BIOGRAPHY

Andrea’s most recent book is Radical Endurance: Growing Old in an Age of Longevity (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Praised as “a personal guide to the transformations, hard truths, profound pleasures, and infinite possibilities of aging,” the book traces her journey into old age, including the choking fear of losing her health and with it, her independence; the profound pleasures of “growing up again” as she reconsiders experiences from young adulthood; and finally, her unexpectedly optimistic journey toward contentment as she contemplates her future.

Winner of an Honorable Mention from the Forward Indies 2023 Book Awards, After Effects: A Memoir of Complicated Grief (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) traces Andrea’s deeply personal struggle with abnormally intense and prolonged grief after the untimely death of her husband, ultimately leading to a profound reconsideration of what might constitute happiness in a life alone.

In 2020, Andrea was awarded a Next Step grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board’s Metropolitan Regional Arts Council to support After Effects, and in 2022, she was a featured writer in the Minnesota Humanities Center’s popular Minnesota Writers Series.

Andrea is also the author of Restoring Flexibility: A Gentle Yoga-Based Practice to Increase Mobility at Any Age (Ulysses Press, 2015), which received enthusiastic reviews from yoga, health, and wellness media and continues to find an appreciative audience.

Now, just to whet your appetite, here are short previews of Andrea’s two recently completed books.

Andrea has now completed work on a travel memoir titled Somewhere Over the Rainbow: An Art Lover’s Life-Changing Journey into Native America. To support this work, she was awarded a 2024 professional development grant from the University of Minnesota Retirees Association. The memoir is set during a time in which Andrea transformed her understanding of and feeling for art, learned about and grew to love the arts and traditions of American cultures outside her own European American and Jewish cultures, traveled to indescribably beautiful American lands, and met some of the people who are indigenous to these places.

Between 1989 and 1998, Andrea and her husband made eleven road trips to the northern and southern Plains, the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains, and the high deserts and mountains of the continent’s southwest, as well as another dozen trips within their home state of Minnesota. Somewhere Over the Rainbow traces these journeys in loving and sometimes improbable detail while paying tribute to some of the contemporary Native American artists whose spectacular beaded artworks Andrea collected during their travels. Equally, the book offers a poignant biography of Andrea’s late husband, Tom Dayton, the most intrepid road warrior she had ever known.

Read a short excerpt from Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

Andrea’s freshly finished personal narrative, Directions of the Heart: Writing and Sharing the Stories of Our Lives focuses on two elemental and interrelated human needs—our need for self-expression and our need for connection. It is a book about the cathartic pleasures and life-affirming value of sharing our “particularized worlds” through writing, speaking, and gifting the fruits of those labors to other people. The glorious fact that our experiences can be transmitted to others through language hearkens us to incorporate composing and sharing the stories of our lives into our lives. It is that transmissibility, not the rudiments of composition or the elements of technique, that forms the beating heart of this book.

In order to write our stories, we must direct our hearts toward the parts of our lives that mean the most to us. Where do our true subjects lie? In this book we will try out some answers to that often difficult question. Andrea will also share her thoughts on the delights and difficulties of writing about living people, and she will offer a few stories from her own life as evidence that we really are the many in the one. Through our stories, we bequeath more than our ways of living, more than the facts of our histories, and more, even, than our guiding values and beliefs. We bequeath love.

Andrea founded and directed LearningLife, the University of Minnesota’s diverse collection of learning opportunities for people in the second half of life, as well as Encore Transitions: Preparing for Post-Career Life, a trailblazing, nationally replicated program that offered a holistic approach to preparing for a meaningful life after retirement. These programs allowed her to develop an enduring professional and personal interest in health, well-being, and vital engagement in later life, concerns that have become foundational to her writing. 

As the founding director of the University of Minnesota’s legendary Split Rock Arts Program, Andrea led an internationally renowned series of intensive residential workshops in the literary and visual arts. During her tenure, she put cultural, racial, gender, and aesthetic diversity at the heart of the program by bringing groundbreaking writers and artists of color and pioneering LGBTQ+ artists to the program, and by offering program participants opportunities to learn non-European art forms from master practitioners.

In 1995, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota’s Department of American Indian Studies, Andrea also founded and directed American Indian Lives, Lands, and Cultures travel study tours to tribal nations. The program offered opportunities for members of participating tribal communities to create curriculum and serve as teachers in order to develop their capacity in intercultural tourism. This work grew from Andrea’s abiding interest in and passion for Native American art, especially contemporary beadwork created for sale to tourists.

Between 2010 and 2018, Andrea taught hundreds of yoga classes through her Third Age Yoga teaching practice, working with a wide variety of participants ranging from 45 to 98 years old. She taught exclusively in community-based nonprofit settings, including the West 7th Community Center and the Wilder Foundation Center for Aging, both located in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Andrea’s home town.