After a two year hiatus, Reframe Your Life is back. It took a special guest to get me to record another episode. Ann Douglas was Canada's go-to expert on all things parenting for decades. Now that her kids have grown up and left home, she's turning her attention to the glorious messiness that is midlife.

And she hasn't just been researching it; she's been living it: trying to find her way through all that messiness-career curveballs, mental and physical health challenges, a house fire, relationship highs and lows, the death of a parent, and so on.

Ann is the author of twenty-five non-fiction books, including many bestselling titles in the parenting category, such as The Mother of All® series, and a passionate and inspiring speaker who delivers keynote addresses and leads small-group workshops at conferences & online events.

The book recommended in this episode:  One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle (affiliate link)

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We had a great time talking to Cait Flanders author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Year of Less. It may seem like an odd time to publish a book about opting out and yet, as we discovered, this is the perfect time to get serious about leading an intentional life.

Find out more about Cait here. Follow on IG @caitflanders

Find out more about Sandy here. Follow on IG @sandyareynolds 

Find out more about Patti here. Follow IG @pattimhall

About the book:

It has long been thought that artistic output declines in old age. When Emily Urquhart and her family celebrated the eightieth birthday of her father, the illustrious painter Tony Urquhart, she found it remarkable that, although his pace had slowed, he was continuing his daily art practice of drawing, painting, and constructing large-scale sculptures, and was even innovating his style. Was he defying the odds, or is it possible that some assumptions about the elderly are flat-out wrong? After all, many well-known visual artists completed their best work in the last decade of their lives, Turner, Monet, and Cézanne among them. With the eye of a memoirist and the curiosity of a journalist, Urquhart began an investigation into late-stage creativity, asking: Is it possible that our best work is ahead of us? Is there an expiry date on creativity? Do we ever really know when we’ve done anything for the last time?

The Age of Creativity is a graceful, intimate blend of research on ageing and creativity, including on progressive senior-led organizations, such as a home for elderly theatre performers and a gallery in New York City that only represents artists over sixty, and her experiences living and travelling with her father. Emily Urquhart reveals how creative work, both amateur and professional, sustains people in the third act of their lives, and tells a new story about the possibilities of elder-hood.

Art crashes into life for author Erica Cantley when she finds herself behind a podium in front of a class of high school seniors, teaching HAMLET as her father died, thousands of miles to the south in Costa Rica.

Interspersing interactions with her teenage students and memories of her father, desperately sick and difficult to reach in his adopted jungle home, Cantley guides her students through HAMLET -- written four centuries ago -- while reflecting upon the impending loss of a parent in the never-ending now.

The result is a powerful memoir of a love that will not die, the timeless story of the bond between parent and child, the magic created by a gifted teacher and willing pupils, and finally, the exploration of the timeless themes of HAMLET, the study in the transition of power through the generations.

For those of you who aren't acquainted with Hamlet - don't let that deter you from this book or podcast.  The themes in this book and discussion are themes we can all relate to in our lives. 

For more on Erica visit her website. 

And your cohosts can be found here:  Sandy Reynolds and Patti M. Hall

This week on Reframe Your Life we interview award-winning producer Michelle Parise about her book Alone: A Love Story. This memoir is about falling in love, the fallout of infidelity, and everything messy in between — and the inspiration behind the hit CBC podcast. Parise has worked for CBC Radio and Television for over two decades. She was born and raised in Toronto in a gigantic Italian immigrant family.

Our guest this week  is Anne Bokma . She is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of My Year of Living Spiritually: From Woo-Woo to Wonderful—One Woman's Secular Quest for a More Soulful Life published by Douglas & McIntyre in October 2019.

A leading expert on North America's 80-million strong "spiritual-but-not-religious" demographic, Anne was the award-winning "Spiritual But Secular" columnist for the United Church Observer (now Broadview) for four years before writing her popular My Year of Living Spiritually blog for the magazine.

Anne also leads workshops and gives presentations on topics relating to spirituality and writing, including how she left a fundamentalist religion, the importance of finding community, how to live a more soulful life and what it takes to tell a good story. She is the founder of the 6-Minute Memoir “Speed Storytelling For a Cause” event, which features storytellers sharing tales on a common theme within a strict six-minute time limit. The event has raised more than $45,000 for local charities in her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, since 2013.

You can find our more about Anne at her website here.

In this episode we talked about some of the challenges of losing your religion. A big part of the struggle is disappointing people. Sandy offers a free PDF course for anyone who needs to find the courage to end people-pleasing in their life. You can find it at her website https://www.sandyreynolds.com

And if you want to get support in writing a memoir you've been working on, reach out to Patti M. Hall

An unexpected and belated mid-life love affair with birds and nature and finally discovering one’s place in the world – Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder illuminates the joyful experience of a new discovery and the surprising pleasure to be found while standing still on the edge of a lake at six a.m.

When Julia Zarankin saw her first red-winged blackbird at the age of thirty-five, she didn’t expect that it would change her life. Recently divorced and auditioning hobbies during a stressful career transition, she stumbled on birdwatching, initially out of curiosity for the strange breed of humans who wear multi-pocketed vests, carry spotting scopes and discuss the finer points of optics with disturbing fervour. What she never could have predicted was that she would become one of them. Not only would she come to identify proudly as a birder, but birding would ultimately lead her to find love, uncover a new language and lay down her roots.

For books that have inspired Julia Zarankin read her article here: https://lithub.com/the-accidental-hobby-on-the-books-that-made-me-a-birder/

Christa Couture reframes the experience of loss for us in her beautiful memoir, How to Lose Everything.  In this interview we talk about the questions she gets asked most frequently, her story of loss and the writing process. 

Synopsis of her book: 

From the amputation of her leg as a cure for bone cancer at a young age to her first child’s single day of life, the heart transplant and subsequent death of her second child, the divorce born of grief and then the thyroidectomy that threatened her career as a professional musician, How to Lose Everything delves into the heart of loss. Couture bears witness to the shift in perspective that comes with loss, and how it can deepen compassion for others, expand understanding, inspire a letting go of little things and plant a deeper feeling for what matters. At the same time, Couture’s writing evokes the joy and lightness that both precede and eventually follow grief, as well as the hope and resilience that grow from connections with others.

Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Couture explores the emotional and psychological experiences of motherhood, partnership and change. Deftly connecting the dots of sorrow, reprieve and hard-won hope, How to Lose Everything contains the advice Couture is often asked for, as well as the words she wishes she could have heard many years ago. It is also an offering of kinship and understanding for anyone experiencing a loss.”

You can find out more about Christa at her website.

If you have started on your memoir but need help shaping it and getting it ready for publication, Patti M. Hall can coach you through this critical stage. Contact Patti here.  

Find out more about Sandy's work with chronic people-pleasers at her website and get started Disappointing More People.