Someone Farther Down the Path, Lighting the Way
Kristen Holt-Browning on finding a mentor in midlife. PLUS: An open thread on those more senior who've guided us along our paths, and the intergenerational aspect of the mentor-mentee relationship.
Readers,
Today (below) we have an essay by
. It’s a piece about her unexpectedly finding an older mentor in midlife—the kind of thing she’d thought only happened in one’s 20s.The mentor-mentee relationship is a special kind of bond, usually an inter-generational one, characterized by great generosity, care, and respect. For the mentee, it’s a rare opportunity to work closely with someone who’s has already achieved many of your goals, to learn from them by witnessing how they do what they do, and to be guided and reassured by them. Maybe they even make some vital connections for you.
For the mentor, it’s a chance to extend their legacy by empowering younger versions of themselves, helping someone younger and/or newer to their field, and possibly learning new methods and perspectives from their mentees.
It can be a formal arrangement, though a college or university program, or government agency—as with the excellent business mentor I was given by the Ulster County Small Business Association in 2016 to help me figure out how to launch Kingston Writers’ Studio, a co-working space for writers that I operated from 2017-2020, until the pandemic forced me to close it. Or it can be less formal, as in the case of the friend of mine—a woman writer fifteen years my senior and much more accomplished—whom I consider an unofficial mentor.
The (commonly) inter-generational nature of this subject made me think this would be a topic to ask all of you about. I figure many of you will have experiences to share of being mentored—or mentoring others.
In the comments please tell us…
How old are you? Have you ever had a mentor? What were you mentored in? Was the mentor older or younger than you? What was that experience like? What did it give you?// Have you ever been a mentor? What did you mentor in? As a mentor, were you younger or older than your mentee? What was the experience like? What did it give you?
Someone Farther Down the Path, Lighting the Way
On finding a mentor in midlife.
by
I didn’t have a mentor until I was 40—and by that (relatively) late point in my life, I certainly didn’t expect to ever have one. Whenever I read about or came across a reference to a “student-mentor relationship,” I pictured a wide-eyed youth (ok, a boy) kneeling at the feet of a white-bearded elder (ok, a man), gazing up at that mature fount of knowledge in adoring admiration, as the old man pontificated, deigning to share his hard-earned nuggets of wisdom.
What I did have, instead, as I approached 40, was a sudden, heavy sense that it was time—or, really, well past time—to let myself do what I hadn’t for the last two decades: be a writer. I had written poems and short stories as a kid, a teenager, a college student, and a young adult. But by my late 20s, I had put my journals away. There was my job as an editor; then there was marriage; then there was a baby; and then, another baby.
But not long after my 40th birthday, a poet named Ruth Danon moved to my town of Beacon, in New York’s Hudson Valley. She had taught at NYU for over twenty years, and now she was offering writing workshops out of her home. A friend signed up, and urged me to join her, given my past interest in writing. I did sign up, although I had serious reservations about the whole enterprise. The last time I had written poetry, I had been all of 25 years old. It felt so far away, and, frankly, it seemed like a young person’s game. What could I write poems about? Packing my kids’ lunches every morning? My commute? Laundry?
Well, actually, yes—and no—and everything in between those two poles. I wrote poems about my toddler talking to himself in the mirror, saying “Hello, other me, what are you doing in there?” I wrote poems about watching my boys run around the backyard at dusk, and feeling the boundary between us and the wider, natural world thin and diminish, as I thought more about what my body had made, just like all of those animals out there in the dark beyond our fence.
I was able to let myself write those poems in that workshop, because Ruth has a unique approach to teaching writing. In her classes—or, as she calls them, “live writing sessions,” we sit on the floor, or a comfy sofa, while Ruth scatters random objects or books before us. Under her guidance, we choose a tchotchke, or a random sentence from one of those books. We might describe the object in ten lines, or be instructed to use that sentence in our own free-writing. We make in the moment, and sometimes, we end up with a poem. It feels open, welcoming, low stakes—and fun. Those sessions were a break from my work of editing other people’s words, and a respite from the constant churn and flow of motherhood. They were an opportunity to revel in the physical, mental, and emotional act of art-making, for the pure pleasure of it.
I was full of admiration for Ruth, but I wasn’t thinking of her as a mentor, not yet. For one thing, I wasn’t a bucket to be filled with the waters of inspiration: I had been working for two decades, I had given birth to two children, I had fully entered middle age. Wasn’t I too old for something like a mentor? Hadn’t the moment for me to grow and mature as a writer long since passed me by?
Plus, Ruth and I were so different: I was in my 40s, she was in her 70s. She had been raised by her Jewish-Hungarian, immigrant mother on the grounds of the hospital where she worked as a psychiatrist. I was raised Catholic in a small town by my middle-class mom and dad. Ruth doesn’t have kids, and has been writing and publishing consistently throughout her adult life. I have two sons, now 16 and 10, and as I mentioned, had been writing inconsistently, or not at all, for about fifteen years by the time we met.
But I kept writing. I took more classes with Ruth. I asked her if we might start working together more deeply, one-on-one. We met for coffee to discuss the idea more, and she informed me, “You, my dear, are a poet.” I protested: No, not me, this is just fun, that’s not possible, I’m not that good, I just want to see if I can get better. But she was unmoved. She pointed out how carefully I chose my language in my poems, how deeply I considered and filtered and reflected the world around me in my writing. How much I clearly loved writing, how serious I was about it.
It turned out I needed someone else farther down the path to shine a light for me—well, maybe “needed” is the wrong word (I’m a poet, I choose my words carefully!). I might have eventually cleared my own path, stumbled along in my own way. But Ruth gave me…I almost said “permission,” which I suspect she would push back against, but for better or worse (probably worse), it’s true. I needed somebody with no vested interest in soothing my ego or propping me up—not a family member, not a friend, but someone objective. Since then, she’s also given me more traditional mentor gifts: she parses my drafts with me to highlight strengths and uncover weaknesses; she recommends books and poets I should read; she introduces me to other writers, and invites me to participate in readings; she provides a model in her own approaches to writing, publishing, and speaking publicly as a poet.
I do wonder if I’d be open to receiving the same level of support from a male mentor. So much of Ruth’s mentorship lies in her simply modeling a specific way of life, one that values and prioritizes art, writing, and creativity. That feels like an especially bold choice for a woman—especially an older woman. How often are we shown older women living an unapologetically art-centered, childfree life? Not often enough, I think—and I say that as a woman who loves being a mother. Indeed, my first chapbook of poetry, The Only Animal Awake in the House, was heavily focused on motherhood. As mentioned, Ruth does not have children. And yet she pushed me to publish—and wrote a generous blurb for—my chapbook. A true mentor isn’t shaping the student into a mini-me, but supporting that person to fully become the artist they already are on some level, coaxing out the inherent and specific writer within.
Ruth’s support of and belief in me has increased my own self-confidence as a writer. So much so, in fact, that in addition to writing poetry, I also returned to writing fiction—and I just published my first novel, Ordinary Devotion. A dual-timeline narrative, one of the plots centers on two women living in fourteenth-century England, named Adela and Elinor. Adela is older than Elinor, and has fully devoted herself to a singular and difficult vocation, while Elinor struggles with understanding what her role in the world is, and might be. Adela is, I now see, something of an anti-mentor for Elinor, showing her a path she doesn’t want to follow. Meanwhile, in the present-day part of the book, a woman named Liz is struggling in her career, and notably, she has no mentor. Which is, perhaps, part of the reason why she is so adrift.
Although these characters are not me and Ruth, I have no doubt that my relationship with her fed into my desire to write a novel about women at different points in their lives, each seeking their own varieties of being and expression. We know it’s not easy to be an ambitious, creative woman, and never has been. But Ruth shows me one way to embody that approach to life, and in Ordinary Devotion, I imagine other possible pathways for women.
Currently, Ruth is teaching me how to be a teacher, instructing me in her pedagogical approaches to writing and creativity. It’s another form of mentorship—and motherhood, in a way—as Ruth teaches and inspires me, and I, perhaps someday, might teach or inspire another woman, entering middle age, afraid she is too late, who needs to be shown that, in fact, she is right on time. I don’t sit at Ruth’s feet; rather, we sit across from one another at the table, cups of coffee hot between us, eye to eye, and I drink in everything she offers me. Should I ever have the opportunity to mentor another woman writer, I’ll be eager and ready to pull up a chair, and ask her to sit beside me.
Okay, your turn:
How old are you? Have you ever had a mentor? What were you mentored in? Was the mentor older or younger than you? What was that experience like? What did it give you?// Have you ever been a mentor? What did you mentor in? As a mentor, were you younger or older than your mentee? What was the experience like? What did it give you?
With big thanks to
. And to all of you—the most engaged, thoughtful, kind commenters I have ever encountered on the internet!! And thank you, too, for all your support. 🙏 💝 I couldn’t do this without you.-Sari
 | A guest post by
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I have mentors 30 years my senior because they give me context to keep my thinking big. I have mentors 30 years my junior because the day-to-day mechanics of life are made for the young. Setting the time on a VCR is now streaming on Reddit.
This was so lovely to read. I have always longed for a mentor of my own and have mentored, but never had any volunteers. Probably because folks assume at this point I should be the mentor, not the mentee. No matter how old we are, we always need someone to light the way.