Past Episodes
Amy Ferris: Turning Mistakes into Missions
Amy Ferris is an author, screenwriter, and playwright and co-founder of Women of Our Words. Amy has become a widely-regarded maven of what she calls “Gracebook”, with her Post Coffee/Pre Wine posts in which she can as easily excoriate politicians for acts of despicable cruelty as she can wax adoringly about one or another fellow human for an act of kindness and generosity.
She is the author of a memoir, Marrying George Clooney: Confessions of a Midlife Crisis, and has edited and co-edited the anthologies: Dancing at the Shame Prom, with Hollye Dexter, and Shades of Blue: Writers on Depression, Suicide, and the Blues, a collection inspired after the death of Robin Williams. Her latest book, co-written with Joseph “Rev Run” Simmons and Justice Simmons, Old School Love: And Why it Works, is story of enduring love in all its forms and in all its messiness.
Grant Faulkner: Community and Creativity
Grant Faulkner is a champion for writers of all ages and all things storytelling. He is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He has published two books on writing, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide, in addition to a collection of 100-word stories, Fissures, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. His short story collection, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2021. Grant is also the co-host of the podcast Write-minded. Follow him on Twitter at @grantfaulkner and on Instagram at @grantfaulkner.
Samantha Dunn: Bricks and Feathers
In her spellbinding, bestselling memoir, Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life, Samantha Dunn tells of her horrific injury when her horse inadvertently trampled her, nearly cutting off her leg, severing bones, vital muscles, and veins. Her physical recovery was not the only healing she required. The accident illuminated that Sam had long been leading a life full of risk-taking and injury to both her body and her heart. Here’s the story about how Samantha got back on the horse, literally and figuratively, healing her psychic wounds and broken relationships along with her body.
Lucinda Jackson: Just a Girl
Lucinda Jackson is the author of Just a Girl: Growing Up Female and Ambitious. As a scientist and business executive, Lucinda spent almost fifty years at three universities and four Fortune 500 companies where she experienced and witnessed the unequal treatment of women. This spurred her to write about how to change that dynamic and how to help women find their power.
After growing up in California, Oregon, and Washington, she received her Ph.D. in science in Illinois and continued speaking and serving on boards of academic, nonprofit, and industry organizations worldwide. After Peace Corps volunteerism in Palau and teaching science in Mexico, Jackson and her husband returned recently to their home near San Francisco where she enjoys her fantastic women friends, reading, exercise, and helping others. They are immensely proud of their three liberated sons who are scattered around the globe.
Grace Livingston: Tragically Beautiful Things
Grace Livingston is on a journey to find her voice as a writer and storyteller as she faces illness, loss, and all the other tragically beautiful things that make us human. Grace works as a Senior Researcher for Ten Percent Happier, a mindfulness meditation company, where she is currently helping founder and ABC News anchor Dan Harris on his forthcoming book code-named “10% Nicer.” She is an active member of the Reimagine community, first as a volunteer and then as a performer and the host of multiple events for people personally facing illness.
Anna J. Stewart: Romancing a Writing Career
Anna Stewart personifies the phrase “dedicated writer.” Since her first novella with Harlequin in 2014, Anna has written and published more than forty romances in multiple sub-genres. As a USA Today and national bestselling author she writes sweet to sexy romance for Harlequin’s Heartwarming and Romantic Suspense lines with one of her titles, Recipe for Redemption, optioned for a TV Movie aired on Uptv in the 2019 holiday season. Early obsessions with Star Wars, Star Trek, and Wonder Woman set her on the path to creating fun, funny, and family-centric romances with happily ever afters for her independent heroines.
Laura Davis: Wholehearted
Laura Davis, author of seven bestselling non-fiction books, including The Courage to Heal, I Thought We’d Never Speak Again, and forthcoming memoir, Wholehearted, teaches writing workshops in Santa Cruz, California, and leads transformative writing retreats in Tuscany, Peru, Bali, Spain, and other international locations. As the creator of The Writer’s Journey Roadmap, Laura sends out free evocative writing prompts by email each Tuesday.
Matt Nightingale: Choosing Gratitude
As a gay Christian, Matt Nightingale is passionate about the intersection of sexuality and spirituality. He works to create safe, sacred spaces for people exploring these identities. His TEDx talk, “Choosing Gratitude and Hope,” with his former wife, Luanne Nightingale, tells their story of their 23-year mixed-orientation marriage, an evolving understanding of faith and sexuality, and the choice to end their marriage with gratitude and hope. When he first acknowledged his authentic sexuality, Matt believed he needed to be cured, and tried to do this in the confines of the church where he then worked. Eventually, he grew to accept his sexuality though it cost him his marriage and the job he held in his church.
Matt is now a spiritual director and support group facilitator with The Christian Closet, which offers web-based counseling, coaching, and spiritual direction for LGBTQ Christians.
Shannon Curtis and Jamie Hill: Music Our Way—A Chat with Industry Trailblazers
Shannon Curtis writes and performs art pop music; Jamie Hill produces and creates music with all sorts of bands and artists. They’re both writers and authors and speakers … oh, and also, they’re married!
For the last decade-plus, the pair have been building on their shared delusion that a married pair of working artists can make a successful life together – far outside of any industry mainstream. Their journey on this unpaved path has led them to the heart of the community-centered work they do and has given definition to the life they aim to live: one in which they share themselves honestly, make authentic connections with others, and create opportunities for people to make deeper connections with themselves and with each other.
Karen Haycox: Life is a Perpetual Lesson
As CEO of Habitat for Humanity New York City, Karen Haycox has pulled from every aspect of herself, her history, her losses, and her talents to help her teams provide housing to those who might otherwise never have the homes they need. The lessons
she’s learned from losing one she loved, to embracing sobriety, and even her background in filmmaking all serve her now in the highly demanding role of
wrangling all of the entities and overcoming all of the obstacles required to create homes for others. Determination, talents, and wisdom gathered along turn out to be the perfect constellation of skills for doing exactly the work she never aimed for, but which she now knows she was meant to do.
Jen Pastiloff: Listening Hard
Jen Pastiloff travels the world with her unique workshop “On Being Human,” a hybrid of yoga related movement, writing, sharing out loud, letting the snot fly, and the occasional dance party. Her bestselling book, On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard is an exploration of her discoveries, confusions, wisdoms, and her striving for a zero BS way of life.
Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, calls Jen “a conduit of awakenings.” Jen has been featured on Good Morning America, New York Magazine, Health Magazine, CBS News and more for her unique style of teaching, which she has taught to thousands of women in sold-out workshops all over the world. Bring a journal, and open heart and the willingness to grow open and stronger for her workshops.
Sean Dwyer: A Quest for Tears
Seán Dwyer is a college professor, a songwriter, and the author of award-winning fiction and non-fiction. Just as the possibility of publishing his debut novel was on the near horizon, both his career in teaching and his future as an author were put on hold due to a shocking car accident. While stopped at a crosswalk, he was rear-ended at 50 mph and suffered two serious concussions in two seconds. His injuries have left him with challenging balance issues and light sensitivity and rendered him unable to read or write for more than moments at a time. After nearly five years, he has recovered from some of his symptoms, while others linger still. In part as brain therapy but also as emotional therapy, Seán wrote a memoir of his recovery, A Quest for Tears: Surviving Traumatic Brain Injury to provide support and information to other Traumatic Brain Injury survivors. .
Alanna McLeod: Reimagining
After losing both of her parents in her early 20s, and much more of her small extended family over the following few years, Alanna McLeod got an early and up-close education about grief and loss. With the empathy and understanding she gained, Alanna became a founding team member of Reimagine End of Life, a nonprofit organization that encourages others to explore the otherwise taboo topics of death, dying, grief, loss, and mortality. By demystifying the topic of death, it is her belief that by preparing for a better end of life, we can live more fully while we are still here.
Julie Barton: Curiosity as Medicine
Julie Barton is the New York Times Bestselling author of Dog Medicine, How My Dog Saved Me From Myself. Julie’s story is not your average dog story; rather, it’s the story of learning to live through and live with depression by learning a different kind of self-talk. It’s also a story of a loving, but flawed family. Dog Medicine was the recipient of a silver Nautilus Award for its “exceptional literary contributions to spiritual growth, high-level wellness and positive social change.”
A Holiday Reprise: Karen Lynch: Finding Her Own Spirit
Raised by counter-culture parents in San Francisco’s roaring ‘60s, with her progressive politics intact, to say nothing of being female at a time when women were rare in policing, Karen Lynch was not exactly what would’ve been called “cop material”. But for a kid with a mom who suffered mental illness and who was exposed to abuse and neglect, she saw the police as helpers who often rescued her from danger.
A Holiday Reprise: Eileen Rendahl: Humor and Heart
With humor and heart, author, Eileen Rendahl tells the story of grief, family, and enduring beyond loss. In this episode of The Morning Glory Project, she shares how writing this fictionalized version of her story, along with the support and laughter of her family got her through the toughest moments.
Damien Posey: Once a Monster, Now a Mentor
The people in his San Francisco inner-city community who encounter Damien Posey affectionately call him Uncle Damien—Unk for some of the youth. To watch his tireless work on behalf of youth, homeless people, and others in need on the streets of San Francisco’s poorest and roughest neighborhoods it’s hard to imagine him as his former self, a self-described wild child who ran with gangs, went in and out of jail, group homes, and youth ranches, and committed crimes that eventually led him to a ten-year sentence in federal prison. In prison, away from the street life, Damien experienced an awakening that he wanted a different life for himself and for his then two-year-old daughter, and that he could use his natural leadership skills for the good. His transformation can best be described by one of his handles: Once a monster, now a mentor. An inspiring story of transformation and a profile of dedication and determination.
Maureen Langan: Love Your Guts
Maureen Langan is an award-winning stand-up comic and radio talk show host. In her one-woman show, Daughter of a Garbageman, Maureen shares with great humor and great heart the story of growing up with her Irish mother and Bronx-born father, in a loving, but flawed family. With working-class values peppered with alcoholism and other challenges, Maureen reveals her the strengths, struggles, and secrets and the lessons she has taken (or ignored) into adulthood and life as a performer. Somehow she manages to salvage the most loving messages she was taught, including her dad’s peculiar statement of affection: Love your guts!
Meredith May: Lessons Taught by Nature
While enduring a fragmented family and an unstable mom, Meredith May found inspiration in the gentle guidance of a grandfather and a sense of order and “family” that she observed while he taught her the art of beekeeping. Poignant, intriguing, and sometimes funny, this book and this author are bound to inspire.
Sands Hall: Reclaiming Lost Years
Coming from a loving, complicated, literary family, Sands Hall did not precisely fit the profile for one who would submit to a slow yet willing absorption into the Church of Scientology in the 1980s where she spent nearly a decade. In her candid and nuanced memoir, Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology, Sands shares her spiritual and artistic journey both during and after her years in what has since been called a “cult”. How has she found meaning and purpose rather than ruminating in regret? And what are the lessons she took from her experience? That’s what we learn in conversation with her.
Brooke Warner: Blazing Trails, Learning Lessons
Brooke Warner’s deep love for stories and books led her to a career in publishing where she eventually became an acquiring editor for an independent women’s press—her dream job. But when the publishing industry changed, aiming more toward celebrity than substance, she feared her dream was fading. With determination, taking huge risk, and sometimes stumbling, Brooke co-founded She Writes Press, overcoming industry opposition to build a nationally recognized, award-winning alternative to the old models for book publishing.
Toby Dorr: You Don’t Have to Be Your Worst Mistake
Toby Dorr might just be the world’s unlikeliest felon. So law-abiding that she counted to three at every stop sign before putting her foot on the gas, she had a lifelong drive to be “perfect” and to please others with no thought to her own needs. With her emotional well dry she had rendered herself vulnerable to trust the very first person who paid her attention—a choice that ultimately landed her in prison. Jail time gave her a chance to reflect and she learned how far a person can fall…and still get up.
Mark S. King: What’s Not to Love?
Diagnosed with AIDS in 1985, when the first HIV tests became available, Mark S. King felt he’d been given the death sentence that took far too many in those years and since. Somehow Mark’s body endured until the life-saving medications could come along. Today, he credits his “fabulous disease” with giving him the gift of empathy for others.
Karen Lynch: Finding Her Own Spirit
Raised by counter-culture parents in San Francisco’s roaring ‘60s, with her progressive politics intact, to say nothing of being female at a time when women were rare in policing, Karen Lynch was not exactly what would’ve been called “cop material”. But for a kid with a mom who suffered mental illness and who was exposed to abuse and neglect, she saw the police as helpers who often rescued her from danger.
Sara Connell: An Extraordinary Act of Love
As a leadership coach, author, and advocate for writers and thought leaders, Sara’s energy, optimism, and general hopefulness is contagious. Sara’s story of love’s generosity can be found in her memoir, Bringing In Finn. What strikes most is that though Sara’s journey to becoming a mother is an exceptional one, her methods for coping with loss and dealing with paralyzing grief are surprisingly ordinary and accessible to us all.
Eileen Rendahl: Humor and Heart
With humor and heart, author, Eileen Rendahl tells the story of grief, family, and enduring beyond loss. In this episode of The Morning Glory Project, she shares how writing this fictionalized version of her story, along with the support and laughter of her family got her through the toughest moments.
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