Vaboomer -- Baby Boomer Views & News

And Our Book and Company Make Two!

If you are in Copper Harbour, Mich, on August 2, join us for a talk and signing

For Immediate Release

For more information contact Lloyd Wescoat at Grandpa’s Barn Bookstore (906) 289-4377.

 

What is a creative partnership?

Thimbleberry Press founders discuss their creative publishing partnership.

Laura Smyth, designer, poet and publisher of Thimbleberry Press, and Virginia Cornue, author, cultural anthropologist and executive editor of Thimbleberry Press will discuss their creative collaborations in making books and founding their publishing company at Grandpa’s Barn Bookstore on

South Fourth Street in 

Copper Harbor,  Sunday, August 2nd at 7:00 p.m.

Smyth and Cornue will talk about how they created Thimbleberry Press and collaborated on The Dragon’s Daughters Return (2007) and Draw On Culture: Little Friends Around the World (2009).

“When you’re at our kitchen table anything can happen...and it did. We founded a publishing company and mapped out our first book, The Dragon’s Daughters Return, all over dinner,” said Smyth. “But we didn’t do it completely on our own—

China was a big help, too!”

While on a heritage visit to China with her daughter in July 2006, Cornue developed the idea for the first book the two would create together. As an adoptive parent and a China scholar who had spent a great deal of time in China in the 1990s, Cornue secured the cooperation of senior Chinese officials for the printing and shipping of The Dragon’s Daughters, and unbeknownst to Smyth, volunteered her design services as well.

“We started the book before we started the company, but both were realities within six months,” said Cornue.

Some of the topics to be discussed at the August 2^nd book talk include:

• creating a vision / creating the reality

• complementary talents /  complimenting talents

• keeping a sense of humor / keeping the sky as the limit.

A Q & A and book signing will follow.

To find out more about Thimbleberry Press and their current and upcoming publications visit the website at http://www.thimbleberrypress.com or the blog at Thimbleberry Press Blog.

Thimbleberry Press,  P.O. Box 162, Copper City, MI  49917

Phone:  (906) 934-2050

Also on Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/krhl8c and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thimbleberryprs.

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Positive Aging: Enacting it, Thinking It, Being It , Feeling It

Positive Aging Approach: a key aspect of reFIREMENT

Beginning series on positive aging

Looking forward in all senses of the word is central to positive aging http://centerforpositiveaging.org/.

And aging is what we boomers are doing--whether we like it or not. But liking it is what we do if we are to have a positive experience of aging.

How do we like aging in youth obsessed America? What measures can we take to counter the hostility and fear about aging that is rampent in our culture--and which is itself really only a mask and defense about fear of vulnerability, aloneness and ultimately death.

There are the beginnings of a change in consciousness about aging and for that  I am grateful. Indeed I think we all need to be grateful for this incipient change, as surely and with certainty more and more of us will enter that territory of aging.

How then can we make our reFIREMENT years positive ones?

 (more...)

In Praise of Paper Newspapers and the Internet: Celebration #10

The necessity of paper newspapers

Newspapers are tanking http://media.www.dailyillini.com/media/storage/paper736/news/2008/12/11/OpinionColumns/List-Of.Bankrupt.Newspapers.Grows-3577677.shtml ,http://brighthall.aol.com/2008/12/08/newspapers-going-under-bailout-unlikely/ in this economy, while Boomers are starting to use teen-oriented  social networking sites such as Facebook, more and more. I love paper newspapers. And Iove my computer and the internet as well. I'll soon have a Facebook site. My teen has offered to show me how to set one up.

Many uses of paper newspaper

With the democratization of media, post-modern and deconstrutionist analysis taught in the academy, (as I have done), and globalization, technologies like paper newspapers are old-fashioned. But to me the paper format has its special and unique characteristics. You can fold it up and carry it.You can wrap your sandwiches in it and drain bacon on it. You can use it as mulch in your garden, as I do. You can wrap presents with it and crumple it as packing material. If you clip an article, you might discover an even more interesting article on its reverse.

But best of all you can read it walking, sitting, on the train, plane, and bus. You can flip through it, and read several stories at the same time. You can forage through a paper, like browsing library shelves. Reading a paper newspaper is a mobile, whole brain, fully sensate experience. And then of course there is the trustworthiness of the reporting.

Hooray for the internet for Boomers

Yet, the internet offers some amazing advantages that paper newspapers can never do. Blogs such as this one give their  mostly amateur writers a channel for expression that is unriveled. But I do not pretend that it is more than it is. I have my voice, a certain level of knowledge in particular areas, and good research skills. Hopefully this blog is helpful and interesting. But in some fundamental ways, blogs can never substitute for paper newspapers, even those that are as good as www.huffingtonpost.com.

Retired and refiring on the internet

While younger readers turn more and more to the internet for knowledge and information, we older readers are turning more and more to it for socializing. Retired and Wired today on RLTV http://www.rl.tv/shows/Retired-and-Wired/  pointed to more Boomers gaining familarity with social networking sites like Facebook and My Space, a trend that gives the creeps  to some teens. But as younger boomers come to retirement age, what ever and when ever that will be, more and more of them will already have the computing skills and the comfort to fully use all forms of technology.

I just hope that we can keep paper news alive as well as connecting with the web.