Mapping Your Stories
I developed the brand voice, messaging and website copy to promote Dr Anthea McGuigan’s book, Mapping Stories for Happiness in Later Life.
The brief
Dr McGuigan needed a clear, distinctive voice and messaging framework to position her book as both insightful and accessible, helping readers engage with the ideas around storytelling and wellbeing in later life.
The audience
Older adults, their families and professionals working in wellbeing, counselling and aged care.
The voice
Sage, warm academic, keeper, creator and cartographer.
Tone of Voice
Sage
Thoughtful and reflective, clear without embellishing or sentimentalising. Speaks with the confidence of experience and insight, guiding readers towards new understanding.
Within the new rhythms of aging is the chance to reframe how we see ourselves. Like the butterfly, we are not finished when one stage ends; we are being offered another form of becoming.
Aging unsettles our assumptions about identity, dignity and even love. That disruption, painful as it is, can open the way to transformation.
Warm academic
Knowledgeable yet approachable, blending intellectual depth with personal insight. Academic in rigour, but softened by humanity and warmth.
The language of research and policy often reduces elder experiences to numbers. Yet as we age, we remain individuals with histories, personalities, and loves that continue to matter.
Keeper
Keeper of stories, memory, and meaning. Invites readers to preserve and honour their own histories, situating personal memory within a larger human continuum.
Every recollection is a fragment of a larger mosaic. In gathering them, you preserve not only your story or those of your loved ones, but a story that belongs to all who come after you.
The memory of my grandmother’s defiance, even in frailty, reminds me that identity persists until the very end.
Creator
Expressive and inspiring, encouraging others to engage with their own imagination and voice. Offers prompts and structures that invite originality.
While caring for my mother, I kept a journal. These notes became seeds for reflection, and later, a body of work that revealed meaning through change.
Cartographer
Offers maps and frameworks rather than companionship. Elevated and measured, charting the terrain of memory and meaning so others may navigate it themselves. Provides structure, not steps.
The landscapes of later life hold familiar ground and unfamiliar turns. I cannot tell you which way to walk, but I can show you how to orient yourself when the familiar landmarks shift.
Key messages
Aging can be a process of transformation, not decline.
Every life holds stories worth telling and passing on.
Reflection and creativity are powerful tools for meaning-making.
Families can use Anthea’s book as a bridge between generations.
Anthea’s journey offers both academic insight and companionship.
Website copy
Home
Aging can be a time of transformation, creativity, and meaning.
Discover new ways of seeing the later chapters of your life.
[Explore the Book]
Welcome
Aging, like every stage of life before it, is a process of becoming. It invites us to pause, reflect, reimagine, and create new forms of meaning from the stories we’ve lived.
This space is a companion to my book: part memoir, part guide, and dedicated to those who sense there is still more to unfold. Within its pages are reflections, prompts, and creative exercises designed to help you find shape and purpose in your own experiences — to map your story, and perhaps discover new paths through familiar ground.
About the work
After a long career in health and education, I found myself caring for my mother in her final years. The experience reshaped how I understood purpose, identity, and aging. What began as a personal journal evolved into a broader exploration of how we can all approach later life as a creative act.
This work offers frameworks and ideas so that you might find your own direction: one that reflects who you were, who you are, and who you are still becoming.
Wherever you begin, I hope this resource helps you trace the contours of your own life, both as a record of what has passed and as a map towards what still can be.
Explore the book
Part memoir, part creative guide, Mapping Your Stories for Happiness in Later Life offers a practical and reflective journey through the later stages of life, inviting you to find renewal through storytelling, creativity, and self-discovery.
[Learn More]
Mapping Meaning in Later Life
Exploring how we grow, change, and make sense of ourselves.
My story so far
Across a lifetime of work in nursing, education, and research, I have been drawn to how we find meaning as we age. For most of my career, I worked in health and aged care — first as a nurse, and later as a senior executive. My work has been shaped by the privilege of listening to people living their final days, and by the desire to understand what sustains a person’s sense of self when everything else starts to change.
Those experiences became the foundation for my doctoral research, exploring life, work, and meaning in Australian nursing homes. Yet even that inquiry, formal as it was, always returned me to the same truth: aging is not the end of a road. It is another landscape entirely.
A new chapter
After many years in leadership, I stepped away. Like many people in later life, I found myself at a crossroads. Caring for my mother through her final years changed how I understood time, memory, and the process of becoming. I began to write, at first privately. Over time, those pages revealed a path forward. This became a book, which I designed to help you, or your loved ones, find your own paths.
I’ve drawn on research, psychology, philosophy, and personal experience to create a structure for reflection that allows you to chart your own course through memory and meaning. I won’t tell you where to go, but I will show you how to listen, recall, and find coherence in your story.
An invitation to begin
If this resonates with you, I invite you to explore the book, Mapping Your Stories for Happiness in Later Life, which brings this philosophy to life.
[Explore the Book]
