Creative Care

“Creative Care is a love letter to aging. Not a prescription filled with should, it’s a beautifully rendered invitation to be curious and flexible, meeting elders wherever they happen to be in the moment and making that moment richer, sweeter, and more meaningful for all.” — Cynthia Orange, author of Take Good Care and Shock Waves”Moving, honest, and timely, Creative Care’s inspiring stories will comfort families struggling with dementia across the world.” — Diane E. Meier MD, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care and MacArthur Fellow”Basting brings hope and meaning to millions of families living in the shadow of Alzheimer’s disease. A powerful book of healing.” — R. Sean Morrison, MD, chair of the Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai“Alzheimer’s is devastating because it doesn’t only affect the person suffering from the disease. In the face of this challenge the response from the academic and policy side has been feeble. For the first time, this book gives people hope and powerful ways to deal with its challenges.” — Dean Sherzai, MD, PhD, author of The Alzheimer’s Solution”Invites us to shift focus from how well we remember the past to how well we inhabit the present–for ourselves and with others. Basting reveals the power of creativity to expand our humanity and enrich the time we have.” — Marie-Therese Connolly, MacArthur Fellow and senior scholar at The Wilson Center“Upends the bleak ideas of caregiving and dementia as a disease that robs us of our humanity. Basting shows otherwise. Together–caregiver and person with dementia–can create something meaningful. Caregivers will value this; it ought to be required reading for all clinicians and policymakers.”  — Jason Karlawish, MD, co-director of the Penn Memory Center, University of Pennsylvania and author of The Disease of the Century“Creative Care brims with essential wisdom that may forever change the way we care for one another.  In these pages Basting gives readers the most precious gift of all: hope.”   — Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps”As an artist and scholar, Basting has infused art into dementia and elder care, leveraging song, dance, improvisation, and theater to elicit communication and joy. Her ideas have spread to care centers across the country and individual families hoping to forge meaningful connections with loved ones.” — Psychology Today

Anne Basting PhD is a leader in transforming ageing and elder care and the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. She is the founder of the non-profit TimeSlips which implements her innovative approach to memory care, and is the author of three previous academic books, The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture (University of Michigan, 1998), Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) and The Penelope Project: An arts-based odyssey to change elder care (University of Iowa Press, 2016). Her work as the founding director of University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Center on Age & Community was also featured in the PBS documentary, “The Penelope Project” (2011).