The Vintage Years: Finding Your Inner Artist (Writer, Musician, Visual Artist) After Sixty

...Toder s scientific acumen and the inspiration of these exceptional yet everyday elders will be sure to kick-start readers explorations of their own late-in-the-game creative potential. --Publisher's Weekly

...as its title suggests, the savor of fine wine. The Vintage Years is a brew to be sipped slowly and with appreciation; Toder brings a noticing eye to these portraits, and her gallery of 'Inner Artists&' is a pleasure to survey. --Nicholas Delbanco, Professor of English, The University of Michigan and author of Lastingness: The Art of Old Age

The Vintage Years provides us with a vision of the future and ways to get there that are positive, practical, and make the future something to look forward to. --Louis Cozolino, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Pepperdine University and author of The Healthy Aging Brain

If you ever wonder what it would feel like to play a musical instrument, write a play, or paint a landscape but thought you were too old, think again. The Vintage Years, described by psychologist/author Francine Toder, Ph.D. as the life-stage beginning around sixty years of age, opens a window into new choices and life-styles. Most of life's external demands recede enough by the beginning of this decade to make space and time for passion and pastimes not possible before. Toder explains why it is the perfect time-frame to express yourself through the visual arts, writing, or music. The brain also benefits from these challenges, defying the changes that can occur with the passage of time. What's more, natural changes in the brain and hormonal functioning as we age actually seem to facilitate learning the fine arts. Toder delves into the latest brain science findings in everyday terms while opening a window into the lives of more than twenty late-blooming artists, men and women like you, who took up a cello, or watercolor painting, or memoir writing for the first time after they turned sixty. Some were led by curiosity, others by realizing a previously unmet dream. Regardless of whether or not you are working, your financial, geographical, or other life circumstances, read how to increase your pleasure and satisfy your search for a new adventure.* Become inspired.* Learn how to incorporate the practice of an art form into your own life.* Understand why it wasn't likely to happen before this moment. * Make it happen now.

Francine Toder, Ph.D., is an emeritus faculty member of California State University Sacramento and is a clinical psychologist recently retired from private practice. She is also the author of When Your Child Is Gone: Learning to Live Again (Ballantine, 1986) and Your Kids Are Grown: Moving On With and Without Them (Plenum Press, 1996) both critically acclaimed. Her extensive writing on diverse topics has appeared in magazines, professional journals, and edited-book chapters. She and her book were quoted in a New York Times article (3/12/14) titled: New Worlds Open at the Artist's Easel. She resides with her husband in the San Francisco Bay Area where she practices the cello daily.