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I have a complicated relationship with 30 Under 30 lists. I'm genuinely happy for everyone on them, and I'm also in my fifties and have not done most of those things, so there's a part of me that reads those lists and feels like I missed the boat and the train. 

Turns out, David Galef and Beth Weinhouse had the same reaction back in their late thirties when they saw an anthology titled 30 Under 30. So they created 20 Over 40 instead, and when the call went out, writers wrote in saying some version of "Where have you been all my life?" Now, twenty years later, they've put together 20 Over 60, a collection of short stories (fictional) written by authors over the age of sixty about being over the age of sixty. 

David is a fiction writer and lit professor who directs the creative writing program at Montclair State, has published around 200 short stories, and edits Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine around, where the limit is 500 words. Beth is a journalist and magazine editor. They are also married, which made for a fun recording setup!

We got into:

• Why they refused to make an anthology about disease, decline, and death, and what they looked for instead
• The stories that surprised them, including a kleptomaniac with a pepper mill problem and a woman visiting her husband and her ex-husband in the same hospital
• How they handled permissions, payment, and the contributors you've likely never heard of alongside Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Theroux
• What every agent and press told them before Beth built a presentation out of statistics (and sold the book almost immediately)
• Why David thinks a good plot gets you on the bestseller list and a memorable character gets you remembered
• How they're marketing to a demographic that reads more, spends more, and belongs to more book clubs than anyone else

David said something about the unknown writers in the collection that I've repeated twice since. Most of us haven't heard of 90 percent of the authors out there, if not 99 percent, and a lot of them are tremendously accomplished. I used to feel embarrassed when a guest turned out to have written 185 books I'd never encountered (hello, Debra Webb). Now, I think, "If everyone already knew everyone, nobody would ever discover anything!"

We also talked about book tours being largely a thing of the past, and how the ones still happening are often financed by the authors themselves. Their contributors are doing local events around the country instead, which means nobody is getting shipped off on a ten-city tour.

And because this is apparently where my brain lives now, we spent a few minutes chatting about whether we could get a tracking device into every book, which led to a conversation about the inventory robot at my grocery store. Her name is Tally. She is six feet tall and very friendly.

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