’s EST, to people on the sidelines of The Rose Bowl Parade. How very '70s L.A. of us.
Shortly after we got back to the house, it, and everything around it, started shaking. It went on for a few terrifying minutes, followed by a couple of aftershocks, although we experienced no damage. It wasn’t at all like Earthquake, the 1974 disaster movie, but it was scary.
And memorable! I literally can’t recall a single other New Year’s Day in my life. Can you? (Hopefully this helps take some of the pressure off the day…)
Finally, explanations for decreased alcohol tolerance with age
I imagine that today, some of you are beginning Dry January (I’ve also heard it called “Drynuary”). Or maybe you’ve made a new year’s resolution to stop drinking, or drink less.
I’ve written here a few times about my own choice to give up alcohol in my early 50s, after it started to make me feel absolutely awful—headaches, dizziness, a feeling of being hung-over after consuming as little as a half-glass of wine. Here are two pieces:
For every person who’s told me they similarly lost some or all of their ability to tolerate alcohol as they aged, there has been another person who looked at me like I was crazy. I would try to explain it to them, but I couldn’t find any medical explanations to back up what I was experiencing.
So I was relieved to hear and read this December 8th NPR report by Maria Godoy: “Does one drink make you dizzy? Why alcohol hits us harder as we age”
According to studies cited in the piece, it’s a combination of factors—among them, a reduced efficiency in the liver enzymes that help break down alcohol; decreased muscle mass causing alcohol to linger in the body longer; and the hormonal shifts beginning in perimenopause exacerbating some of alcohol’s side-effects.
I’m so happy to now have this link to point people to when they can’t understand my choice for temperance, even though I don’t suffer from a substance use disorder.
People forego alcohol for any number of reasons. If you’re struggling with it, or any other substance, I highly recommend The Small Bow, A.J. Dauliero’s excellent “recovery (and mental health) newsletter for everyone” plus their new podcast. (Check out the Sober Oldster series, our monthly collaboration with The Small Bow.) I also recommend: Holly Whitaker’s Recovering; Katie MacBride’s Ask a Sober Lady; and Laura McKowen’s Love Story.
How to jumpstart your art-making and writing this January...
In case you might be looking for a way to get going, creatively, as the year begins, I want to recommend two month-long accountability projects with low participation requirements that make it easy to take part.
The first is artist Wendy MacNaughton’s “30 Days of Drawing” via her DrawTogether newsletter. With an investment of just about 10 minutes a day, you can get your creative juices flowing and have fun. Who can’t find 10 minutes? Her prompts and instructions are easy and fun—if I can follow them, anyone can.
I love programs with this kind of low bar to entry, which makes it all less scary, and wears down our resistance to getting started. I took part in January of 2024, and plan to do it again this year.
The second is Memoir Nation’s “JanYourStory” program, led by former National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) Executive Director Grant Faulkner (who took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire last February) and Brooke Warner (who was the acquiring editor for Goodbye to All That).
Where NaNoWriMo required participants to produce roughly 1700 words a day—50,000 over the course of the month—JanYourStory encourages participants to write just 500 words each day. It’s a much more reachable goal, designed to lower the stakes, making it easy to commit to producing the first 15,500 of a memoir over 31 days.
There are inspirational emails, and write-in Zoom sessions every day this month, where encouragement and tips will be shared. Writers can also share their work and ideas with fellow participants in the program’s digital “room,” and track their progress via Pacemaker.
Check out the interview I did last month with Grant and Brooke at Memoir Land.
By the way, I have no stake in either of these. I just think they’re both useful, and I admire the people behind them. So I’m recommending them to you.
No paywall this week…
This week I’m not putting the bottom part of my Letter from the Editor behind a paywall, as I have in prior installments. If you enjoy all that I publish here, I’d love your support. Publishing Oldster takes a lot of work, and I pay essayists and interviewers. Big thanks to those who already support what I’m doing. 🙏
Check out the rest of this series here. P.S. Typos happen. Please forgive me if you find any!
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading, and subscribing. I appreciate it. 🙏💝
I remember the first day of 2020 vividly. The smoke from the bushfires in Australia was blowing across the Tasman, occluding the sun here in Aotearoa New Zealand, & casting everything into a weird sepia tone. I had never seen light like it— it felt very ominous, apocalyptic, even. In some places people could smell the smoke, too. It was happening across the sea, but here it was with us, the disaster, everywhere you looked. I made a drawing of myself in this weird light, & tried to read the omen. I decided it was going to be a very weird year, & resolved that now was the time to become more public in my Wizarding. If it was the end of the world coming, then I had nothing to lose: I might as well go full Wizard.
Relatedly, I have been listening a lot lately to Richard Dawson's excellent album 2020... which he made in 2019.
I had two glasses of wine with NYE dinner last night, and later fell into bed like I'd been drugged. So your symptoms and causes hit home! But where would I be without Montepulciano d'Abruzzo? Another conundrum to work out in 2026.