A SECOND BLOOMING is a collection of essays by twenty-one authors who are emerging from the chrysalis they built for their younger selves and transforming into the women they are meant to be. They are not all elders, but all have embraced the second half of their lives with a generative spirit.

Anne Lamott writes about finding herself by rejecting her false selves. Mary Karr shares wisdom from her journey to sobriety. Natasha Trethewey writes about the importance of collective memory to the restoration of the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Katrina. Sally Palmer Thomason explores spiral dynamics and sacred geometry in "The Triskele." Susan Marquez writes about her daughter's new life as an actor and motivational speaker after falling from her five-story apartment in New York City. Alexis Paige tells the story of her new beginnings following both incarceration and rape. Kim Michele Richardson's "Abuse: A Survivor s Message to the Vatican" is a plea written by one who suffered ten years of abuse in a Catholic orphanage. Emma French Connolly retired from her position as a deacon on the staff of an Episcopal church in Memphis in her sixties to open Uptown Needle and CraftWorks in New Orleans.

Other contributors include Jennifer Bradner, Julie Cantrell, Beth Ann Fennelly, Nina Gaby, Jessica Handler, Suzanne Henley, Jennifer Horne, River Jordan, Cassandra King, Ellen Morris Prewitt, Wendy Reed, Kathy Rhodes, and NancyKay Sullivan Wessman.