Aging with Purpose and Passion

Margie Zable Fisher: Embracing Reinvention and Purpose Through Writing and Resilience at 50

• Beverley Glazer • Episode 117

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What if your life could truly begin at 50? In this inspiring episode, Aging with Purpose and Passion welcomes Margie Zable Fisher, who took a bold leap from a high-powered PR career to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming an author. After experiencing career burnout, Margie found herself searching for new purpose, ultimately rediscovering her passion for writing—proving that reinvention after loss and starting over at 50 is not only possible but deeply rewarding.  

Margie’s journey is shaped by the influence of her mother, a fellow writer whose struggles as a single parent initially led Margie to choose financial security over creative pursuits. But after losing her mother to sudden illness, Margie transformed her grief into personal growth, channeling her emotions into writing her first novel—a beautiful tribute to the woman who shaped her early dreams.  

Beyond writing, Margie embraced new passions in midlife, including training as a triathlete—a testament to resilience, reinvention, and the power of stepping outside your comfort zone. Her story is an inspiring reminder that finding purpose in midlife is possible when you listen to your inner voice, take risks, and pursue what truly lights you up.  

Tune in to hear Margie’s powerful insights on navigating career transitions, overcoming burnout, and embracing creativity in midlife. Whether you're facing a career shift, grieving a loss, or wondering if it’s too late to pursue your dreams, this episode will remind you that the rest of your life can be the best part of your story.  

🎧 Listen now and be inspired to start your next chapter with passion and purpose!

For similar inspirational stories on changing your life after 50, check out Episodes #97 and #108

And if you enjoy empowering podcasts that explore the contributions of older women and the wisdom they share, check out The Older Women And Friends Podcast here

Resources

Margie Zable Fisher

margie@margiezfisher.com

https://margiezfisher.com/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/The50YearOldMermaid

https://www.linkedin.com/in/margiezablefisher/

https://margiezfisher.com/vip-club/

Beverley Glazer

https://reinventimpossible.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverleyglazer/

https://www.facebook.com/beverley.glazer

https://www.facebook.com/groups/womenover50rock

https://www.instagram.com/beverleyglazer_reinvention/

https://calendly.com/reinventimpossible/15min

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host. Psychotherapist, coach and empowerment expert Beverly Glaser. Therapist, coach and empowerment expert.

Beverley Glazer:

Beverley Glazer, are you ready to break free of your limitations and step into your own personal power? Well, welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. I'm Beverley Glazer. I'm a transformational coach and therapist and I help women achieve success they know they deserve in their lives and their careers. And you can find me on reinventimpossiblecom and you could also text me in the show notes below. Margie Zable Fisher closed her PR company to become a full-time writer after turning 50. She's written articles for Fortune, for AARP and the New York Times, and she fulfilled her mother's death wish by co-authoring and publishing the Cabaret Club, which has just been released, january 25. So if you're ready to break free from your own limitations and discover a purposeful life, this conversation is for you. Just get inspired. Welcome, margie. Thank you for having me. You have such a story and it will touch the hearts, I'm sure, of many, many, many, many women. What was it like with your relationship with your mom growing up? Were you always very close?

Margie Zable Fisher:

That's such a good question because I was an only child and my daughter is an only child, so it's kind of interesting that we mirrored each other's experiences. I think when, as an only child, you're a little bit selfish and I definitely was I was very independent and my mom was a single parent, so in some senses we were very, very close and in some senses we'd butt heads a lot. Senses we'd butt heads a lot. But as I grew older and when I became a parent, our relationship got much, much clearer to me and much better. And then by the time I was close to 50 and beyond, we were best friends.

Beverley Glazer:

But you went in a totally different direction from your mom. But you went in totally different direction from your mom. She was always a writer, wasn't she?

Margie Zable Fisher:

Yeah, she actually started out really early on as a secretary. She's a self-taught writer as well, but, yeah, I ended up going the business route. I had always been interested in entrepreneurial ventures. I was a good writer, but I saw how my mom struggled and, truthfully, financially it was very difficult. Growing up Again, she was a single parent and I wanted to have a little bit more security, so I ended up doing business.

Beverley Glazer:

And you built a good PR company and then you shifted to being a full time writer after 50. That's quite a shift.

Margie Zable Fisher:

That is a shift, you know. In hindsight, I think I was always a writer. Everyone expected me to be a writer. Right, I was a pretty good writer and, of course, my mom was a writer. So it was genetic somewhat. But I really feel like we do things in the time that we're supposed to do them and for me, I wasn't ready to be a writer. I just know that now. You know, even if I had studied journalism or creative writing or anything in college, it wouldn't have been the right time for me. So I really needed to get through life, get through experiences, get to a certain point where I was actually ready to write, and that was after I turned 50.

Beverley Glazer:

But where some people would say it's too late.

Margie Zable Fisher:

Some people might, but I think it's the best time time. I think especially becoming a writer after 50 is the best time because you have all these life experiences to draw from that you don't have when you're younger. I think it's it. It provides a much richer experience to be able to be a writer then and you can draw on so many resources then.

Beverley Glazer:

Well, was it hard to leave your business after over 20 years?

Margie Zable Fisher:

Well, I had already built a business, exactly, but I was really burnt out and PR, as you might know, has certainly changed and it had changed in that 20-year time because of the whole media landscape and print types of things shutting down and the online surge. But really I had had enough of promoting other people. I wanted to do my own writing. But I did have to build a business from scratch. So luckily I had some experience building a business. It was just a different type of business, so I used those same skills to build experience building a business. It was just a different type of business, so I used those same skills to build up my writing business.

Beverley Glazer:

Yes, but you wrote articles, you wrote from AARP and you wrote for other media outlets like the New York Times. These are big and it's not fiction. How did you switch to writing fiction?

Margie Zable Fisher:

Yes, Well, I wasn't planning on doing it. That was not part of my plan. If there is such a thing, right Life always shows you the way. But there was a very good reason why I shifted to fiction, and that's due to a promise I made to my mom. Happened was in 2023, two years ago.

Margie Zable Fisher:

My mom had been very sick in a very short period of time, very unexpectedly, and so really I didn't know what was going on, but sadly we found out it was pancreatic cancer. And then, right before she passed away, I just said to her hey, I want to make you a promise, I want to get your novel published. And what that meant was she had been working on an adult novel, her first adult novel. She had, 30 or 40 years prior, published some young adult and middle grade novels by major New York City publishers, but this was her first adult novel and she wasn't interested in self-publishing it. So somehow the promise I made to her meant that not only would I get her novel published, but it couldn't be self-published. I had to find a publisher for that, and I wasn't. Honestly, I was grieving, I wasn't thinking very clearly and I just felt like I wanted to promise her something. So I did, and soon after she passed away, and so right after that I picked up her novel because I thought, you know, I was a freelance writer. I'm a pretty good writer, I read a lot of fiction, and how hard could it be to make a few changes, find a publisher and ultimately fulfill her promise? But I was wrong. It was really, really hard.

Margie Zable Fisher:

I ended up having to take three months off from my regular writing business and I spent that time learning how to write fiction and writing novels in particular. So in order to do that, I had a bunch of resources. So I listened to podcasts, because I like podcasts and there's quite a few good ones on the craft of writing, especially fiction and novels. Of course, I researched information online and I actually ended up hiring a developmental editor, which is someone who can really explain the big gaps in a novel, because, truthfully, I didn't want to spend all kinds of time wasting time and I wanted to understand where the areas were that I had to focus on. So after that three months, I had added 20,000 words new characters, new plot lines, a tighter timeline, a new opening and a whole bunch more. And I also, of course, during that time, I was grieving my mom and sometimes I was writing through my tears because, you know, here's this thing I'm doing and I'm grieving and and some of the stuff mom wrote would trigger me and whatever. But ultimately it was comforting to know I was doing something to honor her while I was grieving.

Margie Zable Fisher:

And then, after the novel was finished, I spent about a year pitching agents and publishers and truly I wasn't having much luck. It's very hard to find agents and publishers nowadays, but I actually stumbled across a new small press called Sibylline Press. I actually stumbled across a new small press called Sibylline Press and what was so interesting was they only published books by women over 50. And I write a lot about women over 50. I'm a woman over 50. Mom was certainly over 50. And it was such a great fit. I still don't know how I found out about it and I have to believe that mom guided me to it. So the bottom line is that Sibling Press published the Cabernet Club, which is co-authored by Rona S Zabel that's, mom and me on January 31st 2025. We have the ebook and the print book available now, and then the audiobook will be available in late March 2025.

Beverley Glazer:

I have to hand it to you. Congratulations, thank you, because what you didn't share, and I want everyone to know, was you didn't prepare for this. No, mom was well. Yes, and it happened so fast it did so. You didn't even have time to really discuss anything with her. It just moved so quickly. She was well one day and then she collapsed and something happened. And you try to figure that out, explain that for people going through something similar, because mom was not sick, she was well oh my gosh, such a great point.

Margie Zable Fisher:

Yeah, mom was um 88. She was just a week prior. She was doing pool exercises at the pool and she's very active. And one day she called us it was a Christmas Eve day and she said I've fallen and I can't get up. You know that whole thing, and that was not like mom. You know she was very active and we were just so surprised we didn't really think much of it.

Margie Zable Fisher:

Well, we were shopping in Trader Joe's. I remember my husband said leave all this stuff. We got to go help your mom. She lived about 20 minutes away and she couldn't get up and she didn't know why she had fallen. We didn't see anything, she had tripped over or anything. But she fell and we couldn't pick her up and we were scared to pick her up, even if we could manage to, because we didn't want to. God forbid, god forbid, break anything or something. So we called the ambulance and they took her in and you know they basically said she has some kind of fracture or something. They weren't really sure in the ER, even after doing tests and whatever.

Margie Zable Fisher:

So long story short, this was Christmas Eve day. This was late December. She had been having this pain. Nothing was helping her. They were trying different treatments, nothing was helping, nothing was helping. And then, about six weeks later, we finally had a doctor. Weeks later, we finally had a doctor, after we pushed him, and pushed him do some tests, and found out that her pancreatic cancer was everywhere. So that's why she had been in such agonizing pain All of a sudden. It had, I guess, taken a while to metastasize, but when it did, it went like lightning and literally five days after that diagnosis she came to our house and then she was gone. So it was really really fast, unexpected. And yeah, we didn't know what. We had not prepared for anything, oh, and neither did she Neither did she yeah, yeah, yeah.

Beverley Glazer:

Neither did she yeah, yeah, yeah. And and so you had this death wish, if you want to call it that, and you were going through your own trauma and your own grief, but mom was always there by your side. Yes, there, even more how?

Margie Zable Fisher:

were you able to push through that? You know, I've always loved a good project and I actually believe, in hindsight, that having this project is what saved me, because I was grieving I mean, I would be crying, writing through stuff, taking a minute going into the pool, going into the shower, crying, whatever. But you know what, for me to have something like this, I actually think might have been a gift from my mom, because to just have nothing, to have no way to honor her in the way I wanted to honor her, would have been so much harder.

Beverley Glazer:

So I actually think this might have been a gift from her in spite of it all, okay, at the age of 50 plus plus, not only have you become a writer, but you started to partake in triathlons tell us about that.

Margie Zable Fisher:

So when I said I liked a good project, I I did. For my 50th year, I did the Margie project and what that was was it was a series of activities each month where I tried something new with friends, and one of the things I had always wanted to do was learn how to run, because I always had that little badge that said I'm not a runner, I'm short, I have short legs, I'm not a runner, I don't do this stuff. Well, I said I want to run a 5K. So that was one of my goals for my 50th year. And I had a friend who was a very good runner and she was coach, and we did do a 5k.

Margie Zable Fisher:

And then, when we were finished with that, she said oh, by the way, I also do triathlons and I think you should try that too. And I said what's a triathlon? Because I had no idea. And she said Well, you swim, you bike and you run a certain amount of each all together and that's a triathlon. And I said, well, I know how to swim, I know how to bike, and now I know how to run, so let's do it. So, again, she helped me train and we started doing triathlons.

Beverley Glazer:

Do you have another project going or is this it?

Margie Zable Fisher:

I'm always doing a project. I like projects. Even when I was a kid I loved projects. My next project is working on the second book in this series because I fell in love. I thought this was a one and done project with my mom and then I fell in love with the characters, so I plotted out the second and third books in the series. So my next project will be the second book.

Beverley Glazer:

Perfect. What advice would you give older women who are considering a big change in their life?

Margie Zable Fisher:

I would say, be open to anything and everything. I believe everything is possible, with a few limitations of course, but for the most part, if you can dream it, there's a way to do it.

Beverley Glazer:

And so what's the message that both you and your mom wanted to impart in the cabaret clip?

Margie Zable Fisher:

both you and your mom wanted to impart in the Cabaret Club. The message is why can't the rest of your life be the best of your life? The Cabaret Club features a newly retired main character who makes friends that are also retired, and really the goal of this main character is to finally get the life she always wanted after she retired, and even on a budget. So the goal is to let people know that, yes, you can have a great life in your second or third act, even on a budget. Even with things against you, you can still make a great life, and that's the message we want to get out there.

Beverley Glazer:

Thank you. Thank you, margie. Margie Zable Fisher gave up her PR company to become a full-time writer after turning 50. She's written articles for Fortune, for AARP, the New York Times and she fulfilled her mother's death wish by co-authoring and publishing the Cabernet Club, which was released January 25. So here are a few simple takeaways from this episode. It's never too late to reinvent yourself. You can start a new career, learn new skills and pursue new passions at any age. Your grief can be channeled into purpose. Margie honored her mother's memory by co-authoring and publishing the Cabernet Club.

Beverley Glazer:

Pursue what lights you up, whether it's writing. Pursue what lights you up, whether it's writing triathlons or changing your career. You have the power to live your best chapter. If you've been relating to this story, take a moment and reflect how you can break through your own limitations. Perhaps it's by appreciating your strengths, upgrading your skills, getting support or just to start, by believing that you can do it, and then take one small step in that direction. For similar inspiring stories on changing your life after 50, check out episodes 97 and 108. And if you like these stories, you may also like Older Women and Friends podcast, which explores the contributions older women make and the wisdom that they share. That's also going to be in the show notes as well, so where can people learn more about you, margie, and buy the book? What are the links?

Margie Zable Fisher:

Well, my website is a good place to start and the website address is margiezfishercom, and let me spell that. So it's M-A-R-G-I-E, the letter Z like zebra fisher, F-I-S-H-E-Rcom, the letter Z like zebra Fischer F-I-S-H-E-Rcom. And you can buy the book pretty much any online platform, definitely Amazon, and we're working on getting them into libraries and other places, but right now, Amazon and online are the place to go Terrific.

Beverley Glazer:

And all these links. If you didn't catch them, they're also going to be in the show notes and they'll also be on my site too, that's reinventimpossiblecom. And now, my friends, what's next for you? Are you just going through the motions or are you really passionate about your life? Get my weekly self-coaching tips to empower you through your journey, and that link will also be in the show notes below. You can connect with me, beverly Glazer, on all social media platforms and in my positive group of women on Facebook that's Women Over 50 Rock and if you're looking for guidance in your own transformation, I invite you to explore reinventimpossiblecom, thank you. Thank you for listening and have you enjoyed this conversation? Subscribe so you don't miss out on the next one, and send this episode to a friend. And remember you only have one life, so live it with purpose and passion.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining us. You can connect with Bev on her website, reinventimpossiblecom and, while you're there, join our newsletter Subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep aging with purpose and passion and celebrate life.