In this conversation, Kate and Anna discuss:

• How conversations might engender the intimacy we need to get by
• Fostering the right interpersonal and listening skills it takes to approach a difficult topic (especially when you’re feeling nervous)
• Best practices for responding to someone’s hard news
• How learning to listen might bridge differences of all kinds

What do we lose when we don’t talk about hard things? And what might we gain if we do?

Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful.

Join us for Advent over on Substack!

This episode originally aired April 2022.

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What happens when childhood teaches you more about survival than safety? Poet and author Nikki Grimes joins Kate to talk about growing up with profound instability—and still choosing to see beauty, feel joy, and offer forgiveness. In this moving conversation, they explore memory, trauma, faith, and the small pockets of belonging that shape a life.

SHOW NOTES:

• Books by Nikki Grimes: Ordinary Hazards – A memoir in verse chronicling Nikki’s traumatic childhood; Glory in the Margins – A collection of Sunday poems exploring faith and resilience; A Cup of Quiet – A children’s book about the sweet bond between a grandmother and granddaughter; The Road to Paris – A semi-autobiographical novel inspired by Nikki’s experience in foster care.
• Poems read in this episode: Holy Architecture – from Glory in the Margins, Habitation – from Glory in the Margins
• Support guides: When You’ve Been Hurt as a Child, When Your Family is Complicated
• Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful.
• Join us for Advent over on Substack!

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Today, we’re sharing a conversation from the More Happier podcast between Kate, Gretchen Rubin, Priya Parker, and Francis Lam. 

It’s easy to get swept up in a cycle of holidays that feels more like a relentless to-do list than a source of joy. In this Celebration Roundtable, we talk about how to embrace the holidays as opportunities for intentional connection and meaning.

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Tim Shriver—educator, author, and longtime Chairman of Special Olympics—joins Kate for a tender, funny, deeply practical conversation about dignity: what changes when we decide everyone matters, how relationships (not information) do the real work, and why service is more than “being nice.” Together they trace a family story from Rosemary Kennedy to Eunice Kennedy Shriver to millions of athletes, swap hospital-and-gymnasium epiphanies, and offer a simple lens for disagreeing better. It’s an invitation to the “really real,” where joy and sorrow live together and love makes people—and communities—more fully alive.

SHOW NOTES:

• Special Olympics — The global movement founded by Eunice Kennedy Shriver and now led by Tim.
• Dignity Index — A practical tool for scoring how we speak across difference, helping us learn to disagree without contempt.
• Unite — A bridge-building initiative founded by Tim Shriver to foster common ground and shared dignity.
• CASEL — The pioneering framework for social and emotional learning Tim helped develop.
• Fully Alive: Discovering What Matters Most — Tim’s memoir on faith, family, and the pursuit of a life that really matters.
• Subscribe to Kate’s Substack for blessings, essays, and reflections that hold what’s hard and beautiful.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What happens when you live on a planet where grief rewrites the language of everyday life? Kate Bowler speaks with writer and New York Times editor Sarah Wildman about her daughter Orli’s incandescent life and staggering courage while living with terminal cancer. Together they explore the limits of positivity culture, the fierce tenderness of caregiving, the sacred discomfort of truth-telling, and the love that carries us when nothing adds up. This is a conversation for anyone who has lived inside the ache—and chosen joy anyway.

Show Notes:

• Sarah Wildman’s award-winning writing at The New York Times

• Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire”

• Jewish practices of grief (shiva) and care (bikur cholim)

• Blessing for Life After Loss

• Support Guides: Parenting a Medically-Complicated Child, When Your Child is in Pain, When You’ve Been Diagnosed

• Orli, in all her joy: @orli_halpern on TikTok

• For those of us who live on a different planet now: Small Talk Survivor Tee | Mug

• Kate’s Substack – blessings, reflections, and our tender corner of the internet

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It’s tempting to be a very serious person in a very serious world. But what if staying soft was the most loving thing we could do? In this vulnerable and playful conversation, Kate sits down with Sophie Grégoire Trudeau—mental health advocate, speaker, and writer—to talk about childhood wiring, the masks we wear, and how we begin the lifelong work of coming home to ourselves. If you’re navigating heartbreak, trying to live in your body again, or just craving a little lightness without losing depth—this one's for you.

SHOW NOTES:

• Gabor Maté – on trauma, addiction, and the pain beneath our coping mechanisms

• “Innocence is one’s ability to be found by the world.” – A reflection on David Whyte’s invitation to stay open
• Maslow, Indigenous wisdom, and the reminder that community is what makes us feel safe

• Support Guides: When Your Child is in Pain, When You've Been Hurt as a Child, Those Who Give and Need Support

• Come hang out in our new favorite corner of the internet: Kate's Substack.

 

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Loving people is a gift—and a liability. The more we love, the more there is to lose. In this hilariously honest and deeply tender conversation, Kate talks with beloved writer Catherine Newman about the strange pairing of love and fear. Together, they explore how parenting, grief, humor, and hospice care shape us into people who laugh while crying and keep showing up anyway. If you’ve ever whispered “I love you” and immediately wanted to bubble-wrap your whole family, this one is for you.

Show notes:

• Catherine Newman’s Work: Wreck (Novel), We All Want Impossible Things (Novel), Waiting for Birdy (Memoir), Catastrophic Happiness (Memoir), Crone Sandwich (Substack)

• A Blessing for When Love Makes Us Afraid (as read on the episode)

• Come hang out in our new favorite corner of the internet: Kate's Substack.

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When someone you love is in pain—but can’t say the words out loud—what can you do? Kate speaks with beloved Canadian novelist Miriam Toews (All My Puny Sorrows, Women Talking, A Truce That Is Not Peace) about the silences that shape us: the kind that settle into families, into churches, into whole communities where mental illness is unnamed and suffering goes unspoken.

Together, they talk about the long shadow of religious shame, the courage it takes to tell the truth, and what it means to stay present with people we can’t fix. This conversation is tender, fierce, and unflinchingly honest.

This episode includes discussion of suicide at the beginning and end of the episode. If you're struggling, you can call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

SHOW NOTES:

• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — Call or text 988 if you or someone you love is struggling. You are not alone.

• A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews — her newest memoir and the heart of this conversation

• All My Puny Sorrows, Fight Night, Women Talking — beloved novels by Miriam Toews

• Join Kate on Substack — katebowler.substack.com for blessings, essays, and kind conversation

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How do we stay hopeful in the face of despair and disillusionment—especially when politics threaten to tear us in two? Kate speaks with Parker Palmer, a writer, teacher, and activist. As you’ll hear, he has gone through seasons of deep clinical depression, and has hard-won wisdom to share with us on how to survive, how to regain a sense of agency, how to remain hopeful despite it all. 

In this episode, Kate and Parker discuss:

• finding agency in the midst of depression and despair (including his trick of redefining achievement)

• why it is important to recalibrate our sense of reality—especially in the face of 24-hour news cycles and social media algorithms

• how a broken heart can either shatter or break open into a larger, more compassionate way of being

So on a day like today when we all might be thinking about the state of our nation or the state of our world or the realities at stake for our families and friends (....or perhaps, more tempted to keep our head in the sand to just make it through Thanksgiving), might we pull up close and listen to what Parker has to teach us about how to keep our hearts soft and remain hopeful, still. 

If you liked this episode, you’ll also love: 

• Sharon McMahon on the small differences we can make

• Will Willimon on aging into a new vocation

Watch clips from this conversation, read the full transcript, and access discussion questions by clicking here or visiting katebowler.com/podcasts.

Follow Kate on Instagram, Facebook, or X (formerly known as Twitter)—@katecbowler. Links to social pages and more available at linktr.ee/katecbowler.

This episode originally aired in November 2024.

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Joy won't cure you, but it will carry you.

After surviving a stage-four cancer diagnosis, Kate Bowler knew she was supposed to be grateful. Alive. Blessed. But she still ached—for more connection, more surprise, less resentment on an ordinary day.

So she went looking for joy. Not the toxic positivity kind. Not a 5-step plan. But the type that sneaks in unexpectedly, seemingly out of nowhere. A lemur sunbathing. A belly laugh at a funeral. A dive into the Atlantic with a shark wrangler.

In Joyful, Anyway, Bowler takes us on a hilarious and tender journey through big questions and small delights. With wry wit and deep honesty, she explores how joy can surprise us even in the middle of pain, boredom, and longing.

This is not a book about fixing your life. It is about how we can all find more—feel more—by making room for small extraordinary moments. For anyone who has ever felt stuck, who is achy for meaning, who feels undone by loss, who feels that joy is just out of reach, who wants, simply, to have more fun, Joyful Anyway is a delicious, insightful tour through the questions that sit in the deepest part of our souls. It proves that for every time we ask: Is this it? Joy will answer: there is more.

Joyful, Anyway releases on April 7, 2026, but you can pre-order now from all of your favorite retailers.

• Bookshop

• Amazon

• Apple Books

• Barnes & Noble

• Indigo

Check out that gorgeous cover!

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