Academic Career

During my years in higher education, I began to write extensively. At
first, I wrote program models and documents for daily use. Then I wrote
proposals for faculty, administrators, government funding agencies, and
foundations. Before long, I was being asked to write articles for
journals and newsletters, chapters for books, and papers for conference
presentations.

During the civil rights and women’s movement years of the 1960s, I had
written and given many speeches. My public speaking and my writing were
merging as a serious “shadow career.” In fact, when I organized my
education archives, I counted 85 published articles and 230 unpublished
papers and presentations that I had produced in those years. They are
all now housed at Regis University, along with my nine books.¹ It is a
privilege for me to have my work in adult education and my writing
safely organized and accessible through Regis University.

As my academic career broadened, I wanted to learn how to write books.
I had the opportunity to co-author or edit three academic books, which
were published in 1980, 1981 and 1982.² During the 1980s, I also
joined colleagues in producing four pamphlets based on our work in
adult development and learning.

As part of my individualized doctorate, between 1979 and 1981, one of
my goals was to learn how to write in non-academic style. I was
fortunate to find a mentor, and for a few years I wrote a column,
“Notes from the Everyday,” for the Littleton Independent and Arapahoe
Herald. Later, those columns formed the basis of my first non-academic
book, Weaving: The Fabric of a Woman’s Life (1991). Having
self-published that book, I learned about graphics, working with a
printer, and marketing.

By then, writing was becoming a pervasive activity in my life and
career. Our leadership project produced a handbook and a pamphlet. Our
Journey for Justice mission to Germany, in 1993, produced a journal.

My research and work in adult development and learning led to our first
“trade” book, In Our Fifties: Men and Women Reinventing Their Lives
(1993), which I wrote with two male colleagues who lived and worked in
California. Now, this was 1992 and we were not yet using computers
ubiquitously. We worked across the miles using one computer between us,
three fax machines, and the U.S. post office. Talk about the challenge
of long-distance collaboration!

That same year, I turned 60. This was a very big birthday. I gave
myself a gift and went to Guadalajara, Mexico, to see my college
roommate, who lived there and had recently lost her husband. There I
began to write a few pieces, which I called “In Our 60’s.” In trying to
figure out just what this new decade was to bring, I began to use
writing as a way, once again, of understanding myself and what I came
to call “the third third of life” in my adult development career. At
60, things like Medicare, Social Security, and retirement begin to loom
large. My articles were published in well-known local publications that
printed features and columns.

¹The Finding Aids can be found at www.regis.edu. Then go to libraries, then collections, then Elinor Miller Greenberg Papers.

²Educating Learners of All Ages (1980), Designing Undergraduate
Education (1981), and New Partnerships: Higher Education and the
Non-Profit Sector (1982)