The Creative Power Of Older Women
Two Women on a Mission News flash: After Amba by Stephanie Shields is the Gold Medal Winner in the 2025 WSA Independent Book Awards for Adult Fiction. It’s late August 2025. This is us, Stella and me. Two women novelists of a certain age. We’re sharing a view and we’re sharing a vision. Two older […]
A Taste of the Banquet As I’ve interacted over the years with the marvelous women who create Crone Culture, I’ve often wished for one place where we could see it all: the books, the podcasts, the shows and movies that celebrate women past midlife. A place to learn more about the vibrant women who are […]
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 […]
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. […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Gray New Deal My first published novel, The Gray New Deal, is appearing as I turn 63. In the novel, seven seniors who shared a college co-op in Austin fifty years ago reunite to create another co-op. Together, this intentional community navigates Trump 1.0 and the first years of the pandemic. They’re a diverse […]
Artificial? Yes. Intelligence? Maybe. Years ago my son bought the house Marion Zimmer Bradley owned at the end of her life. She lived there in community with the writers who ghost wrote many of her later novels. Those books, published under Zimmer’s name to take advantage of her established readership, really did literally take advantage […]