Blog Posts - creativity

More Is Possible

February 10, 2017 By Alix Kates Shulman
My husband was a sculptor until 2004, when a traumatic brain injury ended his working life. Before that, he’d spend hours each week looking at art; he called New York’s Metropolitan Museum his “temple.”  Read more...

Very Pinteresting

August 26, 2016 By Pepper Evans
Lonely? Can't find your best girlfriends, not even on Facebook? Don't despair; I know where they all went. They are on Pinterest (pronounced like interest, only starting with a p, pin-trest).  Read more...

Could Happen

May 05, 2016 By Alix Kates Shulman
Before the accident that left him like someone with advanced Alzheimer’s, my husband was an artist. After the severe injuries to his brain's frontal lobes, centers for the "executive functions" that enable us to conceive and carry out plans, he found it difficult to make art. Hoping to get him drawing again, I fixed up an "art table" and, as suggested by an art therapist, sat with him for at least ten minutes a day while he drew.  Read more...

Bill Traylor, People’s Artist

March 11, 2016 By Victoria Robinson
I knew very little about Bill Traylor before I walked into the American Folk Art Museum in New York City to see an exhibition of his work. I knew he was a self-taught artist from the South—but that’s all I knew. When I learned from the gallery text that he didn’t start making art until he was in his mid-80s, I was awestruck. Embarking on anything in one’s 80s is rare. Ending up in a museum is radical.  Read more...

Joan Didion and the Crime of Getting Old

April 13, 2015 By Victoria Robinson
One day while doing research online, I came across an article in the Atlantic about author Joan Didion. Since my first love is literature, I immediately clicked the link. Gracing the piece was a black-and-white photograph of Didion in 1977, looking as cool and meticulous as her carefully crafted prose reads. The image evoked memories of that slightly hopeful, slightly anxious time and primed me for reflections on Didion’s life.  Read more...

Spring Swingers

December 01, 2014 By Flora Davis
I lived in Montreal for half a dozen years in the 1950s, and I recall winters when the snow seemed endless. There was so much of it that the city didn’t just plow, it trucked the stuff away and dumped it in the St. Lawrence River. People said you knew it was spring when the sidewalks came up.  Read more...

How Problematic Is This Atlantic Cover Story? Let Me Count the Ways

October 20, 2014 By Ashton Applewhite
The cover of the October 2014 Atlantic magazine features a white-bearded skateboarder careening crazily above the title of an article that encapsulates American ambivalence about longevity, Ezekiel Emanuel’s “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” I wrote a letter to the editor, calling out the unacknowledged ageism that saturates the issue.  Read more...

Time to Rethink Ink

October 17, 2014 By Pepper Evans
Tattoos—love them or hate them? If you are like me, you shudder at the thought. The mere word can conjure movie images of bikers, sailors, trollops—not to mention the creepy, all-night tattoo parlors—and brings to mind a long-held belief that tattoos are for someone who fits a mold to which I do not aspire.  Read more...

The Zen of Tony, Spanning Generations

August 25, 2014 By Pepper Evans
I heard a voice from my past when I stumbled upon an interview on National Public Radio (NPR) with the legendary singer Tony Bennett. It triggered many happy memories. I would know that voice anywhere—singing or telling a story—and it always makes me nostalgic. Bennett was a constant in my house growing up, as well as music from others of his generation, like Sinatra, Goulet and Como, to name but a few. My parents had a respectable collection of LPs under the turntable. This was the background music of my young life, and it stuck with me even as my tastes changed over the years.  Read more...

The Consoling Power of Art

July 31, 2014 By Alix Kates Shulman
There are an estimated 42 million unpaid family caregivers in this country (including me), not counting the millions more caring for chronically ill or disabled children, so it’s a shock to learn that the first anthology of poems and short stories about caregiving has just been published in the United States. Not that there aren’t hundreds of helpful nonfiction books, journals, newsletters, websites, blogs, as well as memoirs and novels on the subject, covering every category of patient or need. But a single-volume collection of outstanding short fiction and poetry, reflecting many different takes on this widespread, life-altering experience, has until now been missing, leaving an empty space in our hungry consciousness. Living in the Land of Limbo: Fiction and Poetry about Family Caregiving (Vanderbilt, 2014), Carol Levine’s selection of fiction and poetry about caregiving by some of the most accomplished writers of our time, is an excellent start to filling it.  Read more...

Fifty Years of Shopping with My Mother

May 19, 2014 By Margaret Morganroth Gullette
Not just in childhood, but deep into my middle years, my mother and I shopped together. I got most of my clothes on those expeditions, and she paid for a great many of them. It didn’t occur to me that any of this was unusual until a former roommate of mine, now with a daughter in her 20s, said that she had long admired my mother’s example and was “still” buying clothes for her delighted progeny.  Read more...

The Art of Dressing, According to the Woman Who Wasn’t Born Yesterday
Gifts of Aging, Part 1

February 09, 2014 By Margaret Morganroth Gullette
1 comment When I was young, I used to be so anxious about what to wear that, in the morning or before a party, my room would be strewn with discarded outfits. The mess outside exposed the mess inside–how inadequate I felt, how competitive, how miserable that I wasn’t pretty enough or rich enough to meet the day ahead. And often I was wrongly got up—overdressed, mainly.  Read more...

The Art of Shopping, According to the Woman Who Wasn’t Born Yesterday
Gifts of Aging, Part 2

February 09, 2014 By Margaret Morganroth Gullette
When I was young, everyone I knew felt some dissatisfaction when trying on clothes. Some of us found it excruciating. I used to say, “The scream came from the dressing room.”  Read more...

Senior Sprayers Make Their Mark

December 05, 2012 By Victoria Robinson
If we want to challenge negative attitudes about aging, we sometimes need to examine our own attitudes first. That’s what German seniors are doing, with the help of younger artists. This intergenerational exchange takes place in the streets rather than in museums, through spray paints rather than oil paints. Graffiti workshops and classes are popping up across the country, and they are surprisingly popular.  Read more...

Characters I Almost Missed

September 28, 2012 By Pepper Evans
“You will get paid to read and review current fiction if it has a compelling story with an aging protagonist.” Sounds like a good news-bad news joke, right? I love fiction, I told my boss, but the thought of reading novels starring an older person was filling me with dread. I'm in my mid-50s. I found the assignment depressing.  Read more...