Dancing with the Muse in Old Age: An Evening With Priscilla Long

Folio is delighted to invite you to an in-person reception and evening with Seattle author and poet, Priscilla Long, celebrating the launch of her new book Dancing with the Muse in Old Age.

Dancing with the Muse in Old Age is a book about thriving in old age. While focusing on creative engagement, it is for everyone who is aging. It reflects the new ways of looking at old age as a potentially dynamic, happy, and productive time. It reviews the science on aging that shows that negative views of aging can actually cause decline. The book opposes ageism and reports the evidence that old age can be a time of great happiness. It challenges the widespread notion that “peak ages of creativity” are 39 to 42. It challenges the notion that the burgeoning number of elders, the so-called “gray tsunami,” will drag down the economy (in fact, we are holding up the economy). A chapter titled “Brilliant Old Brains” provides lifestyle guidelines that do not guarantee but do influence your chances of growing into a deeply satisfying old age. The book explores the old-age time of life of more than one-hundred dynamic elders—mostly but not entirely creators in the arts, both well-known and little known, both able-bodied and disabled. Their inspiring stories model for us all how to live in old age. The sections, “Composing Our Lives: Old Age” at the end of each chapter will help readers consider and better plan for a satisfying old age. 

Priscilla Long is a Seattle-based writer of science, poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and history, and a longtime independent teacher of writing. Her most recent book, Holy Magic (MoonPath Press), won the Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award. Her guidebook for creators of all kinds is Minding the Muse (Epicenter/Coffeetown). Her how-to-write guide is The Writer's Portable Mentor (University of New Mexico Press. Among her awards is a National Magazine Award for a science-oriented feature. Her book of memoirist creative nonfictions is Fire and Stone: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (University of Georgia Press). Christopher Hitchens called her first book, a history of coalmining titled Where the Sun Never Shines, “an intense and accomplished social history” (New York Newsday). She is founding and consulting editor of HistoryLink.org, the free online encyclopedia of Washington state history.