Sixty-Something and Flying Solo: A Retiree Sorts it Out in Iowa - Tapa blanda

"Sixty-Something and Flying Solo" is a humorous, edgy memoir filled with serious ponderings. An Oregon transplant with no kids, no significant other, the author is someone about whom readers could say “I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes, but if she can make it, I can too.” Pieces such as “What Not to Say at a Funeral” and “Dusting and Other Insanities” provide a backdrop for monthly accounts of her fall into retirement’s abyss where she clings to her to-do lists while she alters her diet, her wardrobe, her routine and her vow to become more domestic. When she resurfaces a year later, she’s surprised at the landscape and what has saved her.

Marian Mathews Clark grew up among lumberjacks in Mist, Oregon, then hopped the train to Iowa to attend her mother’s alma mater, Graceland College. In the ensuing years she’s ironed costumes for Polynesian dancers at the Calgary Stampede, capped perfume bottles in Coty’s factory in New York, attended The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, been stranded on Loveland Pass during a blizzard, refused to sunbathe naked in Tahiti, tried to shear a sheep in Australia and listened to hundreds of college kids’ dilemmas during her twenty-four-year stint as an Academic Advisor at The University of Iowa. She’s buried her parents, her marriage, and several unwieldy relationships but remains open to love that continues to pop up in the strangest of places. In 1987 she won the Iowa Art Council’s first place Fiction Award for her story, “Houseboats and Peacock Feathers.” Other stories have appeared in The Sun and Story magazines, and her essays have been anthologized in Daring to Repair and Dutiful Daughters.