by Betsy Fasbinder | Jun 7, 2023 | Podcasts
Margo Fowkes is the mother of two children – Jimmy, forever age 21, and his younger sister Molly, who is now 26. After Jimmy’s death in 2014, Margo created Salt Water, a blog and online community that provides a safe harbor for those who are grieving the death of someone dear to them.
Margo is the president of OnTarget Consulting, a firm specializing in helping organizations and their leaders act strategically, improve their performance, and achieve their business goals.
Last September, on what should have been Jimmy’s 30th birthday, Margo published Leading Through Loss: How to Navigate Grief at Work. The book provides practical tools and ideas from leaders who’ve dealt with loss and offers insights into the perspective and experiences of grieving employees: what they want and need, what helps and what hurts, what support they were deeply grateful for, and what they wish their leaders had done differently.
by Betsy Fasbinder | May 17, 2023 | Podcasts
Carlyn Montes de Oca grew up surrounded by secrets. She never knew that her dad was a Marin during World War II or that her grandmother hired kidnappers to bring her mother back home after her parents eloped. But her parents took an even bigger secret to their graves…Carlyn’s identity. At age 57, a DNA test taken for fun revealed that Carlyn’s parents were not her biological parents and everyone in her family, including more than 60 first cousins, knew but hadn’t told her. The search for her lineage, her identity, and her truth would result in Carlyn’s memoir, Junkyard Girl: A Memoir of Ancestry, Secrets, and Second Chances.
Carlyn is also the author of Dog as my Doctor, Cat as My Nurse and serves as a sought-after expert on human health and well-being.
by Betsy Fasbinder | May 3, 2023 | Podcasts
For 21 days in 1976, Carol Menaker served with eleven others on a sequestered jury in the trial of Frederick Burton, a young Black Revolutionary charged with the grisly murders of two white prison wardens. She was 24 years old.
Forty-seven years later, she is publishing a memoir in which she unravels the trauma of that experience and comes to the unsettling conclusion that her youth, naïveté, and white privilege may have led her to convict a man whose shoes she never could have walked in. Mr. Burton, now 77 years old, remains incarcerated in a Pennsylvania prison.
Today, Carol has become an advocate for criminal justice reform and looks forward to the way her story will influence others with the political and legislative willpower to consider “second chance” laws for the thousands like Mr. Burton serving excessive sentences with no hope through the courts of earning their freedom.
Carol chronicles her experience in her new memoir, The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done: One Juror’s Reckoning with Racial Injustice.
by Betsy Fasbinder | Apr 19, 2023 | Podcasts
For lots of us, there’s the life we plan and then there is reality. At age 22, looking forward to a life full of opportunity for success and happiness, Jennifer Cramer-Miller got tossed into a world she’d never imagined. Diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease that caused kidney failure, she would face dialysis, and ultimately not only one kidney transplant, but four…and counting. This led her to become a “joy scouter.” The title of her memoir Incurable Optimist: Living with Illness and Chronic Hope (August 2023) is a hint to not only how Jennifer has coped for more than 30 years with illness, but how she lives her whole life. But she’s no Polly Anna, ignoring the hard stuff. Her optimism is born of living with reality, with the operative word being living. Anyone dealing with disappointment, hopelessness, or fear will be inspired by Jennifer’s infectious optimism. Listen in to her inspiring story.
by Betsy Fasbinder | Apr 5, 2023 | Podcasts
How will empathetic people survive the troubles of this time? How do we rescue our overburdened spirits from overlapping disasters such as rising fascism and climate collapse? And from where can we summon the power to heal ourselves, our communities, and the planet?
These are the animating questions behind singer, songwriter, and storyteller Shannon Curtis’s newest album Good to Me—Curtis’s 10th studio album and in her book of the same name.
Confronted in late 2021 with near-paralyzing anxiety brought about by the increasingly fraught state of the world, Curtis aimed her angst at her journal. Using tools she acquired in 12-step recovery, she set out on a quest for self-healing, with the intention of nurturing her personal sense of peace and agency in a world on fire.
The result is a song journey and an accompanying book that took Curtis through a practice of identifying failed coping mechanisms, coming to terms with radical acceptance, learning to trust her inner truth and reconnecting to her serenity and power even as the world continued to burn.
The extended Good to Me album project aims to illuminate a path for others to undertake this same journey for themselves—complete with a companion book and scripted podcast.
