A Home for Writers over 50: Turtle House Ink

What happens when you have found something you enjoy doing, say writing, and you are over fifty. Maybe you’ve been writing for years, but you need new ways to keep going, a different vantage point. Maybe you’re ready to follow a dream to write, but question what it is you want to write and what you will do with it, and you wonder if it’s too late. Maybe you just want to keep a journal. Maybe you want to write down some family stories. Or perhaps you’ve always enjoyed poetry, and you want to try your hand at that. Perhaps you have a novel that sits in your drawer, and you realize it’s time to pull out.

If you’re looking for inspiration, support, camaraderie, community, as well as publishing news and opportunities, then here is that place: Turtle House Ink. 

When Carol and I created and published When Last on the Mountain: The View from Writers over 50, we found writers over 50 on a mission to keep writing and to continue to search for ways to send that writing into the world. The anthology, a collection of essays, poems, and stories, was drawn from an outpouring of submissions that filled our mailboxes when we issued a single call in Poets and Writers. We received over 2,000 submissions and from those we chose the eighty selections that appear in the book.

Over the past year since the anthology was published, we have conducted readings and workshops from North Carolina to California, and we have discovered many more wonderful writers over 50 looking for a place to call home. We want to make this website that place. We are starting with a simple site and simple blogs, and we will grow from here.

The blogs will focus on what we see, hear, and read about and by writers over 50. We will include inspiring stories and invite guest bloggers to share their thoughts. You may find writing tips and ideas, as well as news from our subscribers. We will follow the path up the mountain and report as we go!

We invite you to join us on this journey.  Please join our subscriber list and leave your comments and ideas to help guide us along the way. 

We’ll be adding in some turtle images–as our symbol of endurance and longevity. This lady is ready to go!

4 thoughts on “A Home for Writers over 50: Turtle House Ink

  1. What better than a meeting ground for authors over 50….well over in my case…also much appreciated in my case as I am a very old, though game, rookie author. I look forward to future articles and postings.

  2. Cleo Kocol called my attention to your organization. What a great idea. I actually didn’t start thinking of myself as “a writer” until I was over 50. Twenty-five years prior to that (as a new mother, with a husband off at college on the GI Bill), I had spent a year or two as a reporter on the women’s page of a newspaper in Ohio. I didn’t consider my writing job to be as important as the job of wife and mother I wanted to resume as soon as possible.

    When my husband was recalled to Air Force duty during the Korean War, we had two sons, he had a promising career as a radio announcer, and had just taken a new job in Pittsburgh, Pa.
    We went to live in England for four years and made the decision that, since he had achieved the rank of Lt. Colonel, we would be better off if he just made the Air Force a career for a while.

    That’s when I started writing again, but always in a volunteer capacity to assist various charitable organizations. Eventually, when our four children didn’t need quite so much attention from me, I got a job as a government analyst. It was not until I retired from that job that I decided to “write for fun.” For me, that means writing poetry. I don’t expect to make money doing that. I use any profits I make on my chapbooks to finance other volunteer efforts. Recently, I have been looking more closely at research indicating the power of music and poetry to heal, and enjoy the thought that maybe something I write can provide something useful to another human living on God’s earth.

    • Thank you, Margaret, for your comment. You are like many of us who begin our writing life after retirement. I have also turned to poetry of late. Yet I still plan return to fiction and memoir when I what I have to say requires these longer forms. Best of luck as you write about the power of music and poetry to heal–a wonderful plan.

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