Past Episodes
Sandy Phillips: Self-care for Survival
There are certain groups to which nobody wants to belong. High among that list of undesirable memberships is to be one whose loved one has been stolen from you by gun violence. Sandy Phillips and her husband Lonnie are members of this loathsome club. Their daughter, Jessica Ghawi, was murdered in the massacre at the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in the Summer of 2012 in Aurora, Colorado. Their grief and rage could not be measured and the loss of their beloved daughter was unimaginable.
They made two life-changing decisions in the midst of their grief: they’d cling to one another, keeping their marriage intact as so many survivors had not, and they’d turn their heartbreak into action to prevent the tragedy of gun violence for other families. They founded an organization to offer compassion, support, and resources to help the far too many new survivors immediately after their loved ones are taken, and through their grief process. Survivors Empowered is exactly what its name implies, an empowerment group, to not only support survivors, but to relentlessly confront legislators and businesses who have the power to prevent future gun violence.
Find out about Survivors Empowered at SurvivorsEmpowered.org
Audrey Edwards: American Runaway
Whether doing international reporting under the aegis of the United Nations on the effects of a drought in sub-Saharan Africa in 1984, or interviewing influencers as diverse as Oprah Winfrey and Maxine Waters, Audrey Edwards has had a 40-year career as a journalist with work that has won awards, been used in university courses, and referenced on national television talk shows.
A former senior-level editor for the national publications Essence, Black Enterprise, Family Circle and More magazine. Audrey has also authored seven books, most notably the groundbreaking Children of the Dream: The Psychology of Black Success (Doubleday, 1992), co-authored with Dr. Craig Polite.
Her latest work, AMERICAN RUNAWAY: Black and Free in Paris in the Trump Years (August Press, 2020), is a wise and wisecracking memoir on her decision to run from America following the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. Paris has historically offered refuge to Black Americans running from American racism, be they soldiers following World War I, or the writers, musicians, artists and other creative thinkers who have been coming to the City of Light for 100 years. She chose to run as an older, retired Baby Boomer who had benefited from the enormous social and political gains of her generation’s revolutionary activism. She was not inclined to remain in America watching those gains come under assault by the new Donald Trump political regime.
Clea Simon: Surviving a Mad House
Before turning to a life of crime (or at least writing fictional crime), Boston Globe-bestselling author and multiple Massachusetts Center for the Book honoree Clea Simon was a journalist. The author of three nonfiction books and 31 mysteries, most recently the amateur sleuth adventure Bad Boy Beat, her books alternate between cozies (usually featuring cats) and darker psychological thrillers and amateur sleuth suspense.
Clea’s personal story is rich with drama too. A recent cancer survivor, her unstoppable optimism has served as an essential element of her healing process. But what’s most remarkable about this optimism is that is was born in a childhood of extraordinary challenge, including schizophrenia that plagued her two siblings and cost one his life as she describes in Mad House: Growing Up in the Shadow of Mentally Ill Siblings. The survival of this Clea’s dedication, creativity, resilience, and humor makes this author’s lived story, as remarkable as the ones she writes in her fiction.
Caroline Leavitt: Days of Wonder
Caroline Leavitt’s mother told her that all the Leavitt women were cursed with tragic lives. And, at first it seemed true. Caroline’s young fiancé died in her arms from a heart attack two weeks before their wedding. She was in a coma and in the hospital for months with a mysterious critical illness no one thought she could survive. And her writing career shattered, making it seem that she would never be published again. But Caroline refused to let despair break her. Instead, she persisted with hope and resilience, knowing that sometimes the biggest tragedies can make future happiness even brighter. She ignored setbacks to become a New York Times bestselling novelist, ignored statistics to marry and have a child in her forties, and she became a part of a wonderful community by helping writers during Lockdown by cofounding A Mighty Blaze.
Caroline is a New York Times bestselling author of 13 novels, her most recent being Days of Wonder.
Alex Kuisis: Truth Matters, Love Wins
Alex Kuisis was a happily married early-childhood-educator-turned-health coach, living a beautifully fulfilling life in Denver, Colorado, when the doorbell rang on September 1, 2016. It was the police, there to arrest her for seven felony crimes that she did not commit.
Truth Matters, Love Wins is both an astounding account of fighting false accusations in a slanted criminal justice system, and an uplifting testament to choosing integrity and introspection when responding to staggering levels of betrayal. Alex’s dedication to surviving her darkest hour through faith, love, and personal growth will captivate and inspire you.
A must-read for anyone curious about how to handle the pain and anger that accompanies life’s most devastating curveballs, Truth Matters, Love Wins showcases the power of keeping love close when you know you have the truth on your side.
Cara Brown: Life in Full Color
Cara Brown is an award-winning watercolor artist and teacher, though she came about this having this be her life quite unexpectedly. When she was 24, her first husband proposed marriage to her – in front of a group of friends. She didn’t say yes or no, she said “I want kids.” She had always yearned for the whole experience available to people in female bodies – becoming a mother, including being pregnant and giving birth.
When life circumstances deemed that not possible, she went into a dark time, wondering how her life could be fulfilling, how it could have meaning, given this crushing disappointment. She prayed for the energy to pursue adoption – or to be given something else.
Within a few years, it became obvious what that something else would be. She was asked by a friend to show her art for the first time in 2007. In 2011 she led her first groups of watercolor student-artists. In the years since, these two aspects of her life have evolved, grown, and flourished. She almost stumbled upon a rich and fulfilling life of art making and providing instruction and the supportive environments in which people best expand and learn. Living a Life in Full Color is Cara’s mission, for herself and all of us.
You can find out more about Carta and see her art at: LifeInFullColor.com and find her podcast about art and life, Watercolor Conversations wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
Leah Lax: Not From Here
When Leah Lax was asked to write a libretto for an opera intended to celebrate local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to the stories of upheaval, migration, and arrival, told to her in confidence by people from around the globe. She felt she had discovered the song of America, found its great beating heart. But Leah also discovered troubling truths about America, through the eyes of immigrants, and in so doing was inspired to uncover the lost history of her own Jewish family. Through this interwoven experience of their story and hers, Leah found not only a larger context for the story of immigrants, but a new way of looking at how her own identity, rather than as a member of a small “minority”, but as a part of a very large majority who are here in this country because either they or their parents immigrated from another country. Nearly two decades after Leah had those conversations, long after the opera she wrote had left the stage, she captured those stories into this “libretto” of a story, her extraordinary new book, Not From Here: The Song of America.
Leah was a guest on The Morning Glory Project after her deeply stirring memoir, Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home, which was the first gay memoir ever to come out of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox world. Leah’s dual career as an author and as a librettist has brought her many well-deserved accolades. When she’s not writing, you can find her playing cello or kayaking around the world with her wife.
Susanna Solomon: Finding Her Own Path
Growing up as a girl in the 1950’s girls were not expected to have any career goals. They were
going to be housewives. Susanna Solomon’s mother complained bitterly about her lot in life. Her father told her she was too stupid to go to college, then he fell in love with someone else—someone other than Susanna’s mother. When her mother took her own life when Susanna was fourteen, the upheaval in the family was seismic.
At 20 she met a guy who was loving and warm and wonderful. At first he was great fun, but
he liked to drink. Each year went by things became more difficult, as he would yell and stagger, and diminish Susanna and their two children. After 11 years, Susanna made the decision to get a divorce, but she knew she didn’t have enough skills to support herself and her kids on her own and that “women’s jobs” of that era wouldn’t provide enough.
She decided that she would need what was then called a “man’s” career, with a “man’s income”. Everyone she knew, but for her brother, made fun of her for what seemed like an absurd choice. After six-and-a-half years, she graduated Summa Cum Laude, got a job and ended her marriage, becoming a single parent.
In her delightful short story collections, Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls, and More Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls, Susanna takes the tidbits of sheriff’s call incidents published in her local small-town paper and imagines what the late Paul Harvey might have called “the rest of the story”. In her more recent publication, Paris Beckons, she continues to do what she’s always done… breaking from the expected, weaving her lived experiences and fictional storytelling throughout a collection of short stories that put a different light on loss, memory, and independence.
Kathryn Abdul-Baki: Dancing Into the Light
Kathryn Abdul-Baki was born in Washington, DC, to an Arab father and an American mother. In addition to her bi-cultural immediate family, she had a globetrotting childhood, growing up with dramatic changes in community and culture as her father’s work brought them to Iran, Kuwait, Beirut, and Jerusalem.
The geographical and cultural changes were huge, but dwarfed in comparison to the tragic losses her family would sustain. When she was 7, Kathryn’s brother was born and would be struggle with a heart defect that required extensive treatment. During this time, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Her brother died at the age of 18-month. Her mother at age 32, and Kathryn’s whole world changed.
Kathryn, despite a happy marriage and beloved children of her own, would find herself in the throes of depression as she came to her own thirtieth birthday. With what were then inexplicable feelings of abandonment, she’d make an attempt to take her own life. Behind the scrim of her own life, there would always be the image of the mother she lost before she ever got to really know her.
It was by reconnecting to the joyful aspects of her early life that Kathryn was able to heal, and specifically through dancing that she’d reconnect to this joy. Her memoir, Dancing Into the Light gives readers a unique glimpse into her story, into Arab culture, and into the psyche of a young Arab woman.
Donna Stoneham: Life after Life
Donna Stoneham and her mother found a special closeness in the end of Mary Ruth’s life. Theirs had been a relationship fraught with challenge throughout most of their shared lifetime but in her mother’s final years, the two found healing and deep connection. When Mary Ruth passed, Donna was launched into a new kind of transformational grief journey in which the conversation with her mother did not end with her passing at age 88. Catch Me When I Fall is a moving collection of poems and letters through which Donna keeps her heart open to the mystery and power of transcendent, eternal love that lives on beyond the human lifetime.
Donna’s lifelong experience as a poet accustomed to seeking meaning, her professional experience as an executive coach, and her history as a hospice chaplain inform her rich and deep exploration of connection with her mom as a part of not only grieving death, but embracing life. A balm for a grieving heart, Catch Me When I Fall is an inspiration for anyone who has lost someone they love. Part love song, part grief map, this collection offers another way to look at loss and a thousand ways to embrace life.
Donna is also the author of The Thrivers Edge: Seven Keys to Transform the Way You Live, Love, and Lead.
Jennifer Marshall: Her Turn to Talk
Jennifer Marshall experienced four psychiatric hospitalizations within five years—two before any diagnosis was reached, and two more because she was trying to protect her son during her own postpartum psychosis and later after going off medication to protect her unborn daughter. All of those hospitalizations were because she was unmedicated at the time. Then, seven years later, after seven and a half years of stability, she suffered a manic episode after the death of her friend and partner who had helped her launch her non-profit, Anne Marie Ames. Living in recovery with bi-polar disorder is a daily struggle, but Jennifer is determined to live successfully despite mental illness. With good health practices, good medical care, and the support of friends and loved ones Jennifer continues her campaign to de-stigmatize mental illness and to celebrate the brave people who put their names and faces to it. Jennifer founded “This is My Brave”, an organization to celebrate the stories of those who struggle with or have relationships with those who struggle with all forms of mental illness.
Gretchen Cherington: A Deeper Search for Family Truth
As a follow up to her memoir Poetic License which came out in 2020, Gretchen Cherington dug deeper into family myth and lore, resulting in her new memoir The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy—A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry.
In the early 1900s, Gretchen’s paternal grandfather was recruited by George A. Hormel to help him build what is now the multi-billion dollar food conglomerate Hormel Foods. As a child, Gretchen listened to riveting stories about these two men from her father. Third in the trio was the company’s comptroller, Ransome J. Thomson, who, over a decade, embezzled $1.2 Million from the Hormel company and nearly brought it to its knees. Rumors suggested Gretchen’s grandfather was “in cahoots” with the embezzler. But was he? Gretchen sent out to investigate this question.
Research led Gretchen to business documents, letters, and historical records that helped her find a few of the missing pieces of the picture that is her family’s history puzzle. Kirkus calls this new book “A dazzling account that deftly combines crime, drama, history, and introspective remembrance…a mesmerizing story filled with drama, suspense, and told with remarkable emotional insights.”
Nicki Traikos: Life I Design
Nicki Traikos has been an artist at heart her entire life, though in her early career she thought she had to choose a more “practical and profitable” way to earn a living. But her creative self found its way into every job until eventually she decided she wanted to be a full-time artist, but not a starving artist. Today Nicki is the living embodiment of her company’s name: Life I Design. She has built a successful art career as a teacher, as a creative who sells her own work, and now as a published author with an upcoming book to help others develop their artistic skills.
While the medium Nicki has used through her career may have changed greatly over the years, the goal has always been the same: to have the courage to try, and to find joy in the moments exploring. Known best for her “Watercolors Made Simple” online classes and new book of the same name, Nicki has a casual and approachable philosophy about making art and inspires other artists to adopt it, too. It’s not about achieving perfection, but about having the joy of experiencing artistic expression, developing techniques so that they can create art that pleases them, and for each creative person to find their own style.
Christy Warren: Flashpoint
Christy Warren is a retired fire captain/paramedic from the Berkeley, California Fire Department, with 25 years of service as a first responder. In 2014, she was diagnosed with PTSD and struggled through shame, exhaustion and feelings of suicide to finally ask for help so she could fight for her recovery. In her memoir, Flashpoint: A Firefighter’s Journey Through PTSD Christy reveals with both candor and vulnerability the nearly unimaginable challenges that first responders face, the pressure they feel to be invulnerable to the mental health impact of their work, and the value of support, treatment, and healing for the brave people who serve.
Joanne Greene: Not By Accident
Small in stature, large in presence, and always in charge, Joanne Greene anchored the news and hosted talk shows on San Francisco radio while totally devoted to her family—until a traumatic accident suddenly removed her ability to control anything.
Her debut book, By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go is a story of resilience and perseverance, of will and pluck, and of positivity and gratitude for lessons learned—even as the personal hits just keep on coming. Joanne also hosts two podcasts—“In This Story…”, XX minute musings on XXX and “All the F Words”, which she and her Gen X co-host explore everything from fun and friendship to Fiber, Fraud, and Feng Shui.
Margo Fowkes: Salt Water
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.
Carlyn Montes de Oca: Junkyard Girl
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.
Carol Menaker: The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done
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.
Jennifer Cramer-Miller: Incurable Optimism
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.
***Extra Blooms*** with Shannon Curtis: Good to Me
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.
Arin Fugate: The Freedom to Trust Again
Arin Fugate is a survivor. From between the ages of 11-21, she was raised as a “resident” of a spiritual cult and deemed for a time the “ceremonial virgin” whose mother surrendered her child’s custody to the spiritual leader. Deprived of food, education, and freedom of thought, Arin was isolated from a world she’d been taught to fear and indoctrinated in the twisted spirituality of the leader. Arin emerged from the cult experience at 21 unprepared to identify abuse or protect herself from it. Perhaps her most challenging and enduring deficit is being unable to resist an authoritative voice, requiring her to exercise great care in selecting the people she can truly trust.
Having overcome addiction, anxiety, depression, and other limitations from years of abuse she is now dedicated to facilitating the rise of the Female Visionary. She serves on the board of Ride My Road, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping survivors of sex trafficking, founded by past Morning Glory Project guest, Lauren Trantham.
Arin is a mother of two daughters, wife, and a business owner. She knows how hard it can be for women to carve a path to their dreams. By sharing her passion for natural wellness, and entrepreneurship with inspired business owners, she helps women to find their strengths and to pursue their dreams.
Isidra Mencos: Promenade of Desire
Isidra Mencos was born and raised in Barcelona when her home country was under the oppressive rule of Franco and strict religious teachings. Isidra spent her twenties experimenting with the new freedoms afforded by the end of Franco’s dictatorship, causing her to have a double life of “good girl” and “rebel.” She immersed herself in books and dancing, and working at various jobs. In 1992 she moved to the US to earn a Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American contemporary literature at UC Berkeley, where she taught for twelve years. After a ten-year stint in the corporate world managing teams in several countries, in 2016 she focused on creative writing. She tells of her journey in her memoir, Promenade of Desire, A Barcelona Memoir, published in 2022.
Meesh: The Miracle of the Psyche
It can be a helpless feeling to watch a loved one slipping away, becoming increasingly lost to mental illness, drug use, and even homelessness. In this very personal episode, the host of The Morning Glory Project welcomes a loved one, once thought lost. Using only a nickname to protect her privacy, Meesh, now stable, self-sufficient, and four years sober, shares her story of how the toxic cocktail of un-medicated mental illness and methamphetamine use dragged her from her life to the fringes of society—to homelessness, repeated incarceration. She’ll share not only the experience of being lost, but how even in her broken mental state, her psyche served to protect her and help her find her way to health.
Kathia: Rejecting Cynicism, Keeping Love
With over 6 million books sold (and counting), Kathia’s novels have been #1 bestsellers around the world. They’ve received starred reviews, have consistently earned Editor’s Picks for Best Romance, and have been featured by O, The Oprah Magazine. Kathia has written over 40 books and counting, some translated into several languages, all about hope and dreams and the bonds of friendship and family. In addition to writing, Kathia is an acclaimed artist and kung fu master. She wields both the paintbrush and the sword with great flare.
Underlying her prolific writing, her art, and her unabashed sense of adventure, what may stand out most about Kathia is her unrelenting belief in love. When she found and married her own “miracle man”, one who could support her career and share in her adventures, she thought she had it all. Later, however, betrayal not only ended the marriage, but posed a threat to her career and cost her the ownership of 19 of her published works! Has her view of love changed? Is she still a romantic? And how has she healed? That’s what we cover in this episode of The Morning Glory Project.
Kirsten Casey: What’s Poetry Got to Do with Anything?
In troubled times, what good is art of any kind, much less poetry? To many, poetry seems so much the purview of the elite, the dalliances of the fanciful. It can seem esoteric and out of reach for most.
Kirsten Casey, both as a poet herself and in her work with teen writers, has found that poetry is far more than fancy, that it can be not only accessible, but essential, and that engaging young people with poetry is a gateway to other meaningful connections. She shares this conversation with us on The Morning Glory Project.
In 2022, Kirsten is the poet laureate of Nevada County, California, a California Poet in the Schools, creative writing teacher, and the author of Ex Vivo: Out of the Living Body and Instantaneous Obsolescence in which she explores historical and literary characters struggling with social media.
Laura Talmus: Beyond Differences
Following the unexpected death of their daughter Lili Rachel Smith in October 2009, Laura Talmus along with her husband, Averell “Ace” Smith founded Beyond Differences.
Passionate about bringing awareness to the issue of adolescent social isolation, Laura is the full-time Executive Director of Beyond Differences, a student-led social justice organization dedicated to ending social isolation among middle school students.
Beyond Differences’ Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum is now being used in over 9000 schools across all 50 states. They are best known for the national holiday, No One Eats Alone Day.
The work of Beyond Differences strives to have an effect on every layer of society when it comes to suffering from social isolation. Working with families, schools, local and state programs, and even on the national level, this non-profit organization works to advance social-emotional learning and children’s mental health.
Laura has received numerous awards and recognitions including being selected as an AARP Purpose Prize Fellow, a Jefferson Prize Award winner, receiving the MLK, Jr. Humanitarian Award from the Marin County Human Rights Commission, the Courageous Leaders Award from the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco, and the North Bay Business Journal’s Award’s Nonprofit Leadership Award. She is also a member of the Washington, D.C.-based organization, the Coalition to End Social Isolation and Loneliness (CESIL).
Karen Grassle: Bright Lights, Prairie Dust
For many, Karen Grassle is synonymous with Caroline Ingalls, the beloved character she portrayed in the long-running series, Little House on the Prairie. But she does not profess to always be as straightforward and agreeable as the character for which she’s best known.
In this conversation, Karen offers us a glimpse behind the curtain of an actor’s life. In her candid memoir, Bright Lights, Prairie Dust, she reveals the elements of her life as a woman who came of age in the turbulent ‘60s, as a stage and screen actor, and as one who faced her own struggles with depression and alcoholism. She reveals the tenacity, work ethic, and dedication to her craft that kept her moving forward as her life and career. This memoir is a soulful, candid story filled with humor, heart, and wisdom, celebrating and honoring womanhood, in all its complexity.
Lizbeth Meredith: Rescuing My Kidnapped Daughters
Thinking she was doing everything not to duplicate her own dangerous and abusive childhood, Lizbeth Meredith found that she’d somehow fallen into the trap of a treacherous family pattern that made her daughters vulnerable. Finally divorced from an abusive ex-husband, Lizbeth’s world was turned upside down when he abused his visitation rights and left the country with the two girls, landing in his native country of Greece. Pursuing, finding, and rescuing her daughters became Lizbeth’s everything. Her harrowing story is captured in her memoir, Pieces of Me: Rescuing My Kidnapped Daughters and premiered in March 2022 as a true story film on Lifetime as “Stolen by Their Father,” starring Sarah Drew.
Lizbeth is an author, speaker, and online teacher who holds a master’s degree in psychology. After a career working with domestic abuse and child abuse victims, Lizbeth then worked for 20 years as a juvenile probation supervisor. Today, she’s happy to write, speak, and teach online from her home in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Kirsten Mickelwait: Love after Life
At thirty-one, Kirsten Mickelwait was ready to pursue a serious career as a writer and eventually, she hoped, marriage and family. When she met Steve Beckwith, a handsome and successful attorney, she began to see the future materialize more quickly than she’d dared to expect.
Twenty-two years later, Steve has become someone quite different from the man Kirsten first met. Unemployed and addicted to opioids, he uses money and their two children to emotionally blackmail her. The couple separates but, just after their divorce is finalized, Steve is diagnosed with colon cancer and dies within the year, leaving Kirsten with $1.5 million in debts from properties that are no longer hers.
As she fights toward recovery, Kirsten begins to receive communications from Steve in the afterlife—leading her on an unexpected path to forgiveness. The Ghost Marriage is her story of discovery: that life isn’t limited to the tangible reality we experience on this earth, and that our worst adversaries can become our greatest teachers. This is a book about life after divorce and life after death. It’s a story of how forgiveness is the best revenge.
Gina Frangello: Blow Your House Down
Gina Frangello is an author, editor, book reviewer, and journalist published in many prestigious journals and publications. She is the author of Every Kind of Wanting, A Life in Men, Slut Lullabies, and My Sister’s Continent.
Despite these many accomplishments, Gina has come to wider reputation for her newest book, a memoir, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason.
Her book was called “Searing, honest, heartbreaking, heart-mending, and a hell of a ride,” by Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers.
Part memoir, part social commentary, this poignant book of raw candor does what its title implies…it blows the house down, departing from the customary expectations of women’s memoir, and daring to tell the truth about being an imperfect woman who has the sheer audacity to rise into a happy life after making mistakes in her life.
**EXTRA BLOOMS** with Toby Dorr: Living with Conviction
Toby Dorr dared the unthinkable. She broke a convicted murderer out of Lansing Correctional Facility. Since completing her time in Federal Prison, she has achieved two Master’s degrees and rebuilt a broken life. Since her first visit to The Morning Glory Project in 2019, Toby has been making good on her promises to herself and her community.
She’s written and published what she calls her Unleashed series—a series of three workbooks to help women to gain strength and power and to avoid the mistakes that she has made.
Through her memoir, Living with Conviction: Unexpected Sisterhood, Healing, and Redemption in the Wake of Life-Altering Choices, Toby takes readers through all of the heart-pounding, tear-jerking, heartbreaking, eye-opening experiences that touch the most primal human need, the need to be significant. A fascinating prison tale, through the lens of love, inspires change.
Jess Ayers: Finding a New Melody
Jess Ayers is a seasoned musician turned successful freelance writer. On the day that she and her husband brought their three-day-old son Jax home, and loved ones came to welcome the new arrival, nobody could have imagined what would happen. A random bullet, shot by a neighbor more than 200 yards away traveled past dozens of trees, entered their house and killed Jess’s husband, and father to their newborn before her eyes. Through the shock, grief, and profound loss, Jess needed to take care of her newborn and build a life different than she’d planned for herself and her son. Jess had to find her own music, her own voice without Justin, and turned to writing as part of her own healing and to help others deal with their loss. Through her blog, The Singing Widow, and as a contributor on POPSUGAR, and Love What Matters, Jess continues to share her story of love, loss, and healing.
Lorinda Boyer: Straight Enough
Lorinda Boyer strove continuously to be virtuous in the eyes of God and to live the life she believed He intended for her. She married her high school boyfriend at eighteen and had two kids by twenty-eight. Although she created a perfect Christian home for her family, she never felt wholly content in her role as wife and mother. Then her life intersected with Robin’s-the woman who would ultimately awaken her sexuality and show her true love for the first time. Struggling to come to terms with her sexual identity within the confines of her strict fundamentalist Christian upbringing, Lorinda is pushed into living a double life: one part perfect housewife and mother, the other part sexual addict. She soon finds herself in the fight for her life. More than a coming-out story, this is a coming-into story. It is the story of coming into an authentic life and self.
**SPECIAL EPISODE** with Jessica Pritchett: Hard Choices
After a five year struggle with infertility, many heartbreaking disappointments, and with the help of IVF, Jessica Pritchett was finally pregnant. She and her husband awaited the arrival of their much-loved daughter, Izabella. But after multiple medical complications far outside of their control, and after all medical intervention failed, losing Izabella was inevitable and they were faced with the most horrible of choices: to carry the child further would result in Jessica’s death and her daughter’s too. The pregnancy was not far enough along for the infant to be viable outside the womb. Together with her husband and her doctors, Jessica made the agonizing choice to induce labor, knowing that her daughter would likely not survive it. This was grief upon grief for this couple that so wanted to be parents.
Now, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to disregard 50 years of legal precedent, and to overturn federal laws to protect a woman’s right to body autonomy and medical privacy, Jessica has discovered a new kind of grief. She’s been called vile, disgusting, selfish, and a murderer by those who claim to hold a “pro-life” stance.
This is a story of hard choices and a family that has faced them, lived with them, and remained a loving family.
**EXTRA BLOOMS** with Lucinda Jackson: Retired, But Not Retiring
Dr. Lucinda Jackson is the author of the memoir Just a Girl: Growing Up Female and Ambitious about her struggles to succeed as a scientist in male-dominated oil and gas and chemical organizations. Her story continues in her new book coming out April 2022: Project Escape: Lessons for an Unscripted Life about the complex transition from hard-hitting career to retirement. Jackson is the Founder of LJ Ventures, where she speaks and consults on energy and the environment and empowering women in the workplace and the Next Act.
Lauren Trantham: How to Heal a Broken Heart? Help Others
Lauren Trantham is the founder and executive director of Ride My Road. In 2016, Lauren started Ride My Road as a personal photography project to photograph American Survivors of abuse and sex trafficking. Since that time, and in addition to photographing over 80 survivors, she has ridden tens of thousands of miles on her motorcycle raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for survivor-led organizations.
**EXTRA BLOOMS** with Meredith May: Fear and Vulnerability: Our Unlikely Teachers
Meredith May was our guest, sharing her intimate and inspiring memoir, The Honey Bus. We welcome her back to share the story she portrays in Loving Edie: How a Dog Afraid of Everything Taught Me to be Brave. This new memoir is a story of a dog, to be sure, but it’s also much more than that. This is the story of what our relationships with vulnerable creatures can teach us about ourselves.
Meredith’s books have been published in 17 countries and her first children’s book, My Hive, will be published in spring 2024. Previously, she was an award-winning journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle, where her reporting won the PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism, the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Carmel Valley where she spends her time writing, beekeeping, and volunteering as a scuba diver for the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Kevin Berthia: A Life Worth Saving, A Life Worth Living
Kevin Berthia is a suicide survivor and prevention advocate. Kevin was born with a genetic major depression disorder. In 2005, at the age of 22, Kevin attempted to take his own life by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Eight years after his attempt, Kevin was reunited with the officer who talked him back to safety. Since then, Kevin’s story of HOPE has touched a diverse group of audiences all around the world. Kevin has had the opportunity to share his story with several magazine outlets along with local and national news stations. Kevin’s story was also featured on the Steve Harvey Show. The photo of him standing on the bridge was front page of the San Francisco Chronicle and placed on the 75 most iconic photos of the 21st Century.
Kevin believes that having survived an attempted suicide plays a major role in the prevention of additional suicides. No one knows more about the darkness that surrounds suicide than those who have walked in its shadow.
Kevin Briggs: Pivotal Points
Kevin Briggs, a retired California Highway Patrol sergeant, spent a decade patrolling the Golden Gate Bridge. A trained negotiator, Briggs handled 4-6 crisis calls a month on the bridge. These challenging but rewarding efforts earned him the nickname “Guardian of the Golden Gate Bridge.”
On one fateful day in 2005, Kevin met with one of the most challenging, yet rewarding encounters of his service career with a young man of twenty-two who had come to that destination to end his life. Kevin Berthia was that young man and the 90-minute, over-the-rail exchange between these two men not only saved his life but was the start of a life-long friendship.
Their hopeful, life-affirming story offers insight into how we can gain an understanding for those in the throes of personal anguish and how to extend compassion to those who may be struggling.
Kevin Briggs has shared what he’s learned in his memoir, Guardian of the Golden Gate. He currently speaks with law enforcement organizations, schools, and businesses to share inspire compassion and understanding about mental health and suicide issues.
Silvia Foti: A Search for Truth
Silvia Foti was raised on reverent stories about her hero grandfather, a martyr for Lithuanian independence and an unblemished patriot. His granddaughter, growing up in Chicago, was treated like royalty in her tightly knit Lithuanian community. But in 2000, when Silvia traveled to Lithuania for a ceremony honoring her grandfather, she heard a different story…a “rumor” that her grandfather hand been a “Jew-Killer”.
Silvia, an award-winning investigative journalist could not ignore such a sharply barbed rumor and embarked on a wrenching twenty-year quest for the truth. This journey into World War II history is intensely personal, but filled with universal lessons about courage, faith, memory, and justice as told her memoir, The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather was a War Criminal.
Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge: Still Poem Crazy after All These Years
What’s the purpose of poetry anyway? In these troubling times of ecological challenge, political vitriol, and social unrest, it’s easy to wonder about the value of the arts in all forms. But for Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, the answer is simple. Poetry isn’t merely a distraction from the world, it’s a necessary element of surviving in it. She sees herself as living between the worlds, the one our bodies inhabit and the one from where poems come. She’s dedicated much of her adult life to inviting others to join her in a world of words, taking poetry out of its rooms in high towers and making it accessible to anyone.
Susan’s book, Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words (now in its 30th Crown/Random House printing) was number 7 on a Penguin Random list of the best books on writing. Anne Lamott wrote, “This is a wonderful book—smart, wide-eyed, joyful, helpful, inspiring. You’re going to love it, and love writing poetry more for having read it.”
Susan has held workshops on journals, creative writing and collage with thousands of adults and children and has worked in over 80 rural libraries in sessions sponsored by Poets & Writers Org. Susan has a chapbook of poems, Bathing with Ants, and a book on creativity and collage, Foolsgold: Making Something from Nothing and Freeing Your Creative Process (Crown).
Jarie Bolander: Business and Heart
Jarie is an engineer by training and an entrepreneur by nature with over 25 years of bringing innovative solutions to markets. As a partner in JSY PR & Marketing, he uses his passion for helping visionary companies find success. His most recent book is The...
Elizabeth Appell: Different Strokes – A Healing Story
When enjoying lunch with a dear friend, Elizabeth Appell began to feel peculiar. The next thing she knew she was waking up in the hospital after surgery, following a sudden stroke. To her great good fortune, Elizabeth’s friend had been in the audience at a one-woman show of another Morning Glory Project guest, Dr. Diane Barns, who wrote and performed Stroke of Luck in which she shares her own story of suffering a stroke, along with tips for identifying and helping others having a stroke. She instantly called 911 and because of speedy help, Elizabeth’s recovery has been nearly miraculous.
Elizabeth is a playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and filmmaker. Her play Confessions of a Catholic Child has won several competitions. The play was produced in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Her plays Chalk Lines and Moon Walkers both were semi-finalists at the O’Neill. Squawk the Musical! was tapped by Apples and Oranges, New York for development sessions and had its first reading late in 2019. More recently, she’s working on Elements of Betrayal, a limited series, and The Family Trick, a play about a woman who slips into the Nether looking for the truth about her family. The play was just shortlisted by the London Playwrights.
George Selleck: Gifts from a Grandson
After a long career as a psychologist, organizational consultant, and sports education specialist, George Selleck has had a lot of experience at trying to understand people, groups, and relationships in work, sport, and life. But in is in his twilight years, while suffering life-threatening illness that George’s greatest teacher has arrived in the form of a prematurely born grandson. In his heartwarming book, Kian and Me: Gifts from a Grandson, George shares insightful lessons about how to live in a happier, healthier, and more fulfilling way. But the lessons in this inspiring book are not from grandfather to grandson. Rather, it is Kian teaching his granddad about connection, curiosity, positivity, and so many more simple practices for living beautifully.
Sallie Weissinger: Yes, Again
Sallie Weissinger felt ready to date again after the passing of her beloved husband. She tried the updated version of the newspaper personal ads through which she’d found her husband in the first place and signed on to dating websites. When she made a list of the qualities she wanted in a new love she noticed that the first letters of those qualities spelled out “PASTRAMI,” which appealed to her sense of humor and her sense of purpose. Dating sites offered mixed results, so Sallie decided to employ other skills as well as her community of friends and family to help her find a romantic partner. She built a website and offered a reward of $5,000 to a non-profit chosen by a “Love Liaison” who successfully matched her up with someone special who fit her PASTRAMI qualifications and who proved to be a partner for at least one year. Her system worked and she was introduced to the second true love of her life.
Sallie’s unique search reminded her to appreciate the abiding friendships, the meaningful volunteer work, and her garden and dogs. New love, she realized, would be only one of many blessings. Her story is about more than a search for romance, it’s about life lived fully, the importance of deep connections, and one woman’s search for meaning.
Angela Muir Van Etten: Always an Advocate
As a dual citizen of New Zealand and the United States, Angela Muir Van Etten served as national president of both Little People organizations and qualified as a lawyer in both countries. She was admitted to the bar in New Zealand, Ohio, and New York.
As a dwarf of three-feet-four-inches, LPA has twice awarded Angela its highest honor—the Kitchens Meritorious Service Award—for her work as a leader in banning dwarf tossing in licensed establishments in New York and Florida and in breaking the six-inch reach barrier in buildings and facilities open to the public throughout America.
Angela has been a legal writer and editor of disability civil rights law books for Thomson Reuter, a staff writer for the Christian Law Association, and an advocate and coordinator for the Coalition for Independent Living Options. Her articles on dwarfism and disability advocacy have been published in LPA Today, and online in the HuffPost blog.
Margot McMahon: Preserving Legacy Through Art
Lucky-number-seven of nine children, Margot McMahon discovered their front acre of woods, ravines and the Lake Michigan shoreline before riding horses in prairies, hiking mountains and sailing while her social justice journalist parents wrote and painted their history. Natural materials like wood, sand, bronze and stone inspired her to sculpt while being locally, nationally and internationally awarded. Margot was compelled to find and tell their untold story to better understand herself as she emerged from a flock of artistic siblings. Growing up in this hectic and artistic family, young Margot was unaware of her parents’ history: Who knew her father was captive and force-marched between three POW Luftwaffe camps? That her mother flew across the nation in first generation Boeing planes, later finding ways to be an award-winning travel writer and teacher while raising a large family?
Margot has preserved the history of her parents’ dramatic lives beyond what she observed in her own lifetime. Fasten your seat belts, hold on tight and enjoy the ride through A WWII Saga and If Trees Could Talk!
Judy Lipson: It’s Never Too Late to Grieve
Judy Lipson is the Founder and Chair of Celebration of Sisters, established in 2011 to commemorate the lives and memories of her beloved sisters to benefit Massachusetts General Hospital. Judy has published articles, given speeches and been interviewed by the Open to Hope Organization, the Centering Organization, SKATING Magazine, and in literature published by Massachusetts General Hospital, where she has maintained a close philanthropic relationship for more than twenty years. Her passion for figure skating secured her the United States Figure Skating Association 2020 Get Up Champion Award.
Willa Goodfellow: A Voice from the Edge
As an Episcopal priest, Willa Goodfellow’s ministry included work with troubled teens, college students, congregations in transition, diocesan structures to develop spiritual leadership within local communities, and advocacy for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people. She was a professional troublemaker.
Life-long depression caught up with her in her fifties. Her poor pitiful brain nearly threw itself over the edge as a consequence of a major depression misdiagnosis and treatment with way too many antidepressants, until she was re-diagnosed with bipolar disorder and began her road to recovery. But hey—she got some great rants out of the experience and went freelance as a troublemaker. She is now a mental health journalist, speaker, blogger, and author of Prozac Monologues: A Voice from the Edge.
Stephen Dexter: American Morning
Stephen Dexter is an actor, writer, audiobook narrator, and activist based in New York City whose work can be seen on both stage and screen. He has appeared on Off-Broadway and International stages and is a lifetime member of the legendary Actors Studio. He has worked steadily in film and TV, most recently appearing on “Evil” on Paramount Plus, “Dr. Death” on NBC Peacock, and “Billions” on Showtime. He is also an award-winning audiobook narrator with over 200 titles to his credit. His most recent film “American Morning”, which he wrote, produced and stars in alongside Emmy-winner Richard Schiff (“The West Wing”, “The Good Doctor”), deals with the aftermath of a school shooting and the desperate measures a survivor resorts to to reconcile his guilt and affect change. The film is currently on the festival circuit and has been lauded both here and abroad receiving a Spirit Of Cinema nomination and Special Mention for Best Short Film at the venerable Oldenburg Film Festival in Germany.
**EXTRA BLOOMS** with Laura Davis: The Burning Light of Two Stars
As the co-author, with Ellen Bass, of the iconic and groundbreaking book The Courage to Heal Laura Davis rode the hurricane-force that was unleashed by empowering women to talk about surviving sexual abuse, while also being catapulted to fame for the worst thing that had ever happened to her. In her new memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother Daughter Story Laura reveals what it was like behind the force of that hurricane and tells the intimate story of her relationship with her mother, of whom she eventually became caretaker.
**EXTRA BLOOMS** with Damien Posey: Everybody is Family
In this Extra Blooms episode, we catch up with past MGP guest, Damien Posey, an award-winning Bay Area mentor, affectionately known as Uncle Damien to his community. When the coronavirus pandemic hit and other service organizations had to shut down, the most vulnerable took the brunt, and Damien stepped up what they do every day in a big way. Now, through his organization Us4UsBayArea Damien and his team work to provide health clinics, mentorship, food services, and entrepreneur training to help and inspire others to live healthy, happy, productive lives.
There’s not a single term that describes what Damien—known as Uncle Damien, or “Unc” in his community—means to his beloved San Francisco Bay Area community. Perhaps his six-word biography says it best: “Once a monster, now a mentor.” As a low-income young man of color in the inner city, Damien chose an all too familiar path that led him to gunfire, crime, and ultimately incarceration. In jail, he realized he’d gotten there because of choices he’d made and that he could make different ones for himself, his daughter, and his community. Now he works to help others to avoid the path he took.
Working in concert with existing organizations and resources, Damien has worked for decades to serve the young, the old, and the vulnerable in San Francisco. Regarding every young person as his “baby” and every adult as his sister or brother, Damien never stops doing all he can to serve his “family.”
Mayor London Breed awarded Damien the key to the city, and he holds the key to the hearts of many.
Claire Hennessy: The Art of Storytelling and a Bonkers Brit
British-born Claire Hennessy is an award-winning storyteller, producer, podcaster (The Bonkers Brit) and author. She reconnected with her first boyfriend after not seeing him for 30 years and then uprooted her entire life in England and took her two kids to live in California to marry him. She then wrote a humorous memoir about her journey and is hoping to find an agent before she is too old to go on a book tour. She recently “came out” as a comedic storyteller, performing funny, true and often embarrassing stories around the San Francisco Bay Area. She started an online storytelling show at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and co-produces Six Feet Apart Productions with longtime, successful comedian Regina Stoops. Together with her husband, Mark, they have produced over 40 online live storytelling shows. To top it off, Claire is the Morning Glory Project’s very first countess. We only hope she’ll let us borrow her tiara.
Giffords: A 30-Minute Panel discussion on Suicide and Gun Safety
Hosted by Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence Please use the link below to view a Lunch & Learn event I recently participated in. Please note that a password is required and listed below. Video: Click here to view the recording. Password: tP$EN8Jq
Judy Temes: Girl Left Behind
Judy Temes was just five years old when she was left by her parents seeking to escape Communist Hungary. With borders sealed in 1969, there were few options for crossing the East-West divide. Her father—a Holocaust survivor desperate to leave behind Hungary’s totalitarian government and the legacy of the Holocaust—used tourist visas to take his wife and twelve-year-old son to the West. These visas, however, came at a high price: one child would need to be left behind. Left with an antisemitic uncle in a destitute Hungarian village, five-year-old “Juditka” had to cope with not only her parent’s apparent desertion, but questions about her real identity and what it means to be a Jew. Judy documented her story in her debut memoir, Girl Left Behind. She is a former journalist, a secondary humanities teacher in Seattle, and the mother of three children.
Lisa Lucca: Living True
Lisa Lucca was enjoying what anyone might call an idyllic 1970s Midwest family life. But as an adolescent, the image of the ideal was shattered when she learned her father was gay, beginning a long journey from confusion and shame to acceptance. Lisa shares this experience in her work as a life coach and with listeners on her weekly radio talk show, Live True.
Lisa has contributed to several anthologies, including Crone Rising. She is co-author of an epistolary memoir, You Are Loved, with her partner, Mark, and was a #Blogher Voice of the Year Honoree. Lisa has just completed her memoir, Ashes to Ink: A Memoir, which chronicles her complicated relationship with her father and her search for love with a wounded heart.
**EXTRA BLOOMS** with Amy S. Peele: Turning Real Life Passion into Fictional Stories
In our first conversation with Amy S. Peele, we focused on her newest role as a newly elected City Council member. But this time we’re chatting about how she’s brought her long career in the fascinating world of organ transplantation into writing medical murder mysteries. “A murder mystery with a mission and a side of humor” is how Amy describes her series. First CUT and now MATCH, the adventure continues. And while there’s always someone murdered in each book, don’t worry; as a conscientious organ transplant professional, Amy always finds a way to use their organs.
Writing, Healing, & Reconciliation
Dear friends, Now and then a deeply rewarding opportunity comes around, and I’m thrilled that this is one that I get to both experience and share with you. Laura Davis, along with her co-author Ellen Bass, broke new ground when they published The Courage to Heal in...
Toni Gattone: Blooming for Life
Toni Gattone fell in love with gardening in her grandfather’s backyard in Chicago, but it wasn’t until she moved to Northern California that her passion began to bloom.
She was a Sales Executive in corporate America for seventeen years but when the gardening bug kept biting, she started a sales company selling gifts and garden products to the retail market. Twenty-eight years later, Toni closed the doors to her business so she could focus on her “encore” career as an author and speaker.
When Toni became a Master Gardener in Marin County she started speaking on her love of gardening but her chronic bad back kept her from gardening with gusto, so she developed a seminar and wrote her book on adaptive gardening and never looked back.
Her book, The Lifelong Gardener, Garden with Ease and Joy at Any Age, reflects Toni’s true purpose and passion: helping gardeners do what they love to do…Garden for life, in comfort, ease, and joy!
Julie Ryan McGue: Twice a Daughter
Julie Ryan McGue is an adult domestic adoptee and an identical twin. In her new memoir, Twice a Daughter, she tells the story about finding out who you are, where you come from, and making sense of it. At 48, Julie was sent for a breast biopsy, and for Julie and her twin sister, this event highlighted what they could not know about themselves due to their closed adoption. What followed was a five-year search to locate birth relatives who could provide family medical history, background, and genealogy. What began as a quest for information ends with the discovery of family, literally, right next door.
Fay Darmawi: Imagine a Different World
Fay Darmawi is a film festival producer, community development banker, and urban planner using all forms of storytelling and media to achieve social justice. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the SF Urban Film Fest, a film festival focused on civic engagement inspired by great storytelling which just completed its 7th season in February 2021, as a virtual film festival. Her 25 years of experience as a leader in affordable housing finance, as well as five years of screenwriting training, informs her community storytelling work.
Fay wants everyone to understand how we’re impacted by urban planning in ways large and small that effect the quality as well as the duration of our lives. Everything we see all around us from the practicalities of how we live, work, and commute to issues of social justice is “by design.” People make choices about how we live together. Once you have that awareness, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to change an unjust world now that you’re conscious of it?
If you want to see a better world, she believes it’s up to us to work together with other folks in your community and most importantly outside your community. Yes individual actions count, but you will be more effective if you work in coalitions and for the service of those who have been most harmed.
Leah Lax: Uncovered
Leah Lax is a refugee from extreme religion. Leah’s memoir Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home is the only gay memoir ever to come out of the hasidic world. She is also the mother of seven children. Uncovered was on many “best of” lists, Susan Stamberg read it on NPR, and it is soon to be an opera by premiere American composer Lori Laitman.
Leah’s next book project is Not From Here, about how she rediscovered America through stories told her by immigrants and refugees, and why that matters. Leah has written four major projects based on interviews with interesting people: a touring photo exhibit, a large scale opera (Houston Grand Opera), a spoken word performance piece (the Houston Symphony), and her forthcoming book.
Cynthia Lim: Wherever You Are, A Caregiver’s Story
Cynthia Lim thought she had the perfect life with her family in Los Angeles. A loving marriage to husband who was a successful attorney, a fulfilling career in education, two teenaged sons. Then in 2003 her husband suffered cardiac arrest that resulted in profound brain injury, changing their lives forever. Married for twenty years at the time, Cynthia doesn’t know how much of her husband’s former self will return. In her memoir, Wherever You Are: A Memoir of Love, Marriage and Brain Injury, Cynthia shares her caregiving journey It’s the story of re-envisioning life with disability and discovering the real truth of love and marriage. Cynthia holds a doctorate in social welfare and is retired from the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is a writer, traveler, quilter and hiker. She is currently working on a second memoir about her family’s immigration history from China.
Daniel Charles: Animal Lessons
Daniel Charles is an intuitive animal advocate, an artist, and a lifelong student of nature and a messenger of love and compassion. Life has been his greatest teacher; from his connection with animals to his many travels and relationships with his fellow humans....
Anita Gail Jones: Lessons from Centipedes
Anita Gail Jones is a writer, visual artist, and oral tradition storyteller originally from Albany, in southwest Georgia. In response to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and the long odds on the campaigns for two Georgia senate seats, Anita co-founded “The Peach Corps,” a grassroots organization that focused on voting turnout in the community where she grew up. In tandem with efforts of others throughout Georgia, this resulted in the wild upset elections of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Southwest Georgia is also the setting for her debut novel, Peach Seed Monkey. The manuscript was recently selected as a Top 10 Finalist in the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Anita is also Executive Director of The Gaines-Jones Education Foundation, a small family charity she co-founded with her husband, Robert Roehrick 18 years ago. Gaines-Jones need-based scholarships are awarded to eligible Black students in southwest Georgia and the San Francisco Bay Area where Anita and family live.
Diane M. Barnes, M.D.: Stroke of Luck
Diane M. Barnes, M.D. is a writer, actor, speaker and retired radiologist. A graduate of Stanford, and Yale School of Medicine, she trained at UCSF and Stanford, and practiced at Kaiser. After a brain hemorrhage, Diane segued from medicine to performance. Her stroke...
Myriam Martinez: Life Reimagined
Myriam Martinez has never been one to keep quiet, but she was born into a Peruvian immigrant family that valued “not rocking the boat”. When an uncle molested her when she was eleven, true to form, Myriam told…loudly. The molestation stopped, but the family encouraged her silence and still gathered for events with the perpetrator of her abuse. She became a depressed, self-destructive teen who attempted suicide. It was during hospitalization after her suicide attempt that Myriam discovered what it felt like to be cared about, heard, and to have her voice honored. She later set limits with her family, refusing to be at events with a molesting uncle.
Lisa Dailey: Square Up
Lisa Dailey is an avid traveler and writer. In her time abroad, she unearthed new ways of looking at her life through her discoveries in remote corners of the world, and she continues to enrich her life through travel. Square Up is her first book detailing a seven-month trip around the world with her husband and two teenage sons on the heels of extraordinary loss.
Cami Ostman: Second Wind
Cami Ostman grew up in a chaotic family. The craziness of her childhood drove her to look for solidity and structure outside of her family which she at first found in fundamentalist religion. But religion that was once a place of structure and safety, proved to be a...
Barbara Abercrombie: The Language of Loss
When Barbara Abercrombie’s husband died, she found the language of condolence, no matter how well intended, often unhelpful and sometimes downright irritating. In her grief, she yearned for words that acknowledged the reality of what it felt like to survive a loved one’s death and that could unflinchingly speak to the sorrow and loneliness (and sometimes even guilt and anger) that can show up in the mourning process. When she searched for a book that might help, they were all either too clinical or too flowery. She ultimately created the book that she needed. Finding that ordinary language wouldn’t do, she discovered that it was poetry that cut to the chase.
Patricia Maisch: Unlikely Activist
Patricia Maisch is an unlikely activist. She led a modest, non-public life with no desire for a public one. She and her husband owned and operated an HVAC business in Tucson, Arizona. They raised their son, saved their money, and planned for retirement. But her life changed when she decided to attend a “Congress on Your Corner” event on January 8, 2011. It was at this event that Patricia became first, a witness to a mass shooting, then a survivor, and finally one who could not stay silent about gun violence. At this event a murderer killed six citizens, including a 9-year-old girl, and injured 18 others, including then Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. Patricia was not only a witness to the shootings, but played an instrumental role in robbing the murderer of the opportunity to take even more lives. She has since testified before the US Senate and dozens of other law-making bodies and media outlets. This modest woman has also been detained in the US Capitol for protesting their rulings, but she remains undaunted, supporting organizations that assist gun violence survivors and work toward sensible gun laws.
Judy Bebelaar: And Then They Were Gone
Judy Bebelaar loved teaching in San Francisco public high schools for 37 years, where she nurtured young poets and writers in her classes, many of them winning writing prizes, including eight on the national level. As a co-founder of Opportunity I and II, public alternative schools, never could she, or really any of the educators then, have imagined that literally dozens of the Opportunity students would die in the tragedy of Jonestown under the twisted spell of Jim Jones of the People’s Temple.
Pam Houston: Politics Gets Personal
Along with her dedication as a writer and coach to other writers, Pam Houston has had a long love affair with nature and has been a fierce advocate for environmental protections. Her memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, is a love story to the ranch she calls home and bounty of beauty that she’s found all over he world. The memoir won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and the Reading The West Advocacy Award. Her most recent work is, Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place coauthored with Amy Irvine. She is also the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness and Sight Hound, as well as four other books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on a 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande and teaches at UC Davis and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers and the fiction editor at the Environmental Arts Journal Terrain.org.
Edward Doyle-Gillespie: Philosopher Cop
Edward Doyle-Gillespie is a walking stereotype buster who shatters assumptions among his colleagues and in his community. First headed toward a career in academia where he could study history, literature, and philosophy, the events of 9/11 redirected his path and he became a Baltimore City police officer where he now teaches community policing, ethics, and counterterrorism. In his department Ed found that he neither fit the stereotype of what many would presume a Black man in Baltimore might be, nor does he fit many of the stereotypes of police officers in general. Neither fish, nor fowl, Ed has chosen to learn, to grow, and to bring his own values and experiences to his work in his day job at the police academy, which still fulfills that original mission of protecting people from bad guys, while still writing and publishing poetry including Masala Tea and Oranges and On the Later Addition of Sancho Panza.
Terry Sue Harms: The Strongbox
Terry Sue Harms is the author of her third book, a remarkable accomplishment for a woman who didn’t start reading until she was in her early twenties. This new release is a memoir titled The Strongbox. In it, she reveals the grit, tenacity, and courage it took to not only tackle her reading disability but also to find her absent biological father and face his rejections. Terry Sue didn’t begin writing until she was in her forties, but she’d been hairdressing since she was a teenager, and it’s the intimate story-telling nature of that profession that has fueled her personable, candid, and compelling writing style.
Gretchen Cherington: Poetic License
At age forty, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect the well-crafted myth of her famous family? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth? In her memoir, Poetic License, Cherington candidly retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. She examines what she calls both the gifts and the harms of her growing up surrounded by the literati of her era and with a father who violated the boundaries of good fatherhood. From the Women’s Movement in the ‘60s to the #MeToo era, she tells the story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots.
Angela Alioto: Political Lioness
Angela Alioto is a legal and political lioness who has taken her family’s political legacy and made it her own. Fighting for health, opportunity, justice, and the environment, she has served both in the political arena and the courtroom. Her memoir, Straight to the Heart, covers her eight years in San Francisco politics and is appropriately based on Dante’s Inferno.
Carmen Martines: Re-storying: Claiming the Narrative of Your Survivor Story
Carmen Martines, having survived sexual abuse traumas in childhood, re-storied her body using tattoos, transforming the pain and abuse into a narrative of power and reclamation, transformation, strength and joy. Carmen is also a psychotherapist, practicing in San Francisco and a lifelong writer, poet, and storyteller.
Perseverance – Congresswoman Gabby Giffords
We at The Morning Glory Project are pleased to announce the inaugural Morning Glory Award. These are special acknowledgments for individuals that rise above and exhibiting exceptional and inspiring demonstrations of their humanity. Our inaugural Morning Glory...
Adiel Uzabakiriho: A Grateful Refugee
Dr. Adiel Uzabakiriho was in the U.S. in 1994 attending college when civil war and an ensuing genocide broke out in his home country of Rwanda. He would eventually learn that many in his own family and many more in his community had been murdered and his dreams of returning home were dashed. His dreams of becoming a doctor were also thwarted because, despite seven surgeries, he lost his sight. Refusing to succumb to hopelessness, Adiel has made seeking joy, community, and optimism a practice, providing inspiration to those around him.
Nina G: Stutterer Interrupted
Nina G grew up thinking she was dumb because of both her stutter and learning disabilities. But she claimed her experience and turned it into stand-up comedy and becoming—perhaps ironically—a much in-demand conference and keynote speaker, a TEDx talker, and Huffington Post contributor. Her memoir, Stutterer Interrupted The Comedian Who Almost Didn’t Happen tells of her determined journey to find, and share, her voice.
Hersch Wilson: Firefighter Zen
Be brave. Be Kind. Fight fires. That’s the motto of firefighters like Hersch Wilson who spend their lives walking toward, rather than away from danger and suffering. In his new memoir, Firefighter Zen, Hersch shares the Zen-like techniques that allow people like him to stay grounded while navigating danger, comforting others, and coping with their personal responses to whatever unexpected, unwelcomed crises they’re called upon to face. His belief is that it is how we cope with those inevitable events—more than the events themselves—that defines the quality of our lives.
Magalí Morales: Love, Spirit, Earth
Magalí Morales is a mother, writer, spiritual counselor and bridge builder. She brings her Mexican and Guatemalan history, heritage, and experience to bear in her eco-activism. She believes that there is nothing more important than restoring health to our planet and that this healing will require ancient knowledge, modern technologies, and spiritual healing. Listen in for this dynamic, no-holds-barred perspective on love, spirit, and saving the planet.
Lonnie and Sandy Phillips: Heartbreak Turned to Heroism
Lonnie and Sandy Phillips are the parents of Jessica Ghawi who was murdered in the massacre at the midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” in the Summer of 2012 in Aurora, Colorado. Their grief and rage could not be measured and the loss of their beloved daughter was unimaginable. They made two life-changing decisions in the midst of their grief: they’d cling to one another, keeping their marriage intact as so many survivors had not, and they’d turn their heartbreak into action to prevent the tragedy of gun violence for other families.
Marianne Ingheim: Finding Your Way Back to Self-Compassion
After surviving cancer and suicide loss, Marianne Ingheim rebuilds her life by learning to banish both her inner and outer voices of criticism. In her book, Out of Love: Finding Your Way Back to Self-Compassion, she describes how the practice of self-compassion changed her life in ways big and small–inspiring readers to unlearn self-critical patterns in their own lives and live a happier, more courageous life.
Linda Morrow: Lessons in Down Syndrome and Love
In her memoir, Heart of This Family: Lessons in Down Syndrome and Love, Linda Morrow chronicle’s her son’s remarkable 49 years, sharing the innocent wisdom that he had to share. In Steve’s unbreakable spirit, Linda Morrow found her own.
Molly-Ann Leikin: To Her Own Tune
Molly-Ann Leikin came to California from Canada with her baritone ukulele to become a songwriter in Hollywood at a time when women were rare in the
field. She was told that nobody listens to lyrics. She was told she wasn’t beautiful, so no one would want her. But she refused to leave. Her determination led her to life as an award-winning songwriter for pop and country music stars, TV, and film. Her determination story is about always singing to her own tune.
E.B. Wexler: Endless Exhale
E.B. Wexler has been a clinical social worker for nearly 30 years. She has recently started sharing publicly about living with Complex PTSD, from her early childhood. Her mission and purpose in going public is to use both her own story and her professional experience to help shape a new conversation about trauma in our society, where it carries a great stigma.
Jo and Jeremy Ivester: Once a Girl, Always a Boy
When Jo Ivester and her husband learned that one of their four beloved children identified as trans, they knew they needed to use that love to and to expand their understanding of what their son would face. Jeremy Ivester kept a video journal for much of his transition. Those recordings became the basis for the book his mother wrote: Once a Girl, Always a Boy.
Donna Cameron: The Awesome Power of Kindness?
Coming from the business and nonprofit world, Donna Cameron found herself awed by kindness and its power to transform. In her book award-winning memoir, A Year of Living Kindly, she chronicles her experience of that transformation and shares the discoveries she made—lessons in patience, understanding, and humor.
Michael Lazarin: For the Sake of the Children
Michael Lazarin never set out to be an advocate and activist. But when he became an “erased” alienated father of his beloved daughter, Audrie Pott, when she was seven years old, he had no choice but to fight for his child, and later in her memory. How has he found joy and happiness alongside this fight? That’s the story he shares with us.
Anne Reeder Heck: A Fierce Belief
At age twenty-six, Anne Reeder Heck was brutally raped by a stranger. Years later, still seeking to heal from this trauma, Anne stands alone in her living room and claims her desired belief aloud: “This is my year of strength.” Her clear intention results in a phone call notifying her that her rapist has been identified—fourteen years after the crime. Anne’s gripping and uplifting story is one that has sparked national interest, has been shared on the TEDx stage, and is told in her memoir A Fierce Belief in Miracles.
Elizabeth Kracht: Art, Commerce, and Spirit
As a literary agent, Elizabeth Kracht creates a bridge between art and commerce for her authors and the lessons she’s learned apply not only to writers, but to anyone pursuing their passions. She strives to bring her spiritual self to all of her relationships, including her business associations and has learned an important lesson about rejection: Don’t take it personally. Liz is the author of The Author’s Checklist: An Agent’s Guide to Developing and Editing Your Manuscript.
Gail Warner: Dreaming Made Real
Gail Warner is the dreamer and founder of Pine Manor, a unique retreat center in the mountains above Lake Elsinore, CA. Gail’s vision along with her invitational and collaborative style has allowed people from all walks of life to deepen their connection with self and others in this sacred space. Gail has created a welcoming space for the inner journey of self-awareness as well as walking the same path herself.
David Henry Sterry: From Rent Boy to Book Doctor
How does a guy go from being a kid who made money for sex to being a sought-after teacher of writing and a successful author? That’s the story David Henry Sterry is here to tell on The Morning Glory Project. He is the author of 16 books, including his memoir, Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Man for Rent, along with Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, & Rent Boys, and The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published. Two of his books are currently being made into films.
Francine Falk Allen: Not a Poster Child
Francine Falk-Allen survived polio and six months of hospitalization at age three, emerging with a lifetime-paralyzed leg she has learned to love for its seemingly indomitable will to support her active life. She is also a breast cancer survivor and had many “childhood” illnesses which are now preventable by vaccines. Francine’s memoir, Not a Poster Child: Living Well with a Disability—A Memoir has won gold and silver medals and has been included on several lists of best books of 2018. She was named one of “25 Women Making a Difference in 2019” by Conversations Magazine.
Martha Alderson: Boundless Creativity
Martha Alderson is known among writers as The Plot Whisperer for her multiple books on the craft. But along the way she discovered that the writers and other creative people (and perhaps especially women) must face their own inner obstacles to creating their art and each must travel their own hero’s journey to create her art. Having undertaken the journey herself to write her historical novel, Parallel Lives, A Love Story, Martha came to better understand her own struggles and brokenness in a new light. She shares the hope for overcoming these obstacles with others in her latest book, Boundless Creativity: A Spiritual Workbook for Overcoming Self-Doubt, Emotional Traps, and Other Creative Blocks.
Angela Washington: Coping with COVID: The Hard Times and the Soft Moments
Angela Washington, co-producer and social media wizard for The Morning Glory Project, has an elderly mom who struggles with dementia in a nursing care facility and a son on the front lines as a nurse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like so many others during this surreal time, she has moments of heartache and horror as well as moments of joy, hope, and inspiration that renew her spirit. This episode is a conversation about the hard and the soft living side-by-side.
Hollye Dexter: Out of the Fire
Having experienced gun violence in her own family, Hollye Dexter is a dedicated activist for gun reform, using her voice and her writing to advocate for change. With Women Against Gun Violence, she has lobbied for stronger gun laws both locally and in DC, meeting with members of Congress, speaking at City Hall as well as at rallies, in schools, churches and temples. Her work as an activist has been covered on NPR, PBS, The BBC, Al Jazeera. L.A. Times and Rolling Stone. Hollye is the author of the memoir, Fire Season: My Journey from Ruin to Redemption and co-edited the anthology Dancing At the Shame Prom. She has written extensively about gun violence and feminism, her essays being featured in anthologies, and her articles at Maria Shriver’s Architects of Change, Writer’s Digest, The Feminist Wire, Scary Mommy and others.
Amy S. Peele: A Surprising Path
Happily retired from he 35-year career in the dynamic and fascinating world of organ transplantation, Amy believed her retirement years would be devoted to family life and writing the next books in her murder mystery series. In an unexpected turn, called by the crucial issues of the country, the planet, and her community she found herself running for, and winning a seat on her local City Council. It’s a steep learning curve, but she’s climbing it.
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