In Conversation with Jennifer McGaha

Stop by M. Judson for this free event and listen to a great discussion between Jennifer McGaha and Katherine Scott Crawford to celebrate McGaha’s new book, The Joy Document!

When Jennifer McGaha’s grandmother was in her late eighties, Jennifer asked her what her favorite age so far had been. “Fifty-five,” her grandmother answered, as though there were something magical about this stage of life, some deeper way of knowing from this vantage point. So, in her own fifty-fifth year, Jennifer began to take note. She jotted down her impressions of simple, everyday things that struck her as beautiful or humorous or intriguing and kept a list of all the accomplishments, large and small, that actually mattered to her.

These observations became Jennifer’s Joy Document, a radical act of reclaiming joy and an exercise in paying attention. When you are determined to find joy, almost anything can become revelatory–an Earth Day Whole Foods errand, Claire Saffitz’s fruitcake recipe, a harrowing ride in Twinkly Taxi, an evening picnic at Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8, or cartwheels in the driveway. While many of us at midlife have found all the things we’ve strived for (the career, the better life, the organization tools), those things only go so far. And the search for something greater, something truer, begins. Through this lens, life after fifty becomes not the end or even the middle of life, but a new beginning, another grand adventure with endless opportunities to find joy. The Joy Document includes fifty rollicking and often humorous essays exploring the art of joy and inspiring the rest of us to do the same.

Jennifer is the author of three works of creative nonfiction including The Joy Document: Creating a Midlife of Surprise and Delight, Flat Broke with Two Goats, a 2018 OverDrive Big Library Read, and Bushwhacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out, a Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award finalist. Her nonfiction and creative nonfiction work has also appeared in many magazines and literary journals including Image, The Huffington Post, The New Pioneer, Lumina, PANK, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Brevity, Bitter Southerner, Crab Creek Review, River Teeth, and others, and she has led writing workshops throughout the region and beyond through venues such as Hugo House, Charlotte Lit, Flatiron Writers Room, the North Carolina Arboretum, Story and Song Bistro at Amelia Island, the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site, Kanuga Conference Center, and the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC-Asheville. An Appalachian native, Jennifer lives in a wooded North Carolina hollow with her husband, two cats, four unruly dogs, nine relatively tame dairy goats, and an ever-changing number of chickens.

Katherine Scott Crawford is the award-winning author of Keowee Valley, an historical adventure set in the Revolutionary-era Carolinas and the Cherokee country. A recovering academic and former adjunct professor, she serves as a guest lecturer and workshop leader at conferences, writers retreats, literary festivals, libraries, and more. As a newspaper columnist, her popular column appeared weekly across the country and abroad, in U.S.A. Today, The Detroit Free Press, and many others. She holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Founder and Director of MountainTop Writers Retreats, she lives in Western North Carolina with her husband, daughters, and their trail dog. Her second historical novel, THE MINIATURIST’S ASSISTANT, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in Spring 2025.