Frequently Asked Questions:
What is Oldster Magazine?
Oldster Magazine explores what it means to travel through time in a human body at every phase of life. It focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly we experience with each milestone, starting early in life. It’s about the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures.
Regardless of age, we’re all the oldest we’ve ever been, which makes every one of us feel, well, old.
Remember when you were about to turn 20, and it was a big, scary deal? Or 30? Or 40? Remember when you were in your 20s or 30s and you thought people in their 40s were absolutely ancient? Remember the first time you realized that moving into a new phase of life—graduating, getting married, becoming a parent, getting a major promotion, retiring—meant that you would be leaving behind another phase of life? That’s what Oldster Magazine explores.
A more serious part of the Oldster Magazine mission is de-stigmatizing and normalizing aging by demonstrating that’s it’s happening to everyone, regardless of age and gender, all the time. And fostering intergenerational conversation, so we can all learn from one another.
Who is behind this?
Oldster Magazine is the brainchild of now 60-year-old editor-in-chief, Sari Botton, a bestselling writer, editor, and teacher living in Kingston, NY. This year she published her debut memoir, And You May Find Yourself: Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. She is probably best known for editing Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY, and for the five years she worked as the essays editor for Longreads. (She is writing this text right now, even though it appears in the third person.)
How often will I receive an edition of the newsletter?
Oldster will appear in your email inbox at least three times a week, but many weeks it’s more like four times, and sometimes even five.
On Mondays I publish personal essays by various contributors. On Wednesdays I publish new interviews under the heading of: The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire. On Fridays, I alternate between Link Roundups (sometimes with Oldster Top 10 playlists from former music exec Cliff Chenfeld), and Open Threads, where readers are invited to chime in.
The third Tuesday of each month, I co-publish a Sober Oldster Q&A with A.J. Daulerio from The Small Bow, a recovery and mental health newsletter I love, illustrated by Edith Zimmerman. Bestselling novelist Laura Lippman has an occasional column called “I Don’t Know Why…,” which I tend to publish on Thursdays. Essayist and cultural critic Michael A. Gonzales is a regular contributor.
Sometimes I have people respond to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire verbally, over video, on Substack Live. Here’s one I did in February with Ricki Lake:
If you can’t find the newsletter in your email, and you have gmail, check your “promotions” folder. In your settings, you can also opt to have the newsletter come to you via the Substack app, rather than email.
What’s up with the name?
The overwhelming majority of subscribers *get* that I am using the term “oldster,” an old-timey borderline slur, subversively. They realize it’s tongue-in-cheek, and like it a lot. I hope the handful of readers who don’t *get* it will eventually catch on.
Who qualifies as an “oldster”?
Everyone. You read that right: everyone qualifies as an oldster. Oldster Magazine is NOT about old people. Well, not exclusively about old people. (And who decides at what age “old” begins, anyway?) It’s about all people, who are having the experience of getting older. And who are the oldest they’ve ever been. (Aka…everyone.)
“You call a person who is (28, 30, 47, 67, 71…) an oldster?! Gimme a break!”
Sometimes the eldest of the oldsters get mad at me for featuring contributors who are younger than they are. But I said what I said: Oldster Magazine is about the experience of aging, which everyone who is alive is experiencing. Everyone is an oldster to people who are younger, and a youngster to people who are older. Oldsterism is all relative.
Again, part of the Oldster Magazine mission is both de-stigmatizing and normalizing aging by demonstrating that’s it’s happening to everyone, of all ages, all the time.
Why should I become a paid subscriber?
I rely on paid subscriptions in order to pay contributors, and myself. If you aren’t already a paying subscriber, please consider becoming one. Not only will you help me pay others, you’ll help me build this to a place where I can do more ambitious and better things with it. I keep my rates low, $55/year or $6/month, and given how much content I’m putting out, that’s a pretty great value.
As a paying subscriber, will I have exclusive access to paywalled content?
Yes, paying subscribers will have access to all paywalled content, although I don’t paywall much. There will be more paywalled content going forward, but there will also still be plenty of free content.
I want to write for Oldster Magazine, but I haven’t seen instructions for how to submit.
UPDATE: Submissions are currently PAUSED. I have more submissions than I can keep up with, and more accepted pieces than I can publish soon. Going forward, there will be limited submission periods, which I will announce here. Thank you for your understanding.
Currently I pay $50 for personal essays of up to 1500 words. Occasionally I pay more for pieces that are longer, or require reporting.
My email for pitches is pitch2sari@gmail.com. CAVEAT: You’ll only hear back from me if I’m interested in your piece.
I already receive more submissions than I can quickly respond to or have slots for. It might take me a while to respond to your submission if I am interested, and if I accept it, it might take me a while to publish it. I am doing all of this by myself. It’s a lot of work, and I publish Memoir Land, too.
There’s an awful lot of professional writers featured. Why is that?
Writers are generally who you hire to write for magazines. They (myself included) have been honing their craft for years, sometimes decades, and I’m fortunate that so many of them are willing to contribute here, despite my limited budget. They are also easier to edit than non-writers.
That said, I do hope to eventually include more interviews and podcasts episodes with “regular people,” and to add shorter blog post formats so that more non-writers can easily contribute.
You also feature an awful lot of Gen X-ers.
Well…I happen to be Gen X myself, and I’m acquainted with a lot of peers. Also, Generation X as a demographic is going through some interesting age-related changes right now and I’m curious about how others are handling them. We were latch-key kids who grew up too fast, then swung the other way and got stuck in protracted adolescence, which makes the “adulting” milestones in our forties and fifties feel really, really weird.
I will note, however, that I am working on making sure other age groups are also sufficiently represented.
How can I get one of those Oldster tee shirts I’ve seen Sari wear in photos?
You can order Oldster Magazine Merchandise—tee shirts and mugs—from my Etsy Store.
Read more about my mission in the interview Substack conducted with me:
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