A Harvard grad with a doctorate in literature from the University of Michigan and more than 25 years experience as a college teacher and administrator, Chuck Nicholas has become in the past ten years the nation’s leading advocate for what he originally called, Using the movies to discover what the new old age can actually become.

Now seventy and a bit wiser, he calls these new and more positive narratives of the new old age, Second Half Stories, and is amazed by the increasing number of feature films, novels, short stories, poems and plays that explore this new chapter in our much longer and more productive lives. He’s even more amazed by how few of us seem to be paying attention. There are, after all, more than 200 of these films at last count, more than 150 novels, and more appear each year.

As part of his continuing campaign to introduce these Second Half Stories to those who would benefit from them most, Chuck has given lectures, developed film series and film programs, headed up workshops and facilitated discussions at lifelong learning institutes, independent living facilities, conventions, and health care facilities  around the country. He’s also organized the nation’s first aging film festival at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, been interviewed on NPR’s Here and Now, won two National Endowment for the Humanities grants and been sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive and gratifying. Apparently all of us—professionals in aging, those who are already sixty five, and all the boomers who are about to enter life’s second half, hunger for new narratives to replace the old story that life after middle age is all about retirement, isolation, and decline. It is not. The world’s leading film makers, novelists, poets, and playwrights already know it, and they’re eager to share  their visions and insights with us all.

Now at work on a book tentatively entitled Second Half Stories: Movies, Novels and the Transformation of Life’s Second Half  Chuckhas his own website, has just developed a new round of programs and presentations on the ways in which one’s gender presents particular challenges and opportunities in life’s second half , and continues to spread the word with a widening variety of presentations, discussions, and screenings.