Mindful Libraries: Enhancing Well-Being Through Meaningful Connection
Aug 01, 2025
This month we’re excited to hear from Laurette Klier, founder of Nana's Book Series and co-founder of Mindful Libraries. Laurette is on a mission to weave universal threads that connect, uplift, and honor those living with Alzheimer’s and related dementias through the power of mindful reading. Read on to learn more about Laurette and her passion for serving those living with dementia.
When we shift our perspective from seeing dementia as purely a disease to understanding it as a different way of experiencing the world, we open ourselves to profound possibilities. The work of Mindful Libraries—a collaboration between Nana's Book Series, Mirador Magazine, and The Resense Register—represents this paradigm shift in action, creating dementia-inclusive reading materials that honor the person while supporting their fundamental need for connection and meaning.
Rather than focusing on what has been lost, we ask a different question: How can we enhance well-being through the simple yet profound act of reading?
Seeing the Person, Not the Deficit
My journey began with Mary, my mother-in-law living with Lewy body dementia. The traditional care narrative would focus on her declining reading abilities, her growing withdrawal from family conversations, her inability to follow complex narratives. But Mary's story isn't one of loss—it's one of transformation and the enduring power of human connection.
As an educator, I recognized that Mary's challenges weren't failures; they were unmet needs expressing themselves through behavior. Her apparent disengagement with reading wasn't cognitive deficit—it was a mismatch between her current experience of the world and the materials available to her. She remained a reader; she simply needed reading materials that met her where she was.
When I created simplified, dignified materials woven with nostalgic poetry, familiar prayers, and evocative imagery, something remarkable happened. During one winter visit, a vintage Christmas carol book sparked Mary's detailed recollection of a neighborhood snowball fight from eight decades earlier. In that moment, Mary wasn't a person with dementia struggling with memory—she was a storyteller, a keeper of family history, a person whose experiences mattered.
This encounter revealed a fundamental truth: when we provide the right supports, people living with dementia don't lose their capacity for engagement; they demonstrate their resilience and retained strengths in ways that can astonish us.
A Strengths-Based Approach to Reading
Traditional approaches to dementia often focus on managing symptoms or slowing decline. Mindful Libraries takes a different path, one that aligns with contemporary understanding of person-centered care. We don't create "dementia books" that segregate or stigmatize. Instead, we design authentic publications—real books, magazines, and newspapers—that happen to be accessible to people experiencing cognitive changes.
This distinction matters profoundly. When Nikki Jardin's Aunt Rebecca, living with young-onset dementia, becomes absorbed in a pet-themed issue of Mirador Magazine while a dog rests in her lap, she isn't participating in therapy. She's engaging in the deeply human pleasure of reading about something she loves. As a former pet sitter, Rebecca brings her expertise and passion to each page, demonstrating that her identity and interests persist despite her diagnosis.
Our materials support what I call "natural engagement"—reading that happens organically throughout the day, not confined to structured activities or clinical settings. A newspaper at the breakfast table, a poetry collection on the bedside stand, a magazine in the living room. These become invitations to connection, not reminders of limitation.
Seven Domains of Well-Being in Action
Effective dementia support enhances multiple dimensions* of human experience simultaneously. Through Mindful Libraries, we see how daily, authentic reading experience can support:
Identity and Self-Worth: Publications that look and feel mainstream affirm readers as engaged adults, not patients requiring special materials.
Connectedness: Shared reading experiences create opportunities for meaningful conversation between family members, friends, and care partners.
Security and Comfort: Familiar formats like broadsheet newspapers provide the reassuring ritual of morning reading that many find deeply soothing.
Autonomy and Choice: Materials available throughout living spaces allow people to read when and what appeals to them in the moment.
Meaning and Purpose: Content celebrating universal human experiences—cultural traditions, seasonal celebrations, timeless wisdom—connects readers to larger narratives of belonging.
Growth and Learning: Even as cognitive abilities change, people continue to find new insights in familiar stories and images.
Joy and Humor: The simple pleasure of discovering a meaningful poem or recognizing a cherished memory brings genuine delight.
Reframing Our Understanding
The success of Mindful Libraries challenges us to reconsider fundamental assumptions about cognitive change and reading capacity. When a daughter watches her mother's face light up over a carefully chosen proverb, we're not witnessing a brief breakthrough in a disease process. We're seeing evidence of enduring personhood—the continuing capacity for reflection, emotion, and connection that defines human experience.
This reframing has practical implications. Instead of mourning lost abilities, families and care partners can focus on creating environments that support retained strengths. Instead of seeing reading as impossible for people with dementia, we recognize that different kinds of reading materials may be needed to facilitate meaningful engagement.
An Invitation to Partnership
The creation of Mindful Libraries represents more than product development; it embodies a philosophical commitment to seeing possibility rather than limitation. When we approach dementia from a strengths-based perspective, we discover that people continue to surprise us with their capacity for growth, connection, and joy.
This work invites all of us—families, care partners, communities—to examine our own assumptions. Do we see dementia as a wall that separates us from meaningful relationships, or as a different landscape that requires new maps for navigation?
Mindful Libraries provides those maps. Through carefully crafted books, magazines, and newspapers, we create pathways to continued engagement with the written word. More importantly, we create opportunities for the kinds of human connection that nurture the spirit long after specific cognitive abilities have changed.
The invitation is simple yet profound: Join us in seeing the person, supporting their well-being, and celebrating the enduring power of story to connect us all.
We invite you, your friends, and communities of all kinds to join us. Let’s discuss how we can work together.
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Learn more:
*Seven Domains of Well-Being: Allen Power, Dementia Beyond Disease: Enhancing Well-Being, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Health Professions Press, 2020).
