ElderWare: Story Work and Aging in the mid-21st Century

Ron Pevny is the founder of the Center for Conscious Eldering and the author of " Conscious Living, Conscious Aging: Claiming the Gifts of Elderhood ". He has spent fifty years helping people move through life's major transitions — from his early training with the pioneers of the modern vision quest movement to his work leading week-long retreats at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.

My guest is Xanthe Golenko, an Australian researcher, practitioner, and now storytelling facilitator based in France. Xanthe came to this work through an unlikely path — nine years as a professional dancer, a detour into business and healthcare research, a PhD in organizational culture in public hospitals, and then a fateful introduction to intergenerational practice that, as she puts it, just hoo...

Dr. Pia Kontos is a senior scientist at the KITE Research Institute at the University of Toronto, and her life's work is challenging the idea that dementia means the self is gone. Drawing on embodiment theory, she argues that agency, humor, creativity, and relationship persist through the body even in severe cognitive impairment — and she builds the evidence for that argument through documenta...

Dr. Pia Kontos is a senior scientist at the KITE Research Institute at the University of Toronto, and her life's work is challenging the idea that dementia means the self is gone. Drawing on embodiment theory, she argues that agency, humor, creativity, and relationship persist through the body even in severe cognitive impairment — and she builds the evidence for that argument through documenta...

Kinde Nebeker is a rites of passage guide based in Castle Valley, Utah — out near Moab, which is about as magic a piece of geography as this earth has to offer. She trained in transpersonal psychology at Naropa University, and has spent decades guiding people through vision fasts rooted in indigenous ceremony, stripped of cultural appropriation, but full of the original medicine: solitude, fasting...

Lindsay Beagley is the Senior Director of Lifelong University Engagement at Arizona State University, and she's been quietly dismantling that model from the inside. Her work centers on Mirabella at ASU — a continuing care retirement community built right on the Tempe campus — where residents take classes, mentor students, advise startups, and participate in the full life of the university. Not...

Anne Basting is a writer, artist and advocate for the power of creativity to change lives and transform systems. She is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Founder of the award-winning non-profit TimeSlips.org , which inspires and supports the integration of creativity and meaning-making into care systems. In this conversation, Anne walks us through the method...

e were promised that social media would make life richer, more connected, more humane. And sometimes it has. But many older adults have also experienced something else: platforms that feel harder over time, feeds drifting from friends toward ads and outrage, tools that seem to decline just as we hope they might deepen. So what’s really happening there? And what does it mean for belonging, memory,...

Just Joe looking back on the Elderware's first 14 weeks of interviews and articles.

Stormy and I talk about care and technology—the uses and misuses of AI already threading through clinics and living rooms. Predictive systems help with patterns and logistics; generative systems promise companionship and language scaffolding. But Stormy keeps us honest: these tools must support relationship, not replace it. The chatbot is endlessly patient—and a little too eager to please—which ca...

I speak with my old friend Wayne Goodrich— once upon a time, the quiet maestro behind the spectacle of Steve Jobs onstage. We go way back—to the Joe’s Digital Diner days in San Francisco, but for more than two decades across NeXT, Pixar, and Apple, Wayne produced the keynotes that became our collective campfire: product stories told with rigor, restraint, and a touch of theater. We talk about what...

Tim teaches at a small theological school in Ohio where his classroom spills into fields and wetlands. He helped launch a campus farm that feeds the dining hall and a 150-family CSA, tying soil to spirit, dinner to dignity. He names his work “ecological theology,” asking why, if this Earth is our only home, we so often treat it like a disposable container. Our conversation wanders the way good pil...

Jim Winship is a long time friend of StoryCenter. He spent several decades at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater teaching social work and building bridges between campus and community. He was deeply impacted by his work in Latin America, and he and his son developed a documentary about the role of food banks in rural Wisconsin during the pandemic, https://vimeo.com/735268763?fl=pl&fe=vl. I...

Sara Orem has been practicing an answer in community for a long while. She came to teaching through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute—OLLI for the initiated—after a late-life doctorate just shy of sixty, proof that curiosity has no mandatory retirement age. Sara’s path wanders through gratitude, mindfulness, and joy—not as slogans, but as steady practices, the kind you take up with neighbors a...

Dr. Tricia Jenkins, has been doing digital storytelling with older adults for over a decade, co-running this organization called Digitales. Digitales has trained hundreds of facilitators across Europe. But what really gets me is that story work with seniors isn't just a professional calling for her, it is deeply felt. She watched her own parents navigate dementia, and as she put it to me, she was...

Today's episode is a talk with Mark Silver—social worker, longtime co-coordinator of the Wellbeing Clinic for Older Adults at Swinburne, and one of the steady hands shaping intergenerational story work in Australia. Mark helped found PADSIP back in 2007—the Positive Ageing Digital Storytelling Intergenerational Program—which pairs older adults with students to co-create short, first-person digital...

Mary Ann Schultz has spent 50 years in nursing—from her start as a staff nurse in Youngstown to leadership roles in university hospitals and a department chairship at Cal State San Bernardino—and in her encore career she’s become a clear-eyed voice in nursing informatics and precision health. She brings the receipts: peer-reviewed work on precision medicine and a recent gubernatorial appointment a...

today I'm talking with Gary Glazner, founder and executive director of the Alzheimer's Poetry Project . Gary has spent over 25 years developing and teaching a revolutionary approach to working with people living with dementia—using the power of poetry to create moments of connection, joy, and creative expression. What started as a simple observation in an adult day program in Northern California h...

We have reached the point now where discussing the use of companion bots in support of aging adults is no longer science fiction, but a burgeoning billion dollar industry. The ethics of machines acting as support personnel seem fraught with disaster. But rather than run the other direction, I thought I would go to the source. So this interview is with someone with a true insider's perspective.

Dr. Janet Ferguson spent nearly a decade as Executive Director of the Lifelong Learning Centre in Bermuda, and continues to work with groups like  the National Museum of Bermuda and others, and extends her work around the world with educational institutions and community educators  in the UK, the US, and her native Caribbean communities. 

Dr. William "Bill" Randall is Professor Emeritus of Gerontology at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada, and one of the pioneering voices behind "narrative gerontology." Bill has spent three decades helping us understand that aging isn't just about biology and managing decline – it's about the rich, evolving stories we tell about our lives, and how those stories can transform our experie...

This week you get to listen in to my conversation with Stephen Katz, one of the most influential voices in aging studies - Stephen is now retired as a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, but remains active in countless projects.   He has been described as one of the leading thinkers in the gerontology field, internationally renowned for his contributions to...

In this week's episode, I'll chat with my old friend Dr. Peter Whitehouse. I don't know many neurologists. But he was one that also was an ongoing part of my digital storytelling and creative writing workshops and efforts. In hanging around with him at Case Western University where he taught, and working with him in my workshop contexts I learned he was a leading figure in the field of memory, and...

Elderware is both a detective tale as a research project. As the founder of StoryCenter, some 30+ years after evolving the participatory media method known as Digital Storytelling into an international community of story workers, I am taking my experience into the discussion of what might story and media technology might become by the middle of this century. A mix of interviews with various expert...