Once I was an activist in the areas of labor, housing, civil rights, and education. Then I ran a theater and engaged in national and international discussions of cultural democracy. Then, I evolved a method of practice, digital storytelling.
Do me a favor. Close your eyes. That's how I open Blink, the story I told last week at the Santa Fe Story Lab, an event supported by the Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library's ongoing experiment in getting people to stand in a room
I woke up this morning, did a casual scroll through my Watch Duty App before coffee — a habit I picked up somewhere in the last few fire seasons, the way some people check the stock market — and there it was. Fires scattered across the western map like someone had taken
Before you read another word here, I'd rather you read A Room of One's Own Devices first — a short story I wrote about a version of myself five years from now, a week out of wrist surgery, propped on the couch with my dog, figuring out
Last May, at a Maynard Institute journalism retreat, I fell into conversation with Ian James, the Los Angeles Times reporter who has spent years covering water and climate across California and the West — the Colorado River's slow collapse, the unchecked groundwater pumping draining the desert Southwest, the removal
A meditation for the Fourth of July, or any day you're feeling it I grew up in a house where "freedom" was not an abstraction. My parents — George and Latane Lambert, labor organizers and civil rights workers in the Texas tradition — threw the word around like
Memoir, Autobiography, and the Aging Urge to Explain Yourself Let me confess something at the outset: As part of my Elderware project, I'm writing a memoir. Or trying to. Some days it feels like archaeology, digging through fifty years of political theater, community organizing, and one particularly regrettable
Age, ideology, and the myth that getting older means getting more conservative The Folk Wisdom and Its Problems Let's start with what the research actually says, because it's more interesting than the bumper sticker version. Folk wisdom has long held that people become more politically conservative
Here in the Commons, we have all types of aging folks. Some with families on site living in old school multi-generational homes, some with kids not too far away, some with kids spread across the country, some built over one long relationship, some blended from several, but we also
This Saturday, May 16th, Studs Terkel would have turned 114 years old. He was born in 1912, the year the Titanic went down — a fact he loved to cite, usually with that impish grin, as if to say: I came in on the wreckage and I'm still here.
How often does a piece of music take you away? One minute you’re sweating the details of life’s to-do list, and the next you are singing out loud in your car in the gym parking lot. Okay, that was me today. Possessed and waves of emotion rushing
Imagine you are fifty years old today (and yes I know most of my audience for this experiment passed that toll booth more than a few years back). But go ahead, imagine you are one of your children around 50, I have one of those so I will imagine myself
Tracking my weight, metabolism, and what it means to finally ask for help My father was a diabetic. Diagnosed the same year of my birth, 1957 — as though we arrived in the world together, he and his disease, just in time to greet me. And so for all seventeen years