Growing old doesn't have to be seen as an eventual failure but rather as an important developmental stage of creativity. Offering an absorbing and fresh perspective on aging and crafts, Jon Kay explores how elders choose to tap into their creative and personal potential through making life-story objects. Carving, painting, and rug hooking not only help seniors to cope with the ailments of aging and loneliness but also to achieve greater satisfaction with their lives. Whether revived from childhood memories or inspired by their capacity to connect to others, meaningful memory projects serve as a lens for focusing on, remaking, and sharing the long-ago. These activities often help elders productively fill the hours after they have raised their children, retired from their jobs, and/or lost a loved one. These individuals forge new identities for themselves that do not erase their earlier lives but build on them and new lives that include sharing scenes and stories from their memories.
"An approachable and valuable book... a masterful assessment of the relationship between folk art and the construction of personal narratives, in this case among a selection of elderly individuals from Indiana."
Daniel C. Swan, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma
"A very important contribution to scholarship in folklife, material culture studies, and gerontology studies.... an imminently readable book.... This is the first book I know of that so carefully first renders specific portraits of older artists, then sensitively and acutely analyzes how the construction and sharing of their work realizes this meaning making."
Marsha MacDowell, Professor of Art History at Michigan State University
