The Current - How GEEZER magazine is reclaiming aging

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

We speak to Laura LeBleu, the founding editor of GEEZER. It is a print-only magazine focused on the Gen X aging experience. LeBleu reflects on reaching midlife and realizing the stories we’re told about aging do not quite match how it actually feels. She talks about uncertainty. About pressure. About humour. And about what it means to reach this stage of life without a clear script.

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This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. You know, when young people say the word geyser, it's generally not used as a compliment. Shorthand for old, out of touch, maybe a little cranky, definitely not cool. The kind of word you hear when someone's complaining about their parents or a professor or anybody who still remembers dial-up internet, you know, a geyser. Laura LeBlu heard that word and thought,

yeah, I'll take it. Laura is the founding editor of Geiser, a print-only magazine about what it feels like to hit midlife as a gen Xer. She was feeling that the conventional conversations about aging weren't really capturing the messy realities of her own generation. Laura joins us now from Nevada City, California. Laura, good morning. Hey, good morning, Matt. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being here. So as I mentioned, people hear that word geyser. And a lot of people cringe. That's not me. I'm not old enough. of touch. You actually smiled when you heard that word. What does Gieser mean to you? Oh, my goodness. Yes. Okay. Gyser. Gieser the word. Well, first of all, I just think of the funny word. Gyser. Gyser. It's fun. It's funny. Right. It's good to say. But mostly, and this is where you'll be

able to tell that, you know, it was not necessarily a mastermind from some marketing department somewhere. It honestly came to me in the shower. I thought to myself, you know what? I'm going to make a print-only magazine, and I'm going to call it geyser. And the reason is, you know, it's kind of like we're going to take back the word. We're just going to make it ours and just go with it because we all know that we're getting older. So we might as well just, you know, just claim it now. So I kind of like to say that we're pre-geezering, if you will.

I like that. Take it back. Tell me about your own story in getting old. You turned 50 and what happened? Oh, yes. You know, it's so many people for it happens. You turn 50 and all of a sudden you really do, and it's totally cliche, but you look around and you start to re-evaluate your life. You think about your life choices.

You look at where you are and you go, wow, okay, how exactly did I get here? And I definitely had that revelation. I had been for myself as a creative. I come from a theater and a writing background, and I had been writing for other people for 25 years in different industries and creating for other people. And suddenly, I just caught fire when I realized that I was in my 50s and I had not actually had a chance to truly express myself and to write for myself

and to create something. It really felt like it was an expression of my own creativity and my own vision. And, you know, you can kind of sublimate that, I think, for a long time, because we have families, we have obligations, we need to pay the bills. But when I turned 50, I kind of caught fire. And I just knew that I could not continue to go forward without actually expressing myself in a way that felt genuine in a way that I would hope to, you know, share with the world. You know, it's also a turning point. When I, I just turned 55 not so long ago, and I got a notification saying, you're, you're a geese. I am a geyser. And I knew that because I got, I was able to get a discount at a drugstore. And I thought, how dare you say that I'm allowed?

Did you take offense when you hit that turning point or perhaps were, um, were eligible for certain Certain benefits. Oh, my gosh. Matt, okay, literally last weekend I went into the hardware store. And a woman asked me if I wanted the senior discount. And I looked at her. And I was like, what the what? What would I want that?

But then I walked out and I was like, you know, I should have just gotten that discount, man. So one of the things, one of the reasons behind the, the birth of Geyser magazine was, remembering that visceral anger of receiving my first AARP mailer. This is from the Association for Retired People. Yes, yes. So this is, I'm not sure if we extend up into Canada, but North America, it is the, it is the behemoth organization for the older set. So they sent me a flyer, and I felt very, very stabby about the entire thing.

Because that is for my parents. I'm like, you're not having the conversations I'm having. And I just didn't feel as if they were really touching on the realities of what it is to be middle age today. It felt very much for my parents. Now, I have nothing against them. I feel like, you know what? Get that discount. Join them.

You know, get that 15% at whatever store it is. But what it did is what it revealed to me what I felt like was a gaping hole in. the way that we're telling stories and the way that we're speaking about middle age today. Our generation is a different generation. And as you say in the magazine, Gen X was raised differently, unsupervised, pre-PC, personal computers and political correctness. We rode the bus by ourselves. We read books made of paper and came home when the streetlights turned on. What was missing from the conversations that you were seeing about aging when it came to Gen Xers? Yeah. You know, when I...

I was surveying the landscape of what was being talked about. Things really felt superficial. I was getting, all of a sudden, I was getting pop-ups on my social media or whatever, and they're trying to sell me the top 10 ways to get more fiber into my body. I thought, that's really not my main concern here. The main concerns of our generation are, like I was saying, very different from the previous generation. A lot of us are dealing with having kids, still raising kids, while our parents are experiencing decline. And in fact, one of the most beautiful stories in issue number one is a personal

narrative by a woman named Kim Cross. She's an award-winning writer. And it's about her experience with her son becoming a senior in high school. And at the same time, her mother, moving in with them because she has dementia. And that was, that that's kind of the kind of storytelling that I like to, to propagate in Gieser because it has depth, it has warmth, it has humor, that it's also very real as to what we're going through right now. It also has a collage of mixed tapes and cassette tapes on a cover, including, you of those old Memorex 90-minute cassette tapes that you would make, you know, mix tapes and pause

tapes from the radio on. I mean, part of this is about capturing, you know, kind of the, the energy and the nostalgia that people of that generation still have about their youth. Yeah. And, you know, my co-editor, Paul von Zielbauer and I have had a lot of conversations about, okay, what is the mix in this magazine? How much is nostalgia? How much is looking forward? And how much are we really addressing the way that we're aging right now, which is with, a lot of energy. That's the other thing I want to say. We love some nostalgia and I love the totems and the iconography of Gen X.

We got a lot of good stuff, including that Reality Bites quote that you played earlier, which I'm very much a fan of. So we were, you know, when we're looking at how we're doing the editorial mix, we want to nod to the, we want to nod to those. those generational things that bring us all together like the mixtape. But then we also really want to do profiles of people who are aging with a lot of strength, a lot of energy, with a lot of creativity. That's one of the things that is my personal passion of looking into. It's how can you continue to sustain your creativity over a long period of time and also accelerate it, which is one of the

One of the great stories we have in issue number one is about an artist named Mark Pauline, who basically kind of created the robot-based performance art. So robots that explode things and, you know, blow fire. And he used to have these brilliant shows in San Francisco. It actually all throughout the world, he's an NIA-granted artist back in the day. But right now, he's having a hard time getting a show. although he is still as uncompromisingly creative as he has always been, but the world is not as, you know,

is not as friendly toward this kind of in-your-face art anymore. So how does he navigate, you know, still having this amazing creative, creative, wherewithal, and, you know, this desire to make his art in a world that has kind of changed around him. So that's another kind of. kind of story that we would address in Guter. Why would you do this in a print magazine?

I mean, we grew up reading magazines, but also making zines, right? Those stapled together, kind of handed around, or if you were lucky, sold. But that was way back when. Why would you make a print magazine now? I know so many people asked me that question. They look at me like a little bit, you know, touched in the head and they go, wait, print only? And I, from the very beginning, I was very vehement about this being really a print-only magazine. One of the reasons is because I believe that our generation especially, we remember the power of print.

We know what it is to hold it in our hands to sit down with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, turn off all the electronics, get all the beeps and boobs in another room, and to just allow yourself to get lost in these beautiful pages. So I just felt like, you know, as a society, we're at a place where we're inundated with digital information. Our attention is being constantly bombarded. And this was one way to, instead of spending $5,000 to go to some, you know, phone-free retreat in Arizona, you can just get this magazine and give your yourself the space to sit with it and enjoy some storytelling. Every generation thinks that it's aging differently than the other generations around.

I'm not getting old. Is Generation X really that different in terms of how it thinks about aging? I believe we are. I really, really do. And yes, I'm sure every generation feels the same way. but because of the different forces in our society, and especially because of just when we were born, not only are we that little smashed up generation in between the millennials and the boomers, you know, we've always kind of had the sensibility that we were not really paid attention to. And that gave us some freedom, actually, in a way, to really define ourselves. to decide, okay, how are we going to live our lives? And now we're bringing that same spirit into how are we going to age. You know, we're making different decisions because of, like I was saying,

you know, there are certain cultural elements that are happening. There are economic elements that we're all dealing with. You know, it was interesting. 2025, it started with, you know, as far as the Gen X conversation was going, the New York, New York Times came out with an article that really caught fire about how a lot of Gen Xers were losing their jobs and, you know, what they were doing, how they were dealing with. So we started out as kind of, you know, these, you know, this generation of terrible position, you know, AI is coming. All of our expertise is not necessarily as appreciated as it should be. But then by the end of the year, they had the whole profile on how GenX was the coolest generation. And they brought out all of the wonderful GenX stars.

And I thought, well, this has been an interesting year in the conversation around us. But I do feel like, you know, between the technology that we've experienced, you know, I remember getting our first answering machine for a phone. And between that and where we are today, we've really been in the mix of all of this massive change that has happened as we have evolved along with it and driven a lot of that technology. So, you know, what does that look like as well? And then, yes, economically, it's such a weird time. And like I was saying, we find ourselves smushed between still taking care of our kids, having to deal with our parents, and also trying to maintain, you know, our own lives and fulfill our own visions for what we want. I have to let you go.

But, I mean, in some ways, you even starting this magazine is kind of one of those midlife moments where you decide that, as you say, getting old isn't about getting old. and that you can kick ass in your second half. What's the message, do you think, to all of us? You know, and I want Gen X, and I want people to see this magazine, pick it up, feel it, and just really feel seen. I want them to know that we are paying attention. We want to tell your stories.

We want to help you tell your own stories. You know, we take people's submissions as well. And I just want, I want us to feel like we have something to get inspired by and to dig into and to know that we are all part of the geyser tribe. And it's cool to be a geyser.

Yes. Hey man. Geysering is the best. Laura, thank you very much. I appreciate this. Thank you so much for having me. I hope everyone takes a look at geyser magazine dot com and gets their geyser on. Laura LeBlu is the founding editor of

Geiser magazine. A proud geyser herself. The magazine publishes three times a she was in Nevada City, California. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca slash the current

or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.