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Second Acts that Change Lives

Making a Difference in the World

by Mary Beth Sammons (more about this book and author)

Chapter 4: Reconnect with the Source of Your Creative Spirit
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What do you want? What are you good at? Tap into your hidden talents.

Be strong when you enter your own body; there you have a solid place for your feet.

— Kabir

Reaching the milestone of midlife can be a very positive experience if you look at this rite of passage as the opportunity and time for exploration.

In 2008, as the first of the baby boomer men and women turn sixty-one and the youngest are forty-four, there is a universe of passionate, educated men and women  —  married and single  —  who are unwilling to settle for the stereotypical roles of middle age at the half-century mark. What’s best is that they are realizing they don’t have to.
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We all need role models who show us how not to stay focused on staying young, but to step out and say, “The best is yet to come.” We need to ask ourselves, What am I capable of? And, we need to make it happen.

The second act reinventors in this chapter advise  —  by their actions  —  that the best place to start is by taking an inventory of our own lives. What gives us energy and verve? What do we do to get rid of the anxiety? What are our passions?

Start by making it an adventure to explore yourself.

Going to the Dogs

 From public policy activist and economic consultant to cofounder and editor-in-chief of Bark: A Magazine about Life with Dogs.

Live your life and forget your age.

— Norman Vincent Peale

It’s never too late to realize a dream. Just ask Claudia Kawczynska. After traveling the world and working in a very successful career, she went back to her childhood roots and her simple love of animals and ended up launching a magazine empire. These days, she says she’s connected wholeheartedly with the person she was meant to and wants to be.
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Claudia Kawczynska, 61, Berkeley, California

 Act I: Apple grower, Sebastopol, California; Economic consultant, for Dornbusch & Co. in San Francisco and a Berkeley Waterfront Commissioner.

Act II: Editor-in-chief/Cofounder of Bark, a bimonthly magazine about life with dogs that pays homage to the age-old relationship between our two species (www.thebark.com). She is also the editor of the bestselling anthology, Dog Is My Co-Pilot, and Howl.

New Script

At fifty years old, Claudia found her calling. It came with a bark  —  literally, inspired by her Border collie mix, Nell.

Claudia, who was working as a public policy consultant and traveling with Nell to work at her office in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, spent after hours championing the rights of dog owners and their four-legged buddies, advocating for a leash-free area at Berkeley’s César Chávez Marina Park.

What began as an eight-page newsletter to spread the cause has found an international audience of dog aficionados. Today, Bark has a circulation of 125,000. Claudia is editor-in-chief, and her business and life partner and cofounder Cameron Woo is publisher of the Berkeley-based dog-centric literary lifestyle magazine that boasts a roster of award-winning writers, including Mary Oliver, Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Berg, Augusten Burroughs, Mark Doty, and many more.
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Claudia is widely recognized as an expert on dog culture. She has appeared on National Public Radio and has been quoted in Esquire, Men’s Journal, the Washington Post, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. This expertise also led to her selection by the New York Times for participation on the panel “How We Obsess (Over Dogs),” part of their annual “Sunday with the Magazine” discussion series. She was a recipient of a Hurricane Hero Award from the Humane Society of Louisiana in recognition of Bark’s Katrina coverage.

Life before the Leap

“I took a very circuitous path to where I am now,” says Claudia, who finished college in her mid-thirties, went on to get a master’s degree, and then traveled to the Netherlands for postgraduate work; she lived in Paris for the next three years, and celebrated her fortieth birthday there.

When she later returned to San Francisco, she took what she describes as a small job in an economic planning and public policy consulting firm. For five years, she worked on a variety of different projects for state and federal agencies.

The Epiphany of Change

“It was really getting our dog, Nell, that propelled me out of that consultancy life,” she remembers. “I was definitely fortunate that I could bring Nell with me to the office, and even luckier that I had a marvelous office off a courtyard in a Maybeck building in San Francisco’s North Beach.”
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Getting Started
It’s no secret that many second acts don’t get off the ground because those aspiring to create the new get bogged down in the details of the plan. Though business plans and flowcharts and years of planning are regaled by advisors, sometimes you’ve got to take the plunge and “just do it,” agree many successful second act(ers) such as Claudia.
• Go organic. Bark started organically and grew that way. “The only ‘plan’ that we had was that it would be a quarterly magazine (to begin with; we are bimonthly now), we would support it through advertising and subscription sales, and, unlike other dog magazines, we decided to never take advertisements from breeders,” says Claudia. “We still ‘wrestle’ with planning. While a business certainly benefits from set plans, and at times I wish we had spent more time in considering various options, it has worked fine for us without that as well.”
• Market yourself. Claudia and Cameron have never had to invest in expensive marketing campaigns. Word of mouth, and the fact that pet ownership is huge, attracted an audience from the get-go. “Bark started to attract readers, advertisers, and others almost from its very start,” says Claudia. “There was
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nothing whatsoever (and still isn’t) like the Bark on
the newsstands. We are both a cultural and literary magazine, but we are a lifestyle one as well. In 2000 we incorporated, and we received some seed money (not much) for our Web site.”

But there was something about “the pull of the wild, or, in my case, the pull of spending more and more time with Nell. Although there were many things I liked about my work, and I certainly learned many valuable skills during my time there, there was something about being called upon as an ‘expert’ that made me uncomfortable.”

Standing on the Edge

There’s no question, Nell was the dream weaver. After Claudia and Cameron welcomed their Border collie mix into their lives, they began noticing dogs in literature, art, movies, and poetry. At the same time, they began experiencing the everyday through the eyes of a dog owner. They wanted to let their dog run leashless through the park; for this they needed to rally support from other dog owners. Claudia’s daytime job as a consultant came in quite handy when the duo set out to organize the dog group called “Friends of César Chávez Park.” And holding the official title of Waterfront Commissioner didn’t hurt her credibility in establishing the offleash legislation.

Instead of fearing the fight with city hall, or rather her fellow park authorities, in 1976 Claudia and Cameron handed
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out about a thousand copies of a newsletter at the Berkeley Marina and left a few stacks at pet stores. Bark was born. Initially, the magazine had a smattering of ads from local businesses. But its primary purpose was to drum up support for an offleash area at the waterfront.

The dogs found a romping ground, and the magazine found its niche.

The View from the Other Side

Looking back, Claudia says the calling to magazine editorship was rooted in a friendship she developed in 1967 when she first moved to San Francisco.

“I was lucky enough to befriend a wonderful man, Hirk Williamson,” she says. “Back then he was the managing editor of Ramparts magazine, and went on to leave them for the fledging music magazine called Rolling Stone, where he was the first managing editor.

“Because of Hirk I learned ‘observationally’ how the world of magazines works,” she says. “I learned it was extremely difficult, but with a good idea, and stick-to-it-iveness, one can succeed. It is extremely important to set yourself in it for the long haul.”

Stretching Her Boundaries

Claudia also called on achievements she experienced athletically to push herself to create her second act.

“I also learned about staying in it for the long haul because I ran my first marathon at thirty-eight years old,” says Claudia. “I loved training for the 26.2 mile race; I learned
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how to pace myself, how to build up endurance, and how to finish what I set out to do. Hirk cheered me at the finish line of the first race, and he was there also inspiring Cameron and me when we started Bark. He died four years ago, just when our first book came out.”

A natural risk taker, Claudia also has learned that instead of “believing that it is better to rely on the status quo, I love change. So there really wasn’t much trembling there. I figured that if it didn’t work out, there were many other projects I could accomplish.

“As a consultant I learned how to assemble expert teams, how to work through processes (many of them political in nature, meaning they required a lot of compromising), and how to work on deadlines. All of those skills came in handy for being an editor. I am very much a do-it-yourselfer  — and many of the chores that I had to take on in starting a magazine were very similar to what I have done all my life. I taught myself how to sew when I was ten, by fourteen I was making clothes for my whole family. I was the first organic apple grower in Sebastopol in the ’70s [with Hirk Williamson]. I love doing and creating.”

What has been most rewarding for Claudia is knowing that what they do has an impact on the lives of dogs and their owners.

“We always urge people to adopt pets from shelters and rescuers, and we have heard from so, so many people about how that message affected their decisions,” says Claudia. “We ‘elevated’ the topic of dog culture, took it out of the show ring, paying attention to the importance of all dogs, no
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matter what their breed. Also what is rewarding for me personally is the caliber of the authors who have written for us.”

Words to Inspire

“I felt like I was entering a ‘second act’ when I went back to college to complete my undergrad degree  —  I was thirty-five at the time,” says Claudia. “I definitely had a different attitude about myself, in relationship to the other students and the professors. I just loved learning more, understood more fully the importance of learning for the sake of learning. When I started Bark (I was fifty), I was perhaps more determined than I would have been if I had done it earlier (like in my thirties). It took me some time to understand what my strengths are and not to belittle them.”

A Sweet Escape

Soap opera star turns a pie-in-the-sky inspiration into a recipe for success.

I never feel age. . . . If you have creative work, you don’t have age or time.

— Louise Nevelson

Opening a business can be a family affair and can give everyone in the family a new way to come together.
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Just ask soap star Mary Beth Evans, who took her passion for the simple act of baking pies as a way to destress from the glitzy world of daytime soaps and turned it into a national mail-order business.

The recipe: Do what you love.

Mary Beth Evans, 48, Los Angeles, California

Act I: Actress on the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives; mom to Danny, 21, Katie, 19, and Matthew, 16.

Act II: Owner, Mary Beth’s Apple Pie Company.

Life before the Leap

Baking apple pies became actress Mary Beth’s sweet after-hours escape. Commuting between her Los Angeles home and life as wife and mom of three to New York City for her role in the daytime drama Days of Our Lives, Mary Beth turned to her kitchen and the stove to chill out.

The Epiphany of Change

The secret ingredient: a delish pie with fresh, tart apples, cinnamon, and sugar. She started baking them for her family, then for friends and neighbors, and everybody loved them.

She’d been baking up apple pies for years with her own recipe when her husband dared her to see if she could pull off launching her own business. Before long Mary Beth hung a shingle on Mary Beth’s Apple Pie Company.
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The Liftoff

Mary Beth began simply, by sending flyers around her neighborhood. “For $5 extra, I offered to deliver the pies in my minivan,” she enthuses. Upon launching she had one hundred orders.

It was a stint on the home shopping network that threw her hobby out into the universe big time. She sold three thousand pies.

The View from the Other Side

These days she’s shipping her frozen and ready-to-go pies across the country.

What she says she likes most about my after-hours biz is “the fact that it role models to my children that moms can indeed turn their at-home talents into success outside the home.” But she stresses to them that it takes hard work.

And, at times, it’s a family project. “My thirteen-year-old, Matthew, helps me a lot,” admits Evans. “He is the fastest apple peeler in the West. He can do a hundred apples in 30 minutes.”

Making a Difference Every Day

To refocus our lives, we have to find the clues for what will make us feel good and help others feel good too. Many of us know our talents and the specific skills we bring to our roles as worker, parent, child, student, or spouse. But we have forgotten what we are passionate about. The best way to get in touch with our inner longings is to tap into our creative spirits.
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As creativity guru Julia Cameron says: “Creativity is always a leap of faith. You’re faced with a blank page, blank easel, or an empty stage. When I ask for help with my creativity, I get it. I believe that there is a benevolent listening something that I have named the ‘Great Creator.’ I believe that when we ask to be led, we are led, and there’s nothing too small or esoteric for spiritual help.”

Here are five ways you can get a closer look at where you are being led:

1. Find your bliss. Start with an inventory of yourself. What gives you energy and verve? What do you do to get rid of anxiety? What are your passions?

2. Enjoy the ride. Look at this search for your inner creative spark as an exciting adventure.

3. Find mentors. Make a conscious effort to find people who have already made the midlife leap and are living the “best is yet to come” lifestyle.

4. Be creative. Do something you’ve never done. Mary Beth Evans started baking apple pies. Take a drawing or writing class. Go on a hike. Join a knitting club.

5. Pray for inspiration and guidance. Prayer can open us up to guidance, which just renders us ready to listen to our clues, says Cameron.

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