Editor's Note: This story is part of the series "Entrepreneurship: Square One and Beyond," a Next Avenue initiative made possible by the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation and EIX, the Entrepreneur Innovation Exchange
For decades, Linda C. Shaw had something to say. A poet, author, singer, and performance artist living in Denver, Colorado, she spent years building a creative life around the edges of everything else. Then a series of physical setbacks — including surgeries that required her to relearn how to walk — put it all on hold.
"I was separated from the two things that I absolutely love," Shaw says. "Intellectual stimulation and connection with people."
What brought her back wasn't a grand plan. It was an invitation — to join an online author panel hosted by the Senior Planet from AARP center in Denver. She got sick and missed it. But she signed up for an AI class instead, and something shifted. Soon, she was pitching the center on hosting a poetry slam — not a competition, she explained, but an open gathering where anyone could share their own work or read the words of a favorite poet.
“You have to believe that what you have to say is valuable. And if it's valuable to you, it's going to be valuable to someone else.”
The event filled up. She'll host another this April.
"When you begin to share something that is uniquely yours," Shaw says, "you have to believe that what you have to say is valuable. And if it's valuable to you, it's going to be valuable to someone else."
Her experience reflects a broader cultural shift that researchers, coaches, and program directors are observing across the country: retirement is increasingly becoming less of an ending and more of an opening — particularly for people whose creative ambitions were deferred for decades.
From Dream to Reality
Allen J. Wiener, an author and cultural historian based in Washington, D.C., spent his working years holding onto a writing dream that kept getting pushed aside. He managed to complete an anthology on the Beatles' music over the course of a decade, a project that opened some doors to magazine writing and liner notes, but a full second career had to wait.
"Once I retired, I had the time to undertake serious, long-term research on topics I had wanted to write about for years," Wiener says.
Since retiring, Wiener has published books on Davy Crockett, the Battle of the Alamo, and Elvis Presley's television career, and has interviewed figures including Ringo Starr, Ginger Rogers, and Boy George along the way. He is currently at work on a book about Edgar Allan Poe. "There really are second acts in life," he says.
Retired education administrator Kay Bartel had a similar awakening after leaving her career in 2019. Living on a native tallgrass prairie ranch in the Flint Hills of Kansas, Bartel didn't know what creative expression would look like for her — only that she wanted more of it. She began noticing things: native grasses, wildflowers, the shapes of weathered logs and bones. A chance encounter at a Santa Fe market introduced her to botanical printing, and a word-of-mouth trail eventually led her to a teacher.
“Once I retired, I had the time to undertake serious, long-term research on topics I had wanted to write about for years,”
Now, Bartel creates prints on fabric and paper using plants from her own land, experiments with natural dyes, explores cyanotype printing, and writes poetry — almost all of it focused on nature. Art pieces have been sold at local markets; she has taught classes at her public library; and she has worked with a creative coach who helped her, as she puts it, give herself permission to call herself an artist. "Creativity is within each of us," Bartel says, "but many never explore or tap into their potential talents."
Making It Work
Wanting to create is one thing. Building a sustainable practice around it is something else entirely. Dian Griesel, founder of Silver Disobedience and owner of Perception Dynamics, a communications consultancy based in New York City, has spent years working with adults 50 and older who are redefining later life. Her first piece of advice is deceptively simple: decide whether you want a hobby or a career. They require very different things.
"A lot of people will say, 'Oh, I've always wanted to do this,'" Griesel says, "but they never tried to build skills towards doing that."
She urges people to ask themselves honest questions before committing: Do you need a financial return? Are you ready to put in full-time or even part-time effort, or is something more flexible what you're really after? "A funny thing a lot of people forget when they're looking at second careers," Griesel says, "is how much time and energy it took to get their first one off the ground."
“A funny thing a lot of people forget when they're looking at second careers is how much time and energy it took to get their first one off the ground.”
Griesel also flags a subtler trap: people who reach for work not because they truly want it, but because their identity is still tangled up in what they used to do. "The absence of retirement creates the same void, whether you were the barista at the coffee shop or the CEO of a company," she says. "Our identities get so tied with who we are and what we've done."
For those who do decide to turn a creative pursuit into a business, Griesel is emphatic: do it right from the start. That means incorporating, registering the business properly, filing taxes, and obtaining appropriate insurance. "If you've decided it's a business, treat it as such," she says. "It's an easy way to lose what you worked so hard for."
Technology as a Creative Catalyst
One of the less expected forces driving the creative second act? Technology. According to Thomas Kamber, executive director of Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) and Senior Planet from AARP, digital tools are opening up creative expression in ways that weren't previously possible, particularly for people who believe they lack talent in a given area.
Technology has also shattered geographic isolation for creative people. Kamber describes a woman on a remote island in Maine who joined a Senior Planet open mic night via Zoom, guitar in hand — and performed for listeners scattered across the United States, the Netherlands, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom. "You never know who could be in the room," Kamber says. "The ability to make it social, and the magic of it being somewhat unexpected — that's kind of the point of a lot of art making."
He also recalls a former postal worker who came to a Senior Planet center years ago wanting to write a play about the Green Book — the guide that allowed African American travelers to navigate Jim Crow-era America. The man workshopped the script at the center using technology to help build and score what eventually became a musical. The final production played to standing-room audiences at Senior Planet and later traveled to Chicago. "He was creating," Kamber says, "and he was also exploring a really important cultural artifact around the history of racial conditions in America — and it ended up being a financial benefit to him, too."
For those who don't know where to start — or who doubt whether they're truly creative — Linda Shaw has a message. When she opened her poetry slam to the Senior Planet community, she made clear that no credentials were required. Participants could share their own work or someone else's. They could simply show up.
"Everyone is creative," Shaw says. "Everyone has something that they can do. And it doesn't matter how small it is — it's yours. It's uniquely yours." The door, as Shaw says, is already open. You just have to walk through it.