1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
 I’m trained as both an artist (writer) and a cultural critic. I started studying
and writing about aging in my undergraduate creative writing classes at
Colorado College. People often ask me how I got interested in aging – as
though it’s a strange obsession. I think it’s perfectly normal for a young
person to think about things like the meaning and limits of life. But I do try
to give an honest answer. As best I can figure (and my parents confirm), I was
a kid who got along better with adults – which means I probably didn’t have
many friends my own age. During my junior high school years I took art classes outside of school and most of the other
students were retired people. My grandmother and I were very close as well. When I was in college I spent a month in
Chicago studying Shakespeare at the Newberry Library. While I hung out with my fellow students at the blues bars, I also
relished the company of my grandmother’s best friend. We had a fabulous time going out for dinner and drinking strawberry
daiquiris.
All of my graduate studies (University of Wisconsin-
Madison and University of Minnesota) focused on social
performance of aging. I also kept writing and producing
plays during those five years.
Currently I am the director of the Center on Age and
Community, and associate professor of Theatre at the Peck
School of the Arts, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I
now live in Milwaukee with my two boys, Ben, age 6, and
Will, age 3, and my husband Brad Lichtenstein, who is a
documentary filmmaker, and a reluctant transplant from
New York. We still own our house in Brooklyn’s Lefferts
Manor.
2. What motivated you to apply your talent and training to
working with people with Alzheimer’s disease and related
dementias?
After graduating with my Ph.D., I was lucky to receive a
Rockefeller Fellowship to turn my dissertation into a book.
This became, in 1998, The Stages of Age: Performing Age in
Contemporary American Culture. It basically says that playing
a new role (quite literally on stage, or in everyday life) can
change the prevailing attitudes about aging – that aging necessarily
entails a growing rigidity, decline, or inability to
change. I started getting interested in whether people with
dementia could experience the same transformation
through performance that healthy older adults clearly did.
And that’s when I started experimenting with the role of
artist and storyteller for people with dementia.
3. You have achieved considerable recognition for your
very creative TimeSlips program. Can you briefly describe
this program and tell us what inspired its development?
Thank you for saying so…it’s hard to believe that the
project started 10 years ago and today it has 11 training bases
across the country. TimeSlips was born out of frustration. I
was volunteering at a nursing home to see if some of the
creative drama exercises that clearly benefited cognitively
healthy older adults could benefit people with cognitive
disabilities. I tried lots of reminiscence-type of exercises and
nothing was working. It was a very rough scenario though
– a chaotic day room and people who were clearly, shall we
say, pharmaceutically restrained. I’d been trying to make
something work, to play with the group a bit, for six weeks
and nothing was happening. One day I decided to drop all
reference to memory and see if they responded better to
making things up. I brought in an image and asked them to
make up a new story together. To my great shock (and the
staff ’s as well I should add), we told an elaborate story for
about 40 minutes. We sang and laughed. Clearly, they were transformed by the role of storyteller – not of individual
memories, but of a shared effort at weaving a new tale from
their collective imaginations. After that day, I just kept
trying to replicate the magic of that first session. And I’ve
been trying to replicate it, and teach others to do the same,
for 10 years now.
4. How did you become involved with StoryCorps and the
Memory Loss Initiative? Do you see a connection between
the goals of TimeSlips and this program?
The second I heard about the StoryCorps project, I called
the founder, Dave Isay, and asked him if he was training his
facilitators to understand memory loss – because surely,
people who feel their memories threatened would be eager,
if not first in line, to capture them on disc. The idea for
StoryCorps was so simple, so brilliant, so needed, that it has
swept away Isay into one of the fastest growing non-profits
in the country. He couldn’t entertain the issue of memory
loss in 2003 – too much was happening. But in 2005, we
talked again. He had a potential funder who was interested
in addressing memory loss. And we wrote a proposal to do
a pilot year – training StoryCorps facilitators, creating guidelines
for memory loss interviews, and reaching out to
people with memory loss to encourage them to try
StoryCorps. It’s a fantastic project. TimeSlips is more
focused on the imagination, and on group storytelling, but
many of the same communication techniques are at the core
of both programs. Both programs are eager to share the
stories that emerge to raise awareness about the creativity,
humanity, and capacity of people with dementia.
5. Based on your successful experience with creative
pursuits for people with progressive memory disorders, is
there any message you have for the audience who will be
attending the 8th Annual Early-Stage Memory Disorders
Forum? Would you encourage people to find a way to
preserve their life stories?
When people hear the word “dementia,” they think
decline and loss. They don’t tend to think of growth. The
last 10 years of my life have been spent trying to teach
people that growth and loss aren’t mutually exclusive.
Dementia certainly entails some loss of ability with language,
even in the early stage, but there are so many other ways to
express one’s self. Creativity and the arts can open up a
whole new world to people with a progressive memory
disorder. They offer a way to make meaning, leave legacy,
and connect with friends, care partners, and future
generations. They offer a way to grow.
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