Moxie Cosmos Press is a new venture involving readers in my own incomplete writing. One branch of endeavor is to provide learning materials for group work in and out of school, based on earlier experience with public programs at libraries and museums. The other endeavor is fiction designed to cultivate and satisfy an audience of mystery readers over age 65.

This Web site offers access to workbooks under production by Moxie Cosmos Press. Their themes have common threads — family experience and citizenship. After 50-some years of contemplating the Meaning of Life, I have come to recognize that the most important task we have — and the most difficult — is balancing our individual aspirations with our desire to "fit in" with society. These works reflect that struggle:

• Tumbleweeds: A Moving Story

Every family seems to have its historian, someone who takes on genealogy or decides to chronicle the events in the lives of several generations. Most of us are not well-disposed to fulfill these fascinating but often tedious tasks. "Tumbleweeds: A Moving Story" is for everyone. Based on what is called "the anecdotal approach" to writing history, it is a series of exercises to mine personal memory for the essence of the political and economic past. Each exercise is short but ever-expandable because its simple questions are linked to the experience of migration and the national and world events that "moved" members of the family in question.


• The Road to Utopia: Imagining Better Communities

Two children's programs, on at branch libraries and one in an elementary school, convinced me that citizenship and creativity are linked, and that if we want good citizens we must give children crayons and tell them to imagine the city of their dreams. Then we must ask the children to look at one another's dream cities. Then we can ask them to work together on one dream city where they could live together in harmony. This workbook justifies and simulates the process of planning a livable community in 30 chapters organized in five parts:

1. Why Utopia?
2. The Utopian Process
3. Looking At Cities
4. Planning Real Communities
5. Living in Communities

Each chapter has more than one idea for group activities, and the entire workbook incorporates a system for discussion and debate called "The Problem Box," based on issues in real life reported in newspaper articles.


• The Sophie George Mystery Novels

The life experience of older adults is so rich, deep, and complex that there is no end to the possibilities for stories about troubled individuals and potential danger. The Sophie novels take us into unusual subcultures and rather sensational subjects, but they are designed to be emotionally rewarding as well as mentally engaging. To accomplish this, I have incorporated familiar issues we are likely to face in our later years — living alone, cost of living rises, technology gaps, health problems and worries about children.