Grace Bonney of Design*Sponge on Curiosity and Collective Wisdom
Show Snapshot:
New York Times bestselling writer Grace Bonney of Design*Sponge fame, interviewed 100+ trailblazing women—athletes, activists, artists—for her latest book Collective Wisdom: Lessons, Inspiration, and Advice from Women over 50.
Grace shares a slice of their collective wisdom, the delicate task of cultivating self-love, and the power of embracing earlier versions of yourself while holding space for evolution and new identities.
In This Episode We Cover:
How a cross-generational friendship sparked Grace’s idea for “Collective Wisdom.”
The surprising differences (and commonalities) across the stories of 100+ women aged 40-106.
If curiosity is a key to staying engaged in the world, how to manifest curiosity in your own life.
In a book of unforgettable women - two of powerful stories that made a lasting mark on Grace.
The corrosive thinking of ageism is hurting us all.
Why aging equals opportunity, no matter what pop culture tells you.
How to examine your life with kindness, tenderness and respect.
The big happiness of small success.
Why Grace walked away from the success of her massively popular blog Design*Sponge. Plus, what’s next in store for this career changer.
Quotable:
Many of the women that I spoke with who are in their eighties and nineties who are living, not just second, third, fourth careers but are very much kind of living tenth, eleventh, twelfth versions of themselves. Excited curiosity is a thing that kept them engaged in their own lives. And I don’t think that curiosity has to be only something that we apply to what’s new and cool, but really just being curious about ourselves and the world around us.
The longer you are alive, the more opportunities there are to take different paths and make different choices. So, I ended up being quite reassured by the fact that there’s no one way to do something, there are no 50 ways to do something, there are hundreds of ways and opportunities in life.
More Resources:
Follow Grace:
Grace’s new book:
Collective Wisdom: Lessons, Inspiration, and Advice from Women over 50
Transcript
Katie Fogarty (0:08):
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. “Since the beginning of time, women have been the keepers of stories, traditions, and wisdom and for too long the powerful conversations women have with each other have been overlooked because society often devalues women, age, and knowledge.”
My guest today is New York Times bestselling writer, Grace Bonney, in fact, Grace wrote those words I’ve just read to you. They open her latest book, Collective Wisdom: Lessons, Inspiration, and Advice from Women over 50. Grace interviewed more than 100 fascinating trailblazing women; Olympic athletes, a member of NASA, authors, activists, filmmakers, artists, community volunteers, food entrepreneurs, small business owners, mothers, sisters, daughters, friends. She joins me today to share a slice of their collective wisdom as well as some of her own story. Welcome, Grace.
Grace Bonney (1:02):
Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Katie (1:03):
I’m very excited. Your book is stunning, I have been thumbing through it. What was your inspiration for Collective Wisdom and why did you put this together?
Grace (1:13):
Thank you. So, my work always kind of stems from my interests and just general curiosity and how people view the world, but this book kind of came from two places. First, it came from a friendship that I have with a women in her nineties who is named Georgine. I met Georgine volunteering along with my wife at a local nonprofit here that’s very similar to Meals on Wheels. And we cooked together in the kitchen for years and that friendship really changed the way I see the world and made me realize how valuable it is for all of us to have friendships that span generations.
So, that friendship with Georgine was a big part of this and also feedback I got from the last book I wrote called In the Company of Women and I got a lot of feedback from women who wanted to see the stories of women who had a lot more life experience. And it made me kind of realize how much my own work had focused on people who were within maybe 10 years of my own age, which was in my thirties at the time. So, I really wanted to sit down and document the stories of women who had much longer life experience and really commit those to paper. Because I think so often the stories of women who are older are passed down orally and just told and that that kind of wisdom and feedback is something that exists just between women shared one-on-one and I wanted to make sure that existed in writing somewhere. So, that’s kind of where this book came from.
Katie (2:35):
What’s the age span of the women that are in Collective Wisdom?
Grace (2:40):
So, most of the profiles are women over 50, so between the ages of 50 and 106. And then the stories that are about intergenerational friendships, those are kind of all over the place, but the women in those intergenerational friendships, the older women are over the age of 40 and the younger women start from anywhere in their twenties to women in their sixties who have friendships with women who are you know, in their eighties and nineties and older.
Katie (3:06):
Love it, love it. You have really an eclectic mix of profiles in the book. You have people from all across the country, which I noticed. You’ve got well known figures, like writer Roxanne Gay, you have disability activists, I saw a cookie baker which I loved, [both laughs] you also featured a woman that I know and admire, broadcast television pioneer and philanthropist, Ruth Ann Harnisch. How did you source your profiles? And was it hard to whittle it down to just over 100 women?
Grace (3:37):
You know, that process is my favorite part of the book. It’s always thinking about ensuring that there is a really diverse mix of people from different communities as well as a mix of stories. Because I think often, there can be similar paths in life and that’s a fun thing to be able to point out and be able to highlight these universal threads that exist in our stories, but I want to make sure that there are a really broad mix of, I dunno, I guess paths in there. So, that’s kind of the two approaches I have. Am I making sure to include as many women from different communities as possible? Am I ensuring there’s geographic diversity in the book? Which was kind of a mistake I made with my first book. And this book I really wanted to sit down and make sure there were stories of women from rural communities as well as indigenous reservations and communities all across the country. So, I kind of sat down and made a giant list of I think probably 175 people, and then I spent a few weeks whittling that down, and then I got feedback from people in those communities to kind of say, this is a person whose story would really be great to share. And then I think the actual interview process took maybe two or three months.
So, it’s kind of always a constant edit and process of getting feedback from oh, you may not know this person, but this person has a story that’s really important to share. The thing that was different about this book that was really interesting is when you’re talking to women who are over 40, this is a community that tends not to be as online as the communities that I’m used to working with. So, for example, when I worked on In the Company of Women, I think I spent two weeks confirming names and then we just jumped right into interviews and this book was the opposite I think. I spent 80% of my time trying to get to those women and then spend time getting to know them so that they felt comfortable trusting me and sharing their story with me and then I think the actual interviews were all done quite quickly but it took a lot more time to confirm that because this was a community of people who were definitely more offline than I’m used to working with. And that was a really interesting and important learning curve for me.
Katie (5:40):
Yeah, I’m sure. Especially if you’re talking to somebody who’s 106, this is somebody who is probably not necessarily on Instagram, though maybe I’m making an ageist judgment by assuming that they’re not. My own parents who are in their mid to late seventies are both super active on technology so I guess you never know. But one of the things I did notice when I looked at your book is that you asked most of your subjects the same set of questions, although some of them vary based on their expertise or perhaps, you know, a particular aspect of their life that you wanted to surface. And I love the fact that you asked these women largely the same questions because the answers were so resoundingly different. Did you see any broad themes emerge?
Grace (6:31):
It’s so interesting, I went in expecting there to be really broad themes because in most of my work where I’ve focused on women in entrepreneurial fields, there was a lot of commonality. But when you start to stretch out and look at life spans that include someone who has maybe been alive for over 100 years, paths get really, really diverse, really quickly. So, I think the only commonality I saw was that the longer that you live, the more complex life really gets. So, even if somebody on paper sounded like they had a really similar life experience, maybe someone coming from a same community, getting married around the same age, having children around the same age, their experiences were completely different, primarily because of time. I think the longer you are alive, the more opportunities there are to take different paths and make different choices. So, I ended up kind of being quite reassured by the fact that there’s no one way to do something, there’s no 50 ways to do something, there are hundreds of ways and opportunities in life where we can take different paths down completely different roads. So, there wasn’t really a universality in the way that I expected, but I ended up feeling quite assured in that sense of, we all get to do things really differently and we can all get to the same place and maybe that’s a sense of greater self-confidence or a better knowing of ourselves over time, but there’s really no right way to do that and I kind of loved learning that in the process of making this book.
Katie (8:02):
Yeah absolutely, there is no one right way to do things. I was so struck by some of the stories, I’m forgetting the woman’s name, but she was born outside of Normandy right after World War II and she is now living in upstate New York and it was just so interesting to see these snapshots of women’s lives and the journey that took them there. And I was really inspired by a lot of their takes on aging and their sense of confidence which is something that you just touched upon. So Grace, can I ask you how old you are?
Grace (8:37):
Sure, I just turned 40 this year.
Katie (8:38):
Congrats.
Grace (8:40):
[laughs] Thank you.
Katie (8:41):
So, you’re younger than most of the women that you’re profiling, many of the women that you profiled because you do have some younger people. And you’re younger than my audience. This show basically targets women in midlife and when I say midlife we’re talking about maybe 50 plus although, not all of us are gonna get to 106.
Grace (9:01):
Exactly.
Katie (9:02):
So, did this project change the way you feel about aging? Did you enter with one set of expectations about what it means to be over 50 and leave with another?
Grace (9:16):
This book definitely changed the way I look at aging and maybe not in the way that I anticipated. I think because I live with Type I diabetes, which does affect your overall lifespan in some way so I think that this book made me look at my own mortality and I dunno, I think it made me look at disability and the way that I think ableism kind of intertwines always with ageism and I came away from this realizing that I think the way we think of midlife is really shaped by a lot of identity factors. And I think for some people midlife is a little bit earlier than other people and so I wanted to kind of think about the way that ageism just affects all of us differently.
So, I definitely came away from this feeling like I am in some ways much younger than I think of myself and in a lot of ways much older than I think of myself. I just try to stay curious and non-judgmental about that throughout the process and I’m really glad that I did because I think that no matter how old you are, I think ageism plays a factor in your life, including the younger women in this book. And I tried to encourage them to really look at the way that ageism impacts younger people as well, to get them to be curious about the concept of ageism because I don’t think you really think about it until you’re on the older end of the spectrum. But younger people experience that as well and I hoped that by encouraging them to look at that, they would be curious and inquisitive about the way that their own internalized ageism had affected who they seek out as friends, who they trust for important conversations and mentorships. I really hope that this book will just make people look at ageism as a concept that would be one that would be good to be broken apart a bit more.
Katie (10:59):
Sure, I love that.
Grace (11:00):
Because I think a lot of those barriers we create around age in both directions are just completely arbitrary and shaped by dominant cultures. They really don’t benefit any of us unless you are an older, cis-gendered, white, straight man, I don’t think the concept of ageism is helping any of us so I would encourage all of us to get a little curious about breaking it down a bit.
Katie (11:22):
I think there’s really a movement towards doing that. You touch on intergenerational friendships in your book, I had a guest on by the name of Marci Alboher in Season 1, she works for Encore.org which helps people with second-act careers, they’re doing a lot of work around intergenerational friendships and reverse mentoring that goes both ways. I think of an organization called CIRKEL run by a woman named Charlotte Japp, which is the same thing, it connects somebody who is chronologically older with somebody who is chronologically younger and has them do mentoring and reverse mentoring back and forth. But I love the word that you used also which is ‘curious’, because I do feel that when we look at ageism too, there’s a sense that when we’re getting older, or maybe that we’re not as, I dunno, you can’t learn new things or you’re not open to new experiences or you’re set in your ways. That’s a lot of the stuff that culture teaches us, but, you know, I know people who are chronologically younger that are very fixed, you know. And I know a lot of people who are chronologically older who have very curious, growth mindsets. And I think that one of the keys to remaining youthful in spirit and your experiences is to be curious. How do you manifest curiosity in your own life, aside from talking to 100 women you don’t know? [both laugh]
Grace (12:51):
I really think you hit the nail on the head here. I think that curiosity is kind of the key aspect here and I think that so many of the women that I spoke with who are in their eighties and nineties who are living, not just you know, second, third, fourth careers but are very much kind of living tenth, eleventh, twelfth versions of themselves and who are really transparent about looking at all the different ways that kind of shed different skin throughout their lives. Excited curiosity is a thing that really kind of kept them engaged in their own lives. And I don’t think that curiosity has to be only something that we apply to like, what’s new and cool and happening in life, but really just being curious about ourselves and how we’re feeling about the world around us.
So, I really try to do that by just making sure I have some connection to nature every day and that can be through our pets, that can be just sitting outside, but it usually has absolutely nothing to do with technology. And everything to do with just trying to be more present in how the world around me is changing and that kind of keeps me grounded in myself, then I get curious about how I feel, I dunno, about everything around me. And I noticed that in every single woman that I talked to, that the older they got, the more they wanted to spend time outside in whatever way felt right for them, because that kept them plugged into, I dunno, a way of measuring and experiencing time that is just a lot more slowed down and a lot more present. And I think that’s something that all of us would benefit from because I think as we’re all aware like, today’s kind of obsession around technology, it speeds up time and it makes it this really linear process.
Katie (14:34):
Oh my gosh yes, the scrolling.
Grace (14:36):
I don’t think that benefits anyone.
Katie (14:38):
The Instagram rabbit hole, the endless scrolling. The notion of unplugging from our technology to plug back into ourselves is so key. We need to be better about practicing that, at least I do. In a minute we’re gonna take a quick break but when we come back I wanna hear if there’s a particular story that moved or inspired you the most in your collection of interviews.
[Ad break]
Katie (16:01):
Grace, we’re back from our break. I would love to hear what one, two, three stories moved or inspired you the most as you had all of these amazing conversations.
Grace (16:11):
Yes, I have so many.
Katie (16:13):
[laughs] I know it’s like asking you to pick a favorite child, I know it’s hard.
Grace (16:17):
But there were, there were several that stood out to me, primarily because they weren’t quite what I expected to hear and they also resonated with me in a way I hadn’t felt in myself before. And I think two of those were Betty Reid Soskin who was kind of America’s beloved and oldest park ranger and also an incredible chef and activist named Mahboubeh who is originally from Iran who now lives in the United States and who has worked in feminist journalism and kind of connecting the worlds of feminism with middle eastern activists and women and both of them discussed really transparently, the way that they tried to stay present with all of the past versions of themselves and to not look at them as versions of themselves they needed to be embarrassed of, or ashamed by, or glad they were no longer in, but instead to constantly reference those earlier selves in their daily dialogue.
And Mahboubeh in particular talked about really imaging every night as she sat down to dinner, having dinner at a round table with all the older versions of her selves and wondering what would they think of the decisions she’s making now? What would they think of where she is now? And to do that as kind of a form of appreciation and that really stuck with me ‘cause I think the way our culture approaches growth is from this like, Ah it must be an improvement, we must shed this older, less productive version of ourselves. And instead, she was like, No, no, no, no we need to hold onto those versions of ourselves because how else can we have appreciation for where we are now, what feels easy to us now that may have felt hard at an earlier stage of our life? And that really hit a chord with me because I think I’m in that place in life where I’m switching careers and doing something completely different and I felt a lot of shame, I felt a lot of imposter syndrome and both of those women really got me to slow down and have appreciation for all of the earlier versions of myself that, you know, they make me understand why I feel scared right now but to really be proud that I’m still doing the thing that makes me scared, that maybe an earlier version of myself wouldn’t have been able to sit there and push through that fear. And if I lose touch with that earlier version of myself, I won’t have an appreciation of just the basic steps that I’m getting through right now. So, Betty Reid Soskin and Mahboubeh, both of them really I’m so grateful for the time with them because it made me quite appreciative for the earlier versions of myself that I maybe used to be a little embarrassed of and now I just feel really proud of.
Katie (18:39):
That is so fascinating and such a generous way of treating yourself.
Grace (18:45):
Absolutely.
Katie (18:45):
To recognize that you’ve had sort of different iterations and lived different experiences and that one is not better than another and that they all contribute to make you who you are. So, this is actually a great segue into a question I wanted to ask you. Because I first learned about your writing because I followed you on an earlier career chapter which was Design*Sponge, many of our listeners might know that. It was a wildly popular interior design blog, you were really one of the OG bloggers and then you shattered Design*Sponge after 15 years. So, I would love to ask you, what makes you make that sort of pivot out of Design*Sponge, what is it that you’re doing now beyond writing? You mentioned that you felt a little trepidatious about a change that you were making. What else is going on with you and your career?
Grace (19:40):
Yeah, so I think like anything, I think that projects for better and worse these days are very much attached to the personality of the person who starts them. So, when I started Design*Sponge I was 23, fresh out of college, working at a job I did not like, and Design*Sponge was my respite from all of that and I get to talk about the things in my life that I was most interested in and that I wasn’t seeing in mainstream media and I was able to build, with the help of many other people, of course, a community that I felt at home in. But it was a community that I felt at home in as a 23-year-old and that’s a very different community that I needed at that age than I need now, at 40. So, as I evolved, as all people do over time, I became less interested in the things that meant a lot to me at 23 and I became a lot more interested in slightly more serious, more complicated, more intersectional issues. I just changed as a person and so, you know when I kind of looked at what I had built, which I was so proud of, I also recognized that at a certain point I no longer felt as connected to it. The industry was changing, the way that blogs are financially structured has completely been upended, which is fine, this is the nature of technology. And I think it took me years to kind of adjust to the fact that I think what felt authentic to me would no longer really mesh with what I needed to do to keep that business afloat.
So, over the course of about a year, I made that decision, I helped with my teammates, made sure they had safe, financial places to land at other websites and other magazines, and I just kind of pulled the cord at a time that felt like a good time to leave the party. Leave when it’s still fun and when you’re still enjoying it. I thought I would fall into something really easily, right away. And that there would be offers to go do something different and well-paying and great and none of that happened. And I’m really glad that it didn’t because I floundered for at least 2 years. I spent a year doing all the things I hadn’t had time to and taking these trips and started working on this book. But I just kind of assumed something would fall on my lap and it was a really important life lesson to realize, no, no, no, life doesn’t fall on your lap, it might seem that way, and I think that’s what privilege looks like, but I think in general you have to actively go out and pursue something that feels like what you want to do. And every part of me wanted to run back to the things that were familiar but I’m really glad that I hung in there and ended up applying for graduate school and I’m now in grad school studying to become a marriage and family therapist. That very much came from my love of being curious about people and wanting to ask questions and to listen and I’m really excited to be in this new chapter which terrifies me and is very hard and you know, a lot of my skills from Design*Sponge are able to transfer into this which is great, but it is like getting to know a totally different version of myself and I’m glad that I’m doing it but it took me a while to feel brave enough to do that.
Katie (22:40):
Congratulations, that’s so exciting. And I think, you know, it sounds like being brave has pointed you in a direction that is going to be such a great fit for you. When do you graduate and what do you hope to do with it? Do you want to have your own practice? Do you want to go work for somebody else? What’s your vision?
Grace (22:58):
You know, right now I’m totally open. School is 3 years so I should be done in 2023 and then you have to spend at least a year working toward licensure under somebody else. My initial thought was oh yes, I’m very clearly going to open my own practice and do something here in the Hudson Valley where I live. And I dunno, the deeper that I get into it, I love the research part of it, I’m kind of a researcher by nature and I still have an interest in seeing where mental health overlaps with creativity. And so, I’m not sure where I’ll end up. I could see myself working with a company that wants an in-house therapist who understands how creative teams work. So, I’m not quite sure, I like keeping things open and for the first time in my life, I am actually enjoying the fact that I don’t know what I will do because I have very much planned out everything for a long time and now I’m not doing that and I’m trying to learn to be uncomfortable with that unknowing because I know that’s kind of a useful skill to have in therapy but in life in general, so it’s one I’m working on and practicing.
Katie (23:58):
It’s such an important skill. The willingness to be uncomfortable is what, you know, what opens us up to the possibility of joy on the other side of an uncomfortable leap, or opens us up to new possibilities, new opportunities, new relationships, new people, all the good stuff.
Grace (24:16):
Absolutely.
Katie (24:16):
Everything that’s good is on the other side of maybe making yourself vulnerable. And I feel like the pandemic has kind of accelerated our ability to do that. We all had to kind of stare something very unknown in the face and move our way through that. So, congratulations to you, I’m excited, I’m excited about your new chapter. Grace, we’re gonna be wrapping up in a few minutes but I did want to do two things with you before our time runs out. I want to ask you a couple of the questions that you ask the women in the book because I love them all.
Grace (24:47):
[laughs] Sure.
Katie (24:48):
I would love to hear your answers, then we close with a speed round. So, I want to start by surfacing a couple of the questions that I really loved that you posed to your subjects. And the first one is, how has your sense of self-confidence or acceptance evolved over time?
Grace (25:06):
I think the way mine has evolved is moving beyond the idea of self-acceptance to self-love. I think as a queer person I spent years just trying to get to a place where I accepted myself and where other people accepted me. And then it really hit me I think a few years ago that acceptance isn’t enough, I need it to be love. And so, I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy, really working on that, and I think now in my forties, I’m recognizing that yes, acceptance is the bare minimum, that should be something you expect from the people that are a part of your lives, including yourself. And so now, I’m really focusing on what does self-love look like? And what does that look like without judgment and to not second guess that as you know, being too navel-gazey or something? I’m really trying to figure out how I cultivate self-love in my life right now.
Katie (25:56):
I love that, I love that. How has your idea of success changed over time?
Grace (26:01):
It’s gotten quite small [Katie laughs] which is good. Yeah, I think that contemporary society’s success is never enough, it’s bigger, wider audience, everything needs to be larger. And when I closed Design*Sponge one of my closest friends said like, Woah, what’s it gonna feel like when no one cares what you say? [laughs]
Katie (26:21):
And you’re like, don’t you care what I say?
Grace (26:24):
Yeah. And you know, I had a really immediate like, "Ugh, I don’t care response." And then I had a longer, slower response to that where I was like, "Hmm, am I going to care about that?" And I’ve realized that yes, there are obvious ways where stepping away from something that has a large platform affects your life, but for the most part, I’ve felt so much more fulfilled working in smaller circles and more intimate settings. And so I think for me, success has gotten a hell of a lot smaller and I’m really grateful for that because I think I had been quite biased defining success as something that had to be related to size in a way that it really does not need to be.
Katie (27:05):
It sounds a little bit like just shifting from external validation to internal validation. You get to choose what success looks like, you get to choose what makes you happy. And you know, your Instagram followers or the people that are clicking on certain headlines, don’t factor into that. That’s so… I think that’s so valuable for me to hear even from you because as I launch this podcast as I look to connect with women, I get so lit up when I get a DM or a message that says I love this show because of XYZ, or it connects with them and it makes me feel amazing. And sometimes I’ll look and be like, I wish I had more downloads. You get caught up in the things that are big, sweeping metrics versus the impact that it means to a particular listener. And I try to focus on that. So, I love this notion of choosing to prioritize small because those are the bigger more important things.
Grace (28:09):
Yeah, absolutely.
Katie (28:09):
So, the last question. Knowing what you know now, what would you go back and tell your younger self?
Grace (28:15):
It’s funny, I mean my answers when I think of this always go back to just being somebody who was closeted at a really young age. I would go back and tell myself to just be out. I think I realized I was queer when I was like in middle school and had a really not great reaction from family and community so that was a really difficult thing to kind of stomach and I think spending the better part of 30 years, or I guess 20 years of your life, you get exhausted. It wears down a lot of muscles, including the muscles it takes to develop who you really are and I think I’m kind of playing catch-up in that sense and I have a lot of healing to do around that. So, I think I would go back and tell myself to come out, it’s well worth the kind of immediate pain of it not being very popular to be gay when you’re young in exchange for just all of the years I could get back to enjoy my life and be myself a little bit earlier.
Katie (29:10):
That’s so beautiful Grace. I think we talked about it a little bit earlier that sometimes joy is on the other side of an uncomfortable leap and you know, to look back and to say to yourself, make that leap, happiness is on the other side of it. Thank you so much for sharing those answers to the questions that you asked all your subjects. I loved hearing it from the author and the curator herself. Okay, we’re gonna move onto our speed round before we end. So, this is a quick one or two-word answer that completes this sentence or this thought.
So, writing Collective Wisdom has taught me that aging is _____.
Grace (29:49):
A gift.
Katie (29:50):
My own aging process has given me this new superpower _____.
Grace (29:57):
Oh, that’s a hard one, I don’t know if I have any superpowers. I would say just presence, being present.
Katie (30:03):
Presence. The last new thing I learned or tried was _____.
Grace (30:08):
[laughs] TikTok filters.
Katie (30:10):
[laughs] You’re gonna have to teach me. My next creative project is _____.
Grace (30:17):
Myself. I think getting to know myself.
Katie (30:20):
My big audacious goal for the next decade is _____.
Grace (30:25):
To open a therapy practice that involves nature.
Katie (30:29):
All right, full steam ahead with that one. On weekends you will find me _____.
Grace (30:34):
Watching Below Deck.
Katie (30:36):
Finally, the book or podcast I rely on for creative inspiration is _____.
Grace (30:42):
Right now, Disability Visibility by Alice Wong, which is a collection of stories of people from the disabled community. I think that all justice is rooted in disability justice these days, so that’s my go-to.
Katie (30:54):
Fantastic. And I know that she’s one of the profiles in your book. I’ll put all of those resources into the show notes. Grace, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about Collective Wisdom: Lessons, Inspiration, and Advice for Women Over 50. Before we say goodbye, how can our listeners find you and keep following your work and writing and learn about other books or perhaps other creative projects?
Grace (31:17):
Absolutely. So, my last little online home is Instagram and it’s @designsponge. And it sounds like a general feed but it’s just me.
Katie (31:24):
Thank you, Grace. This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women who are waging without apology. And this wraps our November shows and our month-long focus on the magic of women coming together.
Missed a show? We kicked off the month with nutrition pro and wellness blogger Rachel Hughes of the Meno Memos. Nina Lorez Collins of the Woolfer and Revel came on to talk about re-imagining midlife. Networking pro Susan McPherson walked us through The Lost Art of Connecting and how to build meaningful relationships in your career and personal life. And nonprofit leader Trish Tierney gave us ideas for how to find purpose and volunteer in support of social justice organizations. Join me next Monday when we kick off a month of conversations on celebrating and joy.
Special thanks to Michael Mancini who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time, and until then: age boldly, beauties.