Aging With Power

Interviews with amazing people who are reimagining the journey of aging. Lively adventurers chatting about their journeys, from fabulous milestones to quirky moments that made them who they are today! And what they are planning to do tomorrow. Whether it’s sharing the tales of your first gray hair or the wisdom . earned over the years, let your personality shine. Each story is a spark in a magnificent tapestry of life!

After years of globe trotting with her late husband, Emily Clark is stepping into solo travel with humor, courage, and her own compass—reminding us that a new chapter can start anywhere on the map. Emily Clark may not be a celebrity, but in this conversation she embodies exactly what it means to age with power. A former journalist, Pan Am flight attendant, and lifelong wanderer, Emily shares how curiosity, humor, and a stubborn refusal to sit still have shaped her life. From writing about civil rights in Mississippi in the 1960s to navigating newsrooms in San Francisco, her story reveals how an early hunger to see the world—and to understand it—never really left her. Travel is Emily’s great throughline. She tells the unlikely tale of winning far more money than she was owed on a quiz show, calling to correct the error, and ending up with a five‑and‑a‑half‑month trip around the world instead—tickets for her and her boyfriend included. That same mix of integrity, serendipity, and boldness has carried into her later years. After a lifetime of adventures with her late husband, Emily is now embracing solo travel, from whale‑watching in the Azores to small‑group trips in Portugal, and soon, a journey to Malaysia and Borneo in search of birds, orangutans, and new stories. Along the way, Emily doesn’t romanticize travel; she acknowledges the anxieties, mishaps, and genuinely scary moments—a soldier with a gun at a Turkish hot spring, long airport delays, and the ever‑shifting logistics of getting from here to there. But for her, these are not reasons to stay home. They’re reminders that “stuff happens,” and that flexibility, a sense of humor, and a willingness to say “yes” are what turn trips into lasting memories. Above all, Emily offers a gentle but firm challenge to those who think they’re “too old” or “too alone” to venture out. She urges would‑be travelers to start with small groups, consider volunteer or immersive experiences, and, if possible, invest in a bit of comfort on long flights. In what she calls the “final fifth” of life, Emily is choosing exploration over retreat, connection over isolation, and curiosity over caution. Her story is a vivid reminder that aging with power isn’t about chasing extremes—it’s about continuing to choose adventure, on your own terms, for as long as you can. /episode/index/show/011ca8ba-b45d-44c2-9c23-9614d65dc794/id/41011045

A master of the margins, celebrated Santa Cruz poet, translator and journalist Stephen Kessler opens up about poetry, solitude, aging, and the hard won clarity that comes from a lifetime spent just outside the mainstream. In this episode Bill and Deb interview renowned poet, translator, and columnist Stephen Kessler. Over the course of more than five decades, Stephen has moved from the upheavals of late‑1960s Santa Cruz into a life devoted to language in many forms—poetry, translation, criticism, and personal essay. Named Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year in 2023, he has become one of the Central Coast’s most distinctive literary voices, known both for his international work translating writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Luis Cernuda, and for his sharply observed local columns in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Stephen talks about how he didn’t so much choose poetry as feel chosen by it. As he puts it, he eventually discovered “it was poetry that wanted me and I was just its servant,” guided by what he calls the Muses—“creative dictators” directing his work. That sensibility runs through everything he does: his belief that writers “mine their own experience,” and his conviction that a poet’s job is to live at some distance from power, “questioning conventional wisdom” rather than becoming its official voice. We also explore how Stephen has consciously opted out of the always‑on digital world. He doesn’t carry a cell phone and prefers letters on paper, manual typewriters, and handwritten drafts. Having lived through a serious psychotic break in his early twenties, he has learned to protect his own nervous system from the constant stimulation of “the world’s nervous system” online, choosing instead a simpler, slower, more attentive way of living and working. Finally, Stephen reflects on aging and creative continuity. Now in his late seventies, he’s narrowed his practice to what matters most: his weekly Sentinel column, poems that arrive only when they “ask to be written,” and a rich network of friendships sustained in part through extensive postal correspondence. He speaks candidly about solitude versus isolation, the loss of friends over time, and why he has never been interested in conformity—insisting that an artist’s real value lies at the margins, where, as he says, you can “evoke what people don’t get through official channels.” /episode/index/show/011ca8ba-b45d-44c2-9c23-9614d65dc794/id/40729130