Stella Fosse Logo a stylized heart in a circle

The Musings & Ponderings of Stella (And Friends)

Looking for Newsletters? Click Here.

Into Your Eighties Joining Hands Across Generations header montage
Stella Fosse

Into Your Eighties Joining Hands Across Generations

 Into Your Eighties Joining Hands Across Generations In Part One of our series on Joining Hands Across Generations, forty-something Tera Johnson-Swartz (founder of Midlife_It) posed a question to sixty-something Stella, which Stella answered in Part Two. In this final part, Stella (the sixty-something) talks with Dr. Ruth Saxton, our eighty-something, about the importance of older women’s stories. Biography : In her long academic career, Dr. Ruth Saxton studied and taught about fiction by women, focusing

Read The Rest»
Stella Fosse No Comments
The 32 Week Baby in the Jar - montage header for blog
Stella Fosse

The 32 Week Baby in the Jar

The 32 Week Baby in the Jar I was 34 when I returned to school for a Masters Degree in Biology.  It was 1987 and my twin sons were six years old.  I sat in the front row for the first day of Developmental Biology.  Directly in front of me was a table with jars that, from left to right, displayed embryos of increasing maturity.  Farthest to the right was a 32-week fetus, preserved in

Read The Rest»
Stella Fosse 3 Comments
Joining Hands Across Generations
Stella Fosse

Joining Hands Across Generations

Joining Hands Across Generations – Your Fabulous Sixties In Part One of our series on Joining Hands Across Generations, forty-something Tera Johnson-Swartz (founder of Midlife_It) posed this question to sixty-something Stella: If there were something you wish you could have told a younger, more naive you, or even a woman approaching or just entering midlife, what would that be? What’s the best part of it – the sweetest, most savory piece you wouldn’t trade for

Read The Rest»
Stella Fosse No Comments
Joining Hands Across Generations - Newly Minted Crones
Tera Johnson-Swartz

Joining Hands Across Generations | Newly Minted Crones

Joining Hands Across Generations – Newly Minted Crones Cronedom is not just one generation.  It begins in our forties and extends to the end of life, which for some of us happens in our nineties or more.  At each stage we have much to learn from one another:  Newly menopausal women can learn from sisters who were there twenty years ago, and the oldest wisest sisters can learn from women still working and raising children even

Read The Rest»
Tera Johnson-Swartz No Comments
Falling In Love With Characters header montage
Stella Fosse

Falling In Love With Characters

Falling In Love With Characters I understand now why authors write sequels:  Because it’s tough to walk away from your characters at the end of your novel.  The lead women characters in Brilliant Charming Bastard—Rose, Joyce and Maxine—have been my companions for almost two years. Rose Bingham spent her career as a professor of Biology at UC Berkeley.  When I first “met” Rose, she was dating Brendan Burns, who claimed to be a physician and

Read The Rest»
Stella Fosse No Comments
Sick of Watching header image
Stella Fosse

Sick of Watching

Sick of Watching – Try Shows about Strong Older Women A column on what to watch in lockdown should be obsolete.  But as the saying goes, what doesn’t kill you mutates and tries again.  If for any reason you are not vaccinated, please stop reading this and go do it now.  But even those of us who are vaccinated are the stars of a real-life rerun, spending more time at home by the electronic hearth, a

Read The Rest»
Stella Fosse 2 Comments

Never Miss a Blog

Essays, book news, writing prompts, and dispatches from the vivid times after midlife — delivered to your inbox.
No noise.
Just Stella.