Clik here to view.
Memoir as a Tool for Transformation by Kathy Pooler
“..ordinariness, when imbued with mindfulness, is greatness at ease with itself…” ~Lorraine Ash, Self and Soul: On Creating a Meaningful Life (2014) We all have a book inside of us—a narrative about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why I Couldn’t Graduate From College Until Age 50 by Saloma Furlong
{I’m very pleased to welcome Saloma Miller Furlong to Later Bloomer. ~Debra} My very first class at Smith College is an astronomy course. The professor has put up an image of a child sitting on a sandy...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Grandma Moses: “Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.”
(September 7 marks the 155th anniversary of Grandma Moses’s birth. I’m republishing this to celebrate!) Anna Mary Robertson was born before Lincoln took office. She died the year of JFK’s inauguration....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Are Some People Late Bloomers?
A good garden may have some weeds. ~Thomas Fuller Does another “30 under age 30” achievement list make you wonder if you’re doing life wrong? Does a story about a grandma who ran her first marathon in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Andrea Bocelli: Horseman, Winemaker, Lawyer, Late Bloomer
The Mojave desert: A warrior raises his sword. Fighter planes soar across the sky. A blind man gallops across the sand. These images punctuate the music video for Andrea Bocelli’s new album, Cinema,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Are Some People Late Bloomers? Pt. 2
In Part 1, we explored how “a good garden may have some weeds”—life’s difficulties and Later Blooming. In this installment, we examine two intriguing traits that many Later Bloomers share—wide-ranging...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mary Norton: A Late-Blooming Author’s Big Magic
When I was maybe four years old, my family visited my father’s eccentric old aunties who lived in a fading Victorian near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Auntie Ivy road a Harley. Auntie Dora talked...
View ArticleClik here to view.
May Your 2016 Be Dangerously Weird
“Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal…woo the muse of the odd.” That’s Bruce Sterling addressing the Computer Game Developers Conference back in 1991. Sterling is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How Late Bloomer Charles Perrault Became Cinderella’s Secretary
Once upon a time there was a gentleman who married, for his second wife, the proudest and most haughty woman that ever was seen. She had two daughters of her own, who were, indeed, exactly like her in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Celebrating Jules Verne: Playwright, Stockbroker, Late-Blooming Visionary
“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” ~A Journey to the Center of the Earth Is 35 too young to be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What’s With Writers and Late Blooming?
According to a 2010 survey conducted by the Humber School for Writers, the average age for authors first published in book form is 42. According to Douglas Adams, the answer to the ultimate question of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Maria Sibylla Merian: How a 17th Century Late Bloomer Became the World’s...
In 1699, more than a century before Charles Darwin explored the Galapagos, a middle-aged woman sailed from Amsterdam to Suriname, then a Dutch colony in South America, to study the region’s insects....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Frances Glessner Lee: How a Late Bloomer’s Deathly Dollhouses Transformed...
She was born the heiress to a vast fortune. But in her 40s, she developed a late-blooming compulsion for crime. Not committing it, solving it. Many experts consider Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962), a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Good News About Getting Older
This article is by Jonathan Young, founding curator of the Joseph Campbell Archives. There are some things that get better as we age. On our best days, we have a kind of grace. We are works-in-progress...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Five Things You Didn’t Know About #Literary Late Bloomer Ian Fleming
Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes,’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life. ~Colonel Pott (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) Ian Fleming (1908-1964), the man who created James Bond was, sadly, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Late-Blooming Writer and The Cat Who Could Read Backwards
Why do we love a feline gumshoe? Britt Petersen at Slate cites a literary tradition of mystical cats, “from the witchly cat Grimalkin of the 16th-century anti-Catholic satire Beware the Cat, to Poe’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Late-Blooming Author of “To Sir, With Love” Just Turned 104
An exceptional Later Bloomer turned 104 this week. No blog, website, or newspaper celebrated his eventful life or his world-famous book and its movie adaptation. Perhaps it’s because the book debuted...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beatrix Potter: Her Life Beyond Mushrooms and Talking Bunnies
(Today’s the 150th anniversary of Beatrix Potter’s birth. I’m reposting this to celebrate!) Long ago on a trip to London, a friend and I stayed near Hyde Park in Kensington. We dragged our bags up six...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Late-Blooming Cinderella Who Discovered a Comet
Exactly 230 years ago today, Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) became the first woman to discover a comet and receive the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal. Yet she experienced such childhood...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Flowering of Mary Delany’s Ingenious Mind: At 78 She Invented Collage Art!
An ingenious mind is never too old to learn. ~Mary Granville Delany The pancratium maritimum, or sea daffodil, grows on beaches along the Mediterranean. Examine the the stamen antennae, fluid white...
View Article
