This book review may appear dated. To bring it up to date, substitute MAGA for Tea Party.

A few years ago I read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. As a sociologist, Hochschild spent a few years getting to know Tea Partiers in Louisiana who had in various ways been affected by environmental disasters and economic downturns over the course of their lives. They were all White, working class, conservative southerners. She wrote early in her book of her desire to scale the...

I started writing middle grade novels when I was well into my fifties. I sent my first query at 58 and got my first rejection soon after. Six years and a couple hundred queries later, the rejections keep coming, and not for one book but for two. What have I learned? Literary agents, on balance, are too young.

Let’s face it, getting a literary agent is hard. Anyone in the game has heard the stories of the writing slog amidst mounds of rejections. Combine that with the sound of crickets that...

When I turned 63, I decided it was time to start a new career. I had been a university professor for twenty-five years and had been thinking about a change for a while. The plan wasn’t to stop being a professor, at least not immediately. Instead, I committed to a timeline for ramping up to the new career as I wound down the old one. I gave myself five years, or until I turn 68, to become a middle grade fiction writer.

Detractors might pass off a five-year career transition at 63 as a phased...