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Stella Fosse

A Week of Nobel Queens

A Week of Nobel Queens What a week for older women! Poet Louise Gluck, 77, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Gluck is a professor at Yale who previously won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her lifetime of work includes twelve volumes of poetry and several collections of essays on poetry. One of her best known works is

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Stella Fosse

Who Says Erotica is Porn?

Who Says Erotica is Porn? I got into a minor spat with a romance writer one day.  She was talking online about how much writing romance means to her as an older woman, which I totally understand.  Just like writing erotica, writing romance for older women has that wonderful ability to bring our stories to life, for ourselves and others, and to push back on the nexus of ageism and sexism that plagues us all—especially

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Stella Fosse

Ubuntu – I Am Because We Are

Ubuntu – I Am Because We Are After six months of pandemic, it’s clear that this strange time exacerbates fear and brings out the human tendency to distance ourselves, to label one another as “Other”. It is easy to see when a group I belong to is labeled Other. When the health risks to older people are minimized, as in, “The deaths of older people don’t count because they would have died soon anyway.” Or

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Stella Fosse

Life in the Third Act with Plague

Life in the Third Act with Plague. What it’s like to get what you want in a pandemic I recently read a fabulous article [registration required] by Caitlin Moran with the subtitle “Goodbye, nice, jolly, happy Caitlin. Hello, angry Caitlin.” Moran’s premise is that women spend most of our adult lives drunk on a biochemical cocktail of estrogen and endorphins, and that the stereotypical angry post-menopausal woman is just waking up to all the crap she’s

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Mirinda Kossoff

What I Did Not Know About Racism

My guest blogger Mirinda Kossoff, who grew up in small-town Danville, VA, shares a powerful recollection in What I Did Not Know About Racism of what it was like to grow up in the South one hundred years after the Civil War. She has lived and worked in Japan and England as well as the United States. Mirinda has been a career chameleon: from social worker to newspaper editor to metalsmith and jewelry designer. She

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Stella Fosse

The Surprising Bliss of the Non-Consumer

The Surprising Bliss of the Non-Consumer One of the best things I’ve done lately is to set up a weekly conversation with an accountability buddy.  I talked about doing this for years but just started during shutdown—partly because video calls make it easy, and partly because other things disappeared off my calendar. My accountability buddy is not part of my household.  This turns out to be key.  I don’t sit across the breakfast table wondering

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