Nancy Lynn Jarvis on Starting a Writing Life at 59

Starting a writing life at fifty-nine gave Nancy Lynn Jarvis something she hadn’t expected: a creative pursuit she could begin on her own terms. She’d spent years believing she would never write again, after a high school assignment turned a private story into a classroom spectacle. Now, with her children grown and her working life still underway, she was ready to see whether she could connect a strong opening to a satisfying ending.

Jarvis traces her late start to an earlier lesson in trust. In high school, she loved and trusted her AP English teacher, Mrs. McNabb. For a writing exercise, the teacher asked students to share something personal, promising that she alone would read it. The task was meant to help them express emotion on the page. Jarvis chose a memory bound up with grief, gardening and her grandfather.

A garden, a parting gift and a private story

Jarvis’s paternal grandparents lived in a small northern California town that was an all-day drive from her family. Its main street still had a wooden boardwalk from the days when the place served as a stagecoach stop. The visits made an impression on her: she remembers walking beside her grandfather, holding his hand, and imagining the horses and coaches that had once arrived in town. A stop at the general store for malted milk balls was part of the pleasure.

Her grandfather’s three-acre garden offered another kind of delight. He grew vegetables for the family table and to sell, and the peas were sweet enough to eat straight from the vines. Those visits helped nurture Jarvis’s early interest in gardening. By the time Mrs. McNabb assigned the personal piece, her grandfather had been gone for several years, and Jarvis still missed him deeply.

On the family’s last visit to her grandparents, they dug up a bed of pansies to take home. Her grandfather gave them to Jarvis as a keepsake of their time together in the garden. She planted the flowers carefully and tried to help them settle in, but they withered. After the family returned from his funeral, she found them blooming in full color. As a child, she held on to the thought that her grandfather had come back to tend them before leaving for the afterlife.

That was the story she entrusted to Mrs. McNabb. A few days later, the teacher returned everyone else’s work in class but kept Jarvis’s paper. She told the students that one story had moved her so much she had to read it aloud. The other students’ giggles told Jarvis they knew whose story it was. What she had offered as a private account of loss became a moment of public embarrassment.

Returning to the page years later

Jarvis says she didn’t write again until she was fifty-nine, when she set herself a challenge: could she make a good opening connect to a strong ending? That experiment became her first book. She began while still working full time; her children were grown and had set out on their own, and she wrote when she could. The schedule took shape around the life she already had.

Her account offers an encouraging reminder for aspiring writers who think they have missed their chance. A painful early experience can stay with someone for a long time, but it doesn’t have to decide what comes next. Jarvis has forgiven Mrs. McNabb, though the incident remains in her memory. She now writes because she enjoys it, and says she no longer worries about fitting in or being embarrassed by readers’ responses.

That change in outlook gives her story its quiet force. Jarvis doesn’t suggest that returning to writing erased what happened in the classroom. Instead, she describes finding a reason to write that belongs to her: the pleasure of making stories and the hope that other people will enjoy them. Beginning later meant she could approach the work with a different sense of herself.

A new book and an online tour

Jarvis’s newest book, A Faire to Remember, is available in print and as an e-book on Amazon. She plans to tour online with the book beginning November 11th. Readers can look for updates on her Facebook page, Nancy Lynn Jarvis, or visit nancylynnjarvis.com, where the first chapter is available to read for free.

For readers who have been carrying an old reluctance to write, Jarvis’s path is a reminder that the first step can come much later than expected. Her own began with a game, a question about endings and openings, and the decision to find out what she could make.