Elderware: Story Work and Aging in the Mid-21st Century
A podcast, newsletter, and emerging book
The inquiry
I began this project with a detective's hunch and a teacher's habit: that the story of aging in the next twenty-five years would be shaped as much by technology as by biology, and that the people best positioned to think about it were the ones actually living it — elders, caregivers, researchers, practitioners, and the occasional crank with forty years in the field.
Elderware is that inquiry made public. Part research project, part ongoing conversation, part slow accumulation toward a book. Each episode and article circles the same set of questions: What does it mean to grow old with voice intact? What do emerging technologies — AI companions, predictive care systems, digital archives — do to the experience of aging, and to the stories we tell about it? And what does story work, practiced with care, have to offer a world that is getting older faster than it knows how to handle?
The form
Elderware lives in two places. The article series on Ghost publishes essays, reflections, and reported pieces — longer-form thinking that doesn't fit the pace of social media. The podcast is a series of conversations with researchers, practitioners, artists, caregivers, and elders themselves. Not interviews in the conventional sense — more like the kind of exchange you have when two people who've both been thinking about something for a long time finally sit down together.
Guests have included Peter Whitehouse on story, memory and our place in the world, Stephen Katz on the culture of aging, William Randall on Narrative Gerontology, Gary Glazner on the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, Anne Basting on imagination and dementia care, and some 15 others whose names you may not know but whose work is shaping what aging looks like in the institutions and communities around you. New episodes every month.
Where it's going
20 conversations, and 25 articles in. One book taking shape.
The book — working title Story, Aging, and the Art of Making Meaning — will draw on the interviews, the research, and forty years of story work to make an argument about what we owe each other's stories as we age, and what tools and practices might help us honor that obligation in an era of algorithmic everything.
Expected: summer 2026.
