AGECRAFT After Dark

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October is Menopause Awareness Month, so we’re celebrating the AGECRAFT way: by talking openly about the things nobody bothered to tell us about our changing bodies.

This week, Julia sits down with Dr. Rachel Pope, a board-certified OB-GYN and sexual health specialist, for a candid conversation about the gaps that still exist in women’s and sexual healthcare.

They talk about cancer survivorship and surgical menopause, genitourinary syndrome of menopause (GSM), changing sexual function and desire, and why so many women assume they’re the only ones experiencing these changes.

They also explore the overlap between menopause care and gender-affirming care: hormones, sexual function, pleasure, confidence, agency, and the desire to feel at home in your own body.

Plus, Rachel and Julia get into the current enthusiasm around hormone therapy, why swinging from “nobody should take hormones” to “everybody needs hormones” misses a whole lot of nuance, and why science is still playing catch-up when it comes to women’s bodies.

Dr. Rachel Pope is Chief of the Female Sexual Health Division at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and part of its Gender Care Program. She is the founder of Our Womanity and co-founder of The Menopause Retreat.

And as for why this episode is called I Was Definitely a Witch?

You’ll get there.

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Our Womanity here.  

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What happens when you stop waiting to have everything figured out before letting yourself be the hero of the story?

Julia sits down with author Briana McDonald to talk about writing queer kids into the center of mystery and adventure stories, why girls deserve to do all the cool shit, and what rejection, grief, identity, and uncertainty have taught her about letting go of control.

Briana is the author of the middle-grade novels Pepper’s Rules for Secret Sleuthing, The Secrets of Stone Creek, and Galaxy Jones and the Space Pirates, published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Plus: one seriously consequential moment of intuition and a bibliomancy reading featuring a surprisingly tenacious little bird.

Because sometimes you don’t need to know how the story ends. You just need to keep writing it.

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Briana's website here.

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What if your career doesn’t peak at 30, 40, or even 50? What if shit really starts popping off at 60?

Writer, editor, and Oldster Magazine founder Sari Botton joins me to talk about aging, ambition, gendered ageism, and what happens when the doors stop opening and you decide to build your own damn thing.

We get into why every age is worth talking about, the surprising power of intergenerational conversations, making independent creative work financially sustainable, getting hit on by a 27-year-old at 59, and discovering that becoming older does not necessarily mean becoming invisible.

Then things get appropriately weird.

Sari tells me about being visited by dead people in her dreams—including an uncanny message delivered exactly 12 hours after a friend’s death at 3:33 AM. And in Between the Lines, a little bibliomancy involving an oak tree raises a much bigger question: Is Sari ready to take Oldster to television?

A conversation about getting older, getting bolder, and discovering that sometimes the green lights show up later than you expected.

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Oldster here.

Sari's website here.

Read All The Young Dudes here.

Read For my 70th Birthday I Hired an Escort here. 

Leave your message for the Speaker Box here.

Watch this episode on YouTube here.  

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What happens when you stop treating spiritual work like a calling you’re supposed to suffer for—and start treating it like actual work?

This week on AGECRAFT After Dark, I’m talking with Aly Kravetz, AKA Bronx Witch, founder of Witch Work and Better Witch Coaching. Aly has built her work around a message I can very much get behind: spiritual work is WORK, and you should be getting PAID.

We talk about why spiritual and wellness practitioners—especially women—struggle to charge for their labor, and Aly offers one of my favorite reframes: instead of trying to figure out what you’re “worth,” figure out what it costs you to show up and do the work.

But this conversation goes well beyond business. Aly is approaching 40 in the middle of a major life reinvention, having recently left New York for the U.S. Virgin Islands. We talk about rebirth, leaving a marriage, asking yourself whether you’re actually happy, ancestral practices, herbalism, magic and manifestation, and why neither of us feels particularly obligated to convince skeptics that witchcraft is real.

We also dig into why Aly chose the name BetterWitch—because “best” implies you’ve arrived, while better leaves room to keep learning, changing, and becoming.

It’s a conversation about money, magic, identity, agency, and building a life—and a livelihood—that actually reflects who you’re becoming.

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Bronx Witch website here.

Better Witch YouTube here.

Leave your message for the Speaker Box here.

Watch this episode on YouTube here.  

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A little surprise in your AGECRAFT After Dark feed.

This time, I’m not asking the questions. I recently joined Dr. Rachel Pope on Our Womanity to talk about what it’s actually like to navigate perimenopause when the healthcare system isn’t particularly good at recognizing—or treating—it.

We get into my own perimenopause story (including the grocery-store hot flash that made me think I was dying), being repeatedly told I was “fine,” why regular periods don’t mean you’re not in perimenopause, and the exhausting amount of self-advocacy often required to get appropriate care.

We also talk about the bigger problem: gaps in menopause education for healthcare providers, insurance and access, the rise of private and telehealth care, and the increasingly complicated job of separating genuinely helpful resources from people trying to sell vulnerable patients another supplement, test, treatment, or doodad.

And we get into something central to my work now: validate, educate, advocate. Because people shouldn’t have to become amateur medical researchers just to get someone to listen to them.

Also? Being the guest is delightful. No research. No interview prep. No questions to write. I just showed up and talked. Highly recommend.

Originally recorded for Our Womanity with Dr. Kameelah Phillips Pope and shared here as a special AGECRAFT After Dark feed drop.

CRAFT THE LIFE YOU WANT

Visit the Our Womanity website to hear more episodes here. 

For more AGECRAFT content, join the Substack here. 

To work with Julia and/or learn more about her, go here.  

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This week, I’m joined by death doula Grey Liefer for a deeply compassionate conversation about grief, dementia, end-of-life care, and what it means to help someone feel safe when the world no longer does.

Grey shares how early loss shaped their understanding of mortality, why grief asks us to stop striving for “better” and aim for neutrality instead, and how improvisation can become an unexpectedly powerful tool for caring for someone with dementia. We also discuss the unique end-of-life concerns facing queer and trans people, the practical importance of getting your paperwork in order, and the sacred bond between people and their animal companions.

And because this is AGECRAFT After Dark, there’s also a haunted childhood bedroom, a mysterious light left on, and the possibility that not every ghost is trying to scare us. Some may simply be helping us find our way home.

So light a candle, make a note of where you keep your important papers, and settle in. This one’s about mortality, meaning, and learning how to live more fully while we’re still here.

Grey's website here.    

Leave your message for the Speaker Box here.

Watch this episode on YouTube here.  

For more AGECRAFT content, join the Substack here. 

To work with Julia and/or learn more about her, go here.  

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Bestselling author. Brand strategist. Publisher. Founder of Empress Editions. Survivor of 14 facial surgeries and one extremely rude grocery store floor. 

Alisa Kennedy Jones does not do anything halfway, and in this episode she explains why midlife women — who control 85% of household spending and keep being told their voices are "old" — are the most underestimated force in publishing and this economy, if we’re being honest.

We cover: postmenopausal bliss (yes, really), the salary cliff nobody warns women about, banned-book drama, AI reader companions, taco-truck healthcare activism, and a ghost story involving a Victorian home and a child who was somehow in two places at once.

Visibility is activism. This episode is proof.

Empress website here.    

Empress Substack here.

Gotham Girl Substack here

Leave your message for the Speaker Box here.

Watch this episode on YouTube here.  

For more AGECRAFT content, join the Substack here. 

To work with Julia and/or learn more about her, go here.  

CBDMD website here.

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What if midlife isn’t about reinventing yourself? What if it’s about finally becoming the person you were all along?

In this episode, I sit down with writer, musician, actor, comedian, and multi-hyphenate Jen Kwok to talk about creativity, caregiving, intuition, visibility, and the strange process of reclaiming the parts of ourselves we were taught to tone down. We explore why sensitivity might actually be a superpower, how to hold the mundane and the magical at the same time, and why adulthood often feels like an endless stream of administrative tasks interrupting your actual life.

Plus: energetic hygiene, neurodivergence, comedy as survival, and a wonderfully weird story involving three ukuleles, a keytar, and what may be the universe’s most specific form of communication.

Jen's website here.    

Leave your message for the Speaker Box here.

Watch this episode on YouTube here.  

For more AGECRAFT content, join the Substack here. 

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This week I sat down with my oldest, most annoyingly-always-right friend, Mike Dressel — writer, plant dad, t-shirt auteur, and the reason I've seen approximately 400 things I wouldn't have otherwise seen. (He's almost always right. It's exhausting.) The man also accidentally coined what is objectively the greatest band name of all time, which you'll have to listen to find out — but I promise it involves a cat, a bad hip, and the creeping wave of fascism. 

So, ya know. Relatable.

We go everywhere: the disillusionment-to-essayist pipeline, why Gen X had the best music and also kind of raised itself on caffeine and neglect, what gay culture is finally leaving behind (and what it stubbornly won't), and why Mike is now, definitionally, a rave widow. We talk mental health, SSRIs, the specific shame of listening to Ryan Adams alone in your house, David Lynch on acid, and the mystifying persistence of algorithm pop stars who Mike is convinced are not real people.

We also do Bibliomancy, which tells Mike his style evolution will be nothing short of messianic. Skinny jeans, apparently, are back.

Candles optional. Bwain pills recommended.

Mike's website here.    

Leave your message for the Speaker Box here.

Watch this episode on YouTube here.  

For more AGECRAFT content, join the Substack here. 

To work with Julia and/or learn more about her, go here.  

CBDMD website here.

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You know that thing where a fitness instructor grabs your knee without asking? Yeah, we're done with that. Sofia Engelman — owner of Brooklyn's Queer Body Pilates and genuinely one of the most thoughtful humans working in movement today — joins me to talk about what consent actually looks like in a Pilates class, why the word "burn" is doing a lot of dirty work in so-called body-positive spaces, and how cueing into the posterior chain can quietly sidestep a whole lot of dysphoria. We get into trans-affirming movement, supporting clients through gender-affirming surgery, Sofia's upcoming book Pilates for the Revolution, and why your language IS your politics whether you meant it to be or not. Also: haunted speaker systems, leather jacket divination, and why I — a Gen Xer who got hit as a kid — am still unlearning a lot. Sofia is 28, deeply wise, and I'm taking notes. You should too.

Sofia's website here.    

Leave your message for the Speaker Box here.

Watch this episode on YouTube here.  

For more AGECRAFT content, join the Substack here. 

To work with Julia and/or learn more about her, go here.  

CBDMD website here.

Use code julia_g_wellness to get 15% off 

Episode Sponsor

Be one of the helpers! SUBSCRIBE to this podcast on APPLE PODCASTS or SPOTIFY and leave us a review on APPLE PODCASTS.