The author of the best-selling Composing a Life offers her own revolutionary take on the role of longer life spans and recent lifestyle changes in reshaping individual identity and self-fulfillment. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

This reissue of Bateson's treatise on the improvisational lives of five extraordinary women uses their personal stories to delve into the creative potential of the complex lives of today, where ambitions are constantly refocused on new goals and possibilities.

Mary Catherine Bateson—author of the landmark bestseller Composing a Life—gives us an inspiring exploration of a new life stage that she calls Adulthood II, a result of the longer life spans and greater resources we now enjoy. In Composing a Further Life, Bateson redefines old age as an opportunity to reinvent ourselves and challenges us to use it to pursue new sources of meaning and ways to contribute to society. Bateson shares the stories of men and women who are flourishing examples of this “age of active wisdom”—from a retired boatyard worker turned silversmith to a famous actress to a former foundation president exploring the crucial role of grandparents in our society. Retiring no longer means withdrawing from life, but engaging with it more deeply, and Composing a Further Life points the way.

Margaret S. Barrett and Sandra L. Stauffer We live in a “congenial moment for stories” (Pinnegar & Daynes, 2007, p. 30), a time in which narrative has taken up a place in the “landscape” of inquiry in the social sciences. This renewed interest in storying and stories as both process and product (as eld text and research text) of inquiry may be attributed to various methodological and conceptual “turns,” including the linguistic and cultural, that have taken place in the humanities and social sciences over the past decades. The purpose of this book is to explore the “narrative turn” in music education, to - amine the uses of narrative inquiry for music education, and to cultivate ground for narrative inquiry to seed and ourish alongside other methodological approaches in music education. In a discipline whose early research strength was founded on an alignment with thesocialsciences,particularlythepsychometrictradition,oneofthekeychallenges for those embarking on narrative inquiry in music education is to ensure that its use is more than that of a “musical ornament,” an elaboration on the established themes of psychometric inquiry, those of measurement and certainty. We suggest that narrative inquiry is more than a “turn” (as noun), “a melodic embellishment that is played around a given note” (Encarta World English Dictionary, 2007, n. p. ); it is more than elaborationon a position, the adding of extra notes to make a melody more beautiful or interesting.

Profiles of five women that aim “to shed light on personal and career obstacles women face in achieving success” by a cultural anthropologist (Publishers Weekly). Mary Catherine Bateson has been called “one of the most original and important thinkers of our time” (Deborah Tannen). Grove Press is pleased to reissue Bateson’s deeply satisfying treatise on the improvisational lives of five extraordinary women. Using their personal stories as her framework, Dr. Bateson delves into the creative potential of the complex lives we live today, where ambitions are constantly refocused on new goals and possibilities. With balanced sympathy and a candid approach to what makes these women inspiring, examples of the newly fluid movement of adaptation—their relationships with spouses, children, and friends, their ever-evolving work, and their gender—Bateson shows us that life itself is a creative process. “A masterwork of rare breadth and particularity, encompassing all the rhythms of five lives and friendships, and interweaving their stories in ways that reveal grand social truths and peculiar personal graces.”—The Boston Globe “Well-formulated and passionate . . . Offers nothing less than a radical rethinking of the concept of achievement.”—San Francisco Chronicle “As stimulating as it is hopeful . . . shakes up well-meaning truisms . . . adds new dimensions to our views of the world.”—Elizabeth Janeway, author of Man’s World, Woman’s Place “Bateson has an extremely interesting mind and the ability to express herself with extraordinary literary felicity . . . Too much truth steams behind the quiet elegance of these passages.”—The New York Times Book Review

Writer and educator Mary Catherine Bateson is best known for the proposal that lives should be looked at as compositions, each one an artistic creation expressing individual responses to the unexpected. This collection can be read as a memoir of unfolding curiosity, for it brings together essays and occasional pieces, many of them previously unpublished or unknown to readers who know the author only from her books, written in the course of an unconventional career. Bateson's professional life was interrupted repeatedly. She responded by refocusing her curiosity -- by being willing to learn. The connections and echoes between the entries in her book are as intriguing as the contrasts in style and subject matter. The work is grounded in cultural anthropology but shaped by the observation that, in a world of rapid change and encounters with strangers, individuals can no longer depend on following traditionally defined paths. Willing to Learn is arranged thematically. One section includes a sampling of writings about Bateson's parents, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. The longest section focuses primarily on the contemporary United States and deals with life stages and gender. Bateson argues that because women's lives have changed most radically, women are pioneers of emerging patterns that will affect everyone. Another section deals with belief systems, conflict, and change, especially in the Middle East, and the final section with different ways of knowing. Bateson is a singular thinker whose work enriches lives by bringing fresh, original ideas to subjects that affect all of our lives. Willing to Learn is at once an articulation of and an enduring testament to the artistic creation Bateson has produced pursuing her own life's work.

Your Life Path provides a self-discovery–based personal growth and development toolkit. It applies the concept of life mapping, which is a simple, fun, and comprehensive method for reflecting on your past and "re-modeling" your future. This is the perfect book for anyone facing significant life transitions or who simply desires to gain greater awareness about his or her own life story. Your Life Path combines rich, well-illustrated discussion from the author’s extensive research and case studies with practical, hands-on creative tools that engage and guide the life mappers through a gradual, self-paced repertoire of journaling, active imagination, and creative representation tools in order to help them realize their value-driven goals and arrive at a better understanding of some of their most persistent inner conflicts. Dr. Watts's program helps life mappers strengthen adaptive strategies in order to enrich their life's journey and assist them in achieving their dreams.