Zero to Fifty When I’m being interviewed, I often get the question, “When did you know you wanted to be a writer?” The answer is, it’s complicated. Not that I haven’t written off and on my whole life, I wrote a play in third grade, a reader’s theater in seventh, and there is a book and a screenplay in a drawer somewhere that will never see the light of day. But I never wanted to
Invent Your Own Goddess When pagan author Donna Henes was almost fifty she developed a surprising habit. She began praising herself over even the smallest thing. “Good girl!” she would say to herself if she took the stairs instead of the elevator, or if she really did drink eight glasses of water in a day. It dawned on her that she had been saying “Good boy!” to her dog for years, over the slightest thing;
What Are Women Made Of? As I child, I remember reciting, What Are Little Girls Made of? Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice. Somehow, that never seemed right. The girls and women I knew were made of stronger stuff. Wanting to better define this, I began interviewing women as a graduate student and never stopped. I’ve interviewed over a hundred women over the past decades, almost all of them over forty, in search of a
A Politically Correct Scapegoat? Anthropologists have long debated the idea that targeting certain members of a society as “others” who don’t deserve care and respect has survival value for the group as a whole. If we assume that people have inborn tendencies toward violence, then focusing blame on a subgroup might support the cohesion of the larger group. We can find plenty of examples to support that idea, especially in authoritarian societies where stigmatizing a
My Debut Novel – and I’m 72 And never once has a publishing professional asked about my age There are a few, vanishingly rare, incidents in life when the stars line up in such a way that you begin to doubt the evidence of your own senses. As in, I’ll wake up soon, because this can’t really be happening. I call these iceberg moments, when a sparkling spire juts above the water line, dazzling in
Adjusting to the Now, Over and Over Again Last week I attended a conference in Santa Fe, Quest 2026, all about vivid aging for older women. One of the speakers was Kat Miller, a counselor and pro-aging activist who talked about falling in love with impermanence (“Crazy, right?” she said). Kat urged each of us to buy a bouquet of flowers and keep it until the petals turn to dust, to photograph each stage and
