This book explores the artistic routines and inspirations of amateur and professional musicians, fine artists and literary authors experiencing midlife. Based on ethnographic insight, it argues that creativity is driven by the pursuit of a 'mezzanine' in-between state where the anarchy of possibility is an antidote to the realities of middle age.

This book explores the artistic routines and inspirations of amateur and professional musicians, fine artists and literary authors experiencing midlife. Based on ethnographic insight, it argues that creativity is driven by the pursuit of a 'mezzanine' in-between state where the anarchy of possibility is an antidote to the realities of middle age.

The book starts by asking what is creative aging? And suggests it involves a long process that grows from all of life's experience, if you have the courage to learn the lessons given to you by your own unique life journey. It shows how difficult it is to age positively in a culture that denies and denigrates aging. At age 85, the author, Ruby Abrahams uses her own experience and that of others she has known, to suggest ways of examining the life experience, so that lessons can be learned. Thus, older people become 'elders' growing in their own wisdom and contributing with that wisdom to their families and communities.

Increased longevity has created 30 extra years of life. These years are not tacked on to the end of life, but have created an expanded midlife that I call Middlescence. Learn about the importance of understanding and embracing this life stage.

A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.

The author shows how the unique combination of age, experience, and creativity can produce inner growth and potential for everyone.

For every woman, from the young to those in midlife and beyond, who has ever been told, "You can't" and thought, "Oh, I definitely will!"--this book is for you. Women are expected to be many things. They should be young enough, but not too young; old enough, but not too old; creative, but not crazy; passionate, but not angry. They should be fertile and feminine and self-reliant, not barren or butch or solitary. Women, in other words, are caught between social expectations and a much more complicated reality. Women who don't fit in, whether during life transitions or because of changes in their body, mind, or gender identity, are carving out new ways of being in and remaking the world. But this is nothing new: they have been doing so for thousands of years, often at the margins of the same religious traditions and cultures that created these limited ways of being for women in the first place. In The Defiant Middle, Kaya Oakes draws on the wisdom of women mystics and explores how transitional eras or living in marginalized female identities can be both spiritually challenging and wonderfully freeing, ultimately resulting in a reinvented way of seeing the world and changing it. "Change, after all," Oakes writes, "always comes from the margins."

Over the last fifteen years, psychological research regarding sexual orientation has seen explosive growth. In this book, Anthony R. D'Augelli and Charlotte J. Patterson bring together top experts to offer a comprehensive overview of what we have discovered--and what we still need to learn--about lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities. Writing in clear, nontechnical language, the contributors cover a range of topics, including conceptions of sexual identity, development over the lifespan, family and other personal relationships, parenting, and bigotry and discrimination. Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Identities Over the Lifespan is essential reading for researchers, students, social scientists, mental health practitioners, and general readers who seek the most up-to-date and authoritative treatment of the subject available.

Commenced in 1958 with 142 young women who were seniors at Mills College, the Mills Study has become the largest and longest longitudinal study of women’s adult development, with assessments of these women in their twenties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. Women on the River of Life synthesizes five decades of research to paint a picture of women’s personality and development across the lifespan. The book explores questions of family, work, life-path, maturity, wisdom, creativity, attachment, and purpose in life, unfolding in the context of a rapidly changing historical period with far-reaching consequences for the kinds of lives women would envision for themselves. Helson and Mitchell breathe life into abstract theories and concepts with the real-life stories and voices of the study’s participants. Woven throughout the book are the authors’ reminiscences on the profound endeavor of sustaining a longitudinal study of women’s lives through time.

This is Volume 12, Number of the Creativity Research Journal published in 1999. Covering longitudinals studies in creative out-of-school activities in intellectually gifted adolescents as predictors of life accomplishments; creative personality in women; Re-analyses of Torrence's- 1958 to the present; pretend play; invention is the mind of the adolescent; procrastination; and a study of exceptional giftedness and creativity.