Coffee Talk #58: a special reading honoring Harvey Walker. Our dear Monica Welty emceed this evening, remembering/honoring her son Harvey who died 11 years ago. It's a beautiful event with four amazing readers: Ami Patel, Danielle Woermann, Krista Dabakis Price, and Monica Welty.

If you missed it or want to relisten, here it is. They all brought the best heart medicine. What a tender evening.

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, came out in September. You can buy it wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time to review Anne’s memoir.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

In this tender conversation with Jessica Fein she shares the power of vulnerability and talks about how grief is love, how she’s grown her heart and understands that joy and sorrow live together. She tells her story of her daughter’s illness and death, and how her ambiguous grief was so different from what she names Hallmark card grief—the grief we think of when someone dies.

Jessica Fein is the author of Breath Taking: A Memoir of Family, Dreams, and Broken Genes and host of the "I Don't Know How You Do It” podcast, which features people whose lives seem unimaginable from the outside. Jessica is a working mother and a relentless warrior in the memory of her dynamic daughter whom she lost to rare disease in 2022. Her work encompasses hope and humor, grit and grace—the tools that make up her personal survival kit. She’s a seasoned media contributor, with forums including Newsweek, Psychology Today, The Boston Globe, HuffPost, and more. To learn more visit www.jessicafeinstories.com.

Jessica’s book is just out. You can buy it wherever you buy books.

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page:

Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, came out in September. You can buy it wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time to review Anne’s memoir.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

Judith sites a beautiful ritual that includes the questions What happened to you? Why does your heart ache? We love these questions and how they’re wrapped in compassion, how they’re so different from asking What’s wrong? She shares about her writing journey and reminds us to stay with, not give up, on that things that matter to us.

Judith Turner-Yamamoto’s debut novel LOVING THE DEAD AND GONE, is a story of intergenerational love, loss, and longing that grew from her earlies memories. A Mariel Hemingway Book Club pick, the novel won the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Southern Regional Fiction. LOVING THE DEAD AND GONE was shortlisted for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Awards Grand Prize, where it was also finalist for the Debut Novel Award and awarded an honorable mention in General Fiction. Judith teaches and speaks at conferences and book festivals about healing trauma and finding fiction in fractured families.

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, came out in September. You can buy it wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time to review Anne’s memoir.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

Dianna shares that she while she was pregnant and knew her daughter, Mary Rose’s, chances of survival were slim, she was planning a funeral while buying a preemie car seat. Life and death were closely woven together. In this episode Dianna brings voice to grieving parents, to ghost babies, and to so much more.

DIANNA VAGIANOS ARMENTROUT’s memoir Walking the Labyrinth of My Heart: A Journey of Pregnancy, Grief and Newborn Death was published in 2016. Dianna’s poems appear in several lit journals and anthologies, including We Are the West, a Twenty Bellows Publication.

She is sending her novel about her female Greek ancestors out to Indie publishers this year. Dianna is the founder of The Labyrinth of the Heart Center, where she supports grieving families and practices Classical Homeopathy. She is a member of the Colorado End of Life Collaborative, and believes that grieving in community is more sustainable for our tender hearts.

For more information visit www.frontrangehomeopathy.com and www.diannavagianos.com

The non-profit in Billings, Montana that pays for infant funerals in Montana to support grieving families is Kisses to Heaven: https://kisses2heaven.com/construction/

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, came out in September.

You can buy it wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time to review Anne’s memoir.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

Ona shares about her sister Angie who was murdered decades ago and family secrets that kept the murder and Ona’s grief buried. In her soon to be released memoir, Everywhere I Look (Apprentice House Press; April 16, 2024), Ona Gritz unravels the mystery and tragedy of her sister, Andrea Susan Gritz, also known as Angie Boggs, while sharing her own awakening to loss, grief, guilt, and the truth.

Ona Gritz  holds a Master of Arts in poetry from the creative writing program at New York University. She is the author, most recently, of August Or Forever, a Reader’s Choice and Wishing Shelf finalist in middle grade fiction. Her nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, The Guardian, The New York Times, River Teeth, The Rumpus, The Utne Reader, and been named Notable in The Best American Essays and Best of the Year in Salon. Her earlier books include On the Whole: A Story of Mothering and Disability and Geode, a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She won the Poetry Archive Now Worldview 2020 Competition and has received many other honors for her poems, which have been widely anthologized. Ona lives with her husband, writer Daniel Simpson, near Philadelphia.

You can find Everywhere I Look and more here: https://www.onagritz.com/

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page:

Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, came out in September.

You can buy it wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time to review Anne’s memoir.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

Amy Baskin, Lenka Varekova, Meghan Riordan Jarvis, Melinda Maxwell-Smith, and Miriam Gershow each read a grief piece at our April Coffee Talk. If you missed it or want to relisten, here it is. They all brought the best heart medicine. What a tender evening.

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief.

Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, came out in September.

You can buy it wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time to review Anne’s memoir.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

Tesha reads short pieces from her new co-authored book Beyond Widow, sharing insights into being recently widowed and how she’s learning to be in this new role, this new identity. This episode is full of truth and wisdom and compassion. We hope you love listening.

A Tedx speaker and author, Tesha's new book, Beyond Widow, was released in June 2023 and sold 1,000 copies in its first month. Beyond Widow was written with Patty McGuigan, a colleague of Tesha's late husband Keith, a commercial real estate agent. Praise for the book reflects the appreciation and comfort that it has created for many readers. Tesha is a licensed but not practicing California attorney having received her JD/MBA from Northwestern and BA from Barnard College, Columbia University. 

https://www.beyondwidow.com/

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, came out in September. You can buy it wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. Thank you huge for taking the time.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

Miriam shares two griefs close to her heart: her dad’s death and the death of a dear friend. She talks about how she experienced grief differently with the two of them, how she decided to show up in big ways, and how grief changed her.

Miriam Gershow is the author of Survival Tips: Stories (Propeller Books) and the forthcoming novel, Closer (Regal House, 2025). Her debut novel, The Local News (Spiegel & Grau), was hailed as “unusually credible and precise" and "deftly heartbreaking” by The New York Times. Miriam’s stories appear in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Her flash fiction appears in anthologies from Alan Squire Books and Alternating Currents, and in Pithead Chapel and Variant Lit, where she won the inaugural Pizza Prize. Her creative nonfiction is featured in Salon and Craft Literary among other journals.

You can find more Miriam here:

www.miriamgershow.com

Survival Tips: Stories (Propeller Books, 2024)

Closer (Regal House Books, 2025)

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, came out in September.

You can buy it wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. Thank you huge for taking the time.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

Coffee Talk #57 where five readers read a story included in the anthology Hindsight 2020. True stories from the pandemic. With March being the anniversary of the start of the pandemic, we wanted to have a look back, reflect, on that time that affected us all, that time we didn’t know

what was next but we did know it was important to reach out, to connect, to feel less alone even while sheltering, even with so much uncertainty in the world.

Our thanks to Steve Fowler for curating and editing Hindsight 2020. We were honored to hear stories from Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Kendall Beck, Michael Cannistraci, Paul Silvester, and Story Clayton.

You can buy Hindsight 2020 here: https://www.amazon.com/Hindsight-Untold-Stories-Steve-

Fowler/dp/B0BVT722KF

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page:

Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, came out in September.

You can buy it wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. Thank you huge for taking the time.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

On this episode Dede covers a wide range of griefs from her grandparents’ deaths to her parents’ deaths and more. She shares about generational grief and how writing helps her navigate the hard parts of life. She’s journaled since she was in the eighth grade, building her writing muscles at a young age. 

Dede Montgomery is a sixth generation Oregonian who explores the jumbled path of forgiveness, reconciliation, courage and gratitude in her first memoir, My Music Man (2017). Dede began blogging in 2016 and began to further explore grief and gratitude together with blogs focusing on Oregon past and present. She continued on to write two additional books and her upcoming memoir, all published by Bedazzled Ink Publishing. Dede’s novel Beyond the Ripples was released in 2019, followed by her linked short story collection” Humanity’s Grace in 2020. Her memoir, From First Breath to Last: A Story About Love, Womanhood and Aging will be released on March 17. Follow Dede on her website https://dedemontgomery.com and on Facebook: Dede Montgomery and Instagram @d2montgomery.

Thank you for letting us be in your ears. 

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief. 

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, came out in September. You can buy it wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. Thank you huge for taking the time. 

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!