The Art of Grief

Chef, entrepreneur, and culinary producer of FX's The Bear, Courtney Storer was raised on the north side of Chicago, sparking a lifelong passion for hospitality and cooking. Today, Courtney is the founder of Coco's To Go Go, a culinary events company rooted in her Italian-American heritage and California sensibility.

She joins us for a very candid conversation about her "Young Nonna" persona, and how her practice of hospitality, comfort and care emerged from the traumas of her youth. She also talks openly to us about how she deals with grief and her journey to letting go on a daily basis. Plus, Karen offers her take on "Greek week" in the cinema (from The Odyssey to the filmed West End production of Hadestown), while Megan gives us a food-focused mindfulness exercise.

Author and performance studies scholar, Joshua Chambers-Letson joins us to talk about his latest book, Unfinished Grief: Queer Love and Loss.

In our conversation, we explore grief as a structure, not just a feeling, while considering the double-edged nature of grief and its collective potential / pitfalls. Plus, Megan shares insights on why we need to go to the ocean, as Karen revels once more in the genius of the final episode of HBO's Hacks.

Karen and Megan recorded LIVE with the actor, comedian and performance artist Kate Berlant as part of the "Unscripted" program at the Park Avenue Armory earlier this month.

They get into how we all, to a certain extent "perform" grief through certain public rituals like funerals, while tapping into the humor of not exactly knowing how or what to do with our bodies in those moments. Plus, we learn more about Kate's performance practices, the roots of her physical comedy, and the way she approaches different roles in life as well as art.

Shawn Taylor, a coach, consultant, Senior Fellow with the Pop Culture Collaborative and author of the recent book The Alphabet for New and Expecting Fathers, joins us to talk about the vicissitudes of masculinity and grief. His new performance project-turned-short film, Speak and Carry tackles how men-of-color grieve their lost friends and loved ones, while showing up for each others' families and communities. In our FYC, Megan and Karen pay homage to their favorite meeting-place, Taix in Echo Park, which closed on March 29 after 99 years.

Gil Hochberg, a professor at Columbia University and the author of the new memoir My Father the Messiah (2026), joins us for a discussion of this creative nonfiction text that explores the intersections of mental illness, religion, queerness, Judaism, Zionism and anti-Zionism.

Hochberg reconstructs her relationship with her father through an archive of letters between the two of them, as well as her father's personal writings, painting a tender portrait of family life through which Hochberg's queer identity unfolds alongside her father's mental decline.

Writer, multimedia journalist and a producer for KCRW's Good Food, Elina Shatkin, joins us for a candid, moving conversation about what it's like to lose her mother unexpectedly (while she was 7 months pregnant), right before caring for her newborn daughter.

Elina and her mom immigrated from Ukraine (in the former USSR) in the late 1970s, and she was raised with a single mom's "scrappy," hard working sensibility. Now, nearly a decade after losing her mom Tatyana Melnick, Elina is emerging from her grief to talk about the stories she feels she can finally tell, and future pathways to honoring her mom's memory in her creative practices.

For our FYC segment, Megan brings the hit TV series Heated Rivalry to the table as an experience that helps viewers get beyond "catastrophizing."

Chief restaurant critic for The New York Times, Tejal Rao joins us to talk about her recent article, "That Restaurant You Love Will Close One Day. What to Do?"

Beyond talking about how we grieve the loss of our favorite "third spaces," we get into how to become a regular at restaurants, as well as how food critics become the archivists for our experiences there. We also speak more broadly about the anticipatory grief that comes with losing our favorite places and people.

Dr. Jack Saul, a psychologist and artist, joins us for a conversation about the concept of moral injury explored in his practice, and in his public arts project Moral Injuries of War, which undertakes a national public reckoning on United States war-making and war culture.

As a psychologist and family therapist, Dr. Saul created programs in New York City and abroad for populations that have endured disaster, war, torture, and political violence, as he documents in his book Collective Trauma, Collective Healing.

We explore what "moral injury" means to different populations, specifically war veterans and refugees, as well as how it is connected to grief, love and our sense of a shared humanity amidst unspeakable atrocity.

Comedian, author and actor Guy Branum (Bros, Platonic) joins us to talk about his new one-man show, Be Fruitful. We explore the concept of "pre-grieving," especially as we enter middle age, and consider how love and grief are intertwined.

Megan and Karen return with Season 2 of the "Art of Grief" by exploring the concepts of unrelenting and compounded grief. Even as we began this podcast last year to process specific losses, we have been confronted with new emotional challenges, shocking losses and seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

This gives us the opportunity to explore what Megan describes as both "micro" and "macro" forms of grief, as we explore the "grief spaces" we plan to explore in our new season, with episodes releasing every two weeks.