Monthly Book Share: Local Author Susan Gubar

Name: Monthly Book Share: Local Author Susan Gubar
Start: 2025-09-17T16:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-09-17T17:00:00-04:00
Location: 615 W. Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN, United States, Indiana 47404

Schedule

Wed Sep 17 2025 at 04:00 pm to 05:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

615 W. Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN, United States, Indiana 47404 | Bloomington, IN

Book Share - Local Author
Susan Gubar
3rd Weds, Sept 17, 4-5:00pm
Join us this September as we discuss how nine women artists flourished creatively in their final acts. Local Author Susan Gubar will discuss her book, Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists. This book features women artists who transformed the last stage of life into a rousing conclusion. Gubar draws on their lives and works to suggest that seniority can become a time of reinvention and renewal.
More details:
In 2008, the critically acclaimed author and scholar Susan Gubar was told by a trusted oncologist that she had only a few years left to live. Though she outlived that dire prognosis, this brush with mortality refocused her attention on the boons of a longevity she did not expect to experience. She began to think: In the last years of our lives, can we shape and change our creative capabilities?
The resulting volume, Grand Finales, answers this question with a resounding yes. Despite the losses generally associated with aging, quite a few writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and dancers have managed to extend and repurpose their creative energies. Gubar spotlights very creative old ladies: writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and dancers from the past and in our times.
Each of Grand Finales’ nine riveting chapters features women artists who transformed the last stage of existence into a rousing conclusion. Gubar draws on their late lives and works to suggest that seniority can become a time of reinvention and renewal. With pizzazz, bravado, and geezer machismo, she counters the discrediting of elderly women and clarifies the environments, relationships, activities, and attitudes that sponsor a creative old age.

Susan’s bio:
Susan Gubar is an acclaimed memoirist and literary critic. Together with Sandra M. Gilbert, she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. A Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Indiana University, she lives in Bloomington.