ElderWare: Story Work and Aging in the mid-21st Century

My guest is Xanthe Golenko, an Australian researcher, practitioner, and now storytelling facilitator based in France. Xanthe came to this work through an unlikely path — nine years as a professional dancer, a detour into business and healthcare research, a PhD in organizational culture in public hospitals, and then a fateful introduction to intergenerational practice that, as she puts it, just hooked her. What she witnessed — the bonds, the joy, the transformation in people who had been reduced to a diagnosis or a room number — changed the direction of her professional life.

Dr. Pia Kontos is a senior scientist at the KITE Research Institute at the University of Toronto, and her life's work is challenging the idea that dementia means the self is gone. Drawing on embodiment theory, she argues that agency, humor, creativity, and relationship persist through the body even in severe cognitive impairment — and she builds the evidence for that argument through documentary film, research-based theater, and dance programs that put people living with dementia at the center of their own stories.

Kinde Nebeker is a rites of passage guide based in Castle Valley, Utah — out near Moab, which is about as magic a piece of geography as this earth has to offer. She trained in transpersonal psychology at Naropa University, and has spent decades guiding people through vision fasts rooted in indigenous ceremony, stripped of cultural appropriation, but full of the original medicine: solitude, fasting, land, story, and deep listening.This conversation went places I didn't expect. It usually does when someone knows what they're talking about.

Lindsay Beagley is the Senior Director of Lifelong University Engagement at Arizona State University, and she's been quietly dismantling that model from the inside. Her work centers on Mirabella at ASU — a continuing care retirement community built right on the Tempe campus — where residents take classes, mentor students, advise startups, and participate in the full life of the university. Not as guests. As members.But Lindsay's story goes back further than Mirabella — back to a Peace Corps posting in Honduras, where she encountered something most Americans have never experienced: a society where older people were simply... present.This is a conversation about what we lost, and what it might look like to build it back.

Anne Basting is a writer, artist and advocate for the power of creativity to change lives and transform systems. She is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Founder of the award-winning non-profit TimeSlips.org, which inspires and supports the integration of creativity and meaning-making into care systems. In this conversation, Anne walks us through the methodology she's been tumbling and refining ever since, built around her concept of a "beautiful question," and how that shapes what "story facilitation" actually looks like in her organization's practice.

e were promised that social media would make life richer, more connected, more humane. And sometimes it has. But many older adults have also experienced something else: platforms that feel harder over time, feeds drifting from friends toward ads and outrage, tools that seem to decline just as we hope they might deepen.So what’s really happening there? And what does it mean for belonging, memory, and story?I’m joined by Kelly Quinn, Clinical Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research explores how older adults engage with social media, data-driven systems, and digital privacy, beginning not from assumptions of decline, but from lived experience and curiosity.

Just Joe looking back on the Elderware's first 14 weeks of interviews and articles.

Stormy and I talk about care and technology—the uses and misuses of AI already threading through clinics and living rooms. Predictive systems help with patterns and logistics; generative systems promise companionship and language scaffolding. But Stormy keeps us honest: these tools must support relationship, not replace it. The chatbot is endlessly patient—and a little too eager to please—which can nudge us toward “frictionless” exchange and away from the brave work of being with one another.

I speak with my old friend Wayne Goodrich— once upon a time, the quiet maestro behind the spectacle of Steve Jobs onstage. We go way back—to the Joe’s Digital Diner days in San Francisco, but for more than two decades across NeXT, Pixar, and Apple, Wayne produced the keynotes that became our collective campfire: product stories told with rigor, restraint, and a touch of theater.We talk about what’s next: the human side of emerging tech, from spatial audio to assistive robotics, and the health-span tools older adults actually need—less hype, more coherence. Wayne’s career has always been a bridge: translating fragility into reliability, complexity into experience, ambition into a live moment that lands.

Tim teaches at a small theological school in Ohio where his classroom spills into fields and wetlands. He helped launch a campus farm that feeds the dining hall and a 150-family CSA, tying soil to spirit, dinner to dignity. He names his work “ecological theology,” asking why, if this Earth is our only home, we so often treat it like a disposable container.Our conversation wanders the way good pilgrimages do. We ask whether technology can be a lantern rather than a lure, and if story work—writing it, voicing it, listening to it again and again—functions as spiritual practice in a secular age. We talk about using emerging tools, even AI, as instruments of attention rather than distraction—craft for wisdom, not noise.

Jim Winship is a long time friend of StoryCenter. He spent several decades at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater teaching social work and building bridges between campus and community. He was deeply impacted by his work in Latin America, and he and his son developed a documentary about the role of food banks in rural Wisconsin during the pandemic, https://vimeo.com/735268763?fl=pl&fe=vl. In our conversation you'll hear the humility of an East Tennessee kid that grew up and listened to the stories around him, and like me, became convinced story work is as essential as bread.

Sara Orem has been practicing an answer in community for a long while. She came to teaching through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute—OLLI for the initiated—after a late-life doctorate just shy of sixty, proof that curiosity has no mandatory retirement age.Sara’s path wanders through gratitude, mindfulness, and joy—not as slogans, but as steady practices, the kind you take up with neighbors and keep returning to when the world tilts. Her classes draw from the Greater Good Science Center and the mindful provocations of Ellen Langer in dialogue with Buddhist perspectives. Listen in as we talk about life writing and writing through the fade.

Dr. Tricia Jenkins, has been doing digital storytelling with older adults for over a decade, co-running this organization called Digitales. Digitales has trained hundreds of facilitators across Europe. But what really gets me is that story work with seniors isn't just a professional calling for her, it is deeply felt.She watched her own parents navigate dementia, and as she put it to me, she was "appalled by the lack of agency that older people have." So she did what any of us who've been touched by this work might do - she made it personal. Dedicated her PhD research to understanding how digital storytelling can help older adults reframe their lives and reclaim their voices.The stories she shared with me... working in assisted living facilities when residents suddenly discover each other's remarkable histories for the first time - touches me deeply.

Today's episode is a talk with Mark Silver—social worker, longtime co-coordinator of the Wellbeing Clinic for Older Adults at Swinburne, and one of the steady hands shaping intergenerational story work in Australia. Mark helped found PADSIP back in 2007—the Positive Ageing Digital Storytelling Intergenerational Program—which pairs older adults with students to co-create short, first-person digital stories. What began in Melbourne has since popped up with community groups, schools, and aged-care homes across the city and out into regional Victoria. It’s simple on the surface—two people trading life experience and media skills—but the outcomes are big: belonging, respect, and a little more light in the room for everyone. 

Mary Ann Schultz has spent 50 years in nursing—from her start as a staff nurse in Youngstown to leadership roles in university hospitals and a department chairship at Cal State San Bernardino—and in her encore career she’s become a clear-eyed voice in nursing informatics and precision health. She brings the receipts: peer-reviewed work on precision medicine and a recent gubernatorial appointment advising California’s Institute to Advance Precision Medicine.In our conversation, she brings precision health down to ground level: the bracelet that notices a gait change before a diagnosis; ambient listening that frees a clinician’s hands to touch an elbow and make eye contact; and the stubborn realities of aging alone, where a fall can turn into a night on the floor unless our networks—kin, neighbors, and yes, the bots—are invited to help. This is story work for urgent times: designing care so the data serves the dignity.

today I'm talking with Gary Glazner, founder and executive director of the Alzheimer's Poetry Project.Gary has spent over 25 years developing and teaching a revolutionary approach to working with people living with dementia—using the power of poetry to create moments of connection, joy, and creative expression. What started as a simple observation in an adult day program in Northern California has grown into a movement that's reached 36 states and 10 countries.

We have reached the point now where discussing the use of companion bots in support of aging adults is no longer science fiction, but a burgeoning billion dollar industry. The ethics of machines acting as support personnel seem fraught with disaster. But rather than run the other direction, I thought I would go to the source. So this interview is with someone with a true insider's perspective.

Dr. Janet Ferguson spent nearly a decade as Executive Director of the Lifelong Learning Centre in Bermuda, and continues to work with groups like  the National Museum of Bermuda and others, and extends her work around the world with educational institutions and community educators  in the UK, the US, and her native Caribbean communities. 

Dr. William "Bill" Randall is Professor Emeritus of Gerontology at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada, and one of the pioneering voices behind "narrative gerontology." Bill has spent three decades helping us understand that aging isn't just about biology and managing decline – it's about the rich, evolving stories we tell about our lives, and how those stories can transform our experience of growing older.

This week you get to listen in to my conversation with Stephen Katz, one of the most influential voices in aging studies - Stephen is now retired as a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, but remains active in countless projects.  He has been described as one of the leading thinkers in the gerontology field, internationally renowned for his contributions to the global sociology of aging.  And spending an hour with him, I felt the sweep of his understanding of the issues we all face as humans getting older.

In this week's episode, I'll chat with my old friend Dr. Peter Whitehouse. I don't know many neurologists. But he was one that also was an ongoing part of my digital storytelling and creative writing workshops and efforts. In hanging around with him at Case Western University where he taught, and working with him in my workshop contexts I learned he was a leading figure in the field of memory, and in particular dementia. He seemed like a perfect place to start talking about how our understanding of story's role in the aging process might evolve, and what role if any, technology might play in this work.

Elderware is both a detective tale as a research project. As the founder of StoryCenter, some 30+ years after evolving the participatory media method known as Digital Storytelling into an international community of story workers, I am taking my experience into the discussion of what might story and media technology might become by the middle of this century. A mix of interviews with various experts, my own experimentation, and discussions about the way popular culture imagined aging in the age of thinking machines, I hope it'll extend my conversation to the larger community of people working in story, from oral history, creative writing, personal photography, audio and video creation as a form of inquiry and reflection, for both personal and social transformation.