The Morning Glory Project

The Morning Glory Project

By Betsy Graziani FasbinderHealth & FitnessMental HealthEducationArtsBooksSelf-Improvement
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The Morning Glory Project episodes

  • Arin Fugate: The Freedom to Trust Again
    Arin Fugate is a survivor. From between the ages of 11-21, she was raised as a “resident” of a spiritual cult and deemed for a time the “ceremonial virgin” whose mother surrendered her child’s custody to the spiritual leader. Deprived of food, education, and freedom of thought, Arin was isolated from a world she’d been taught to fear and indoctrinated in the twisted spirituality of the leader. Arin emerged from the cult experience at 21 unprepared to identify abuse or protect herself from it. Perhaps her most challenging and enduring deficit is being unable to resist an authoritative voice, requiring her to exercise great care in selecting the people she can truly trust.
    Having overcome addiction, anxiety, depression, and other limitations from years of abuse she is now dedicated to facilitating the rise of the Female Visionary. She serves on the board of Ride My Road, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping survivors of sex trafficking, founded by past Morning Glory Project guest, Lauren Trantham.
    Arin is a mother of two daughters, wife, and a business owner. She knows how hard it can be for women to carve a path to their dreams. By sharing her passion for natural wellness, and entrepreneurship with inspired business owners, she helps women to find their strengths and to pursue their dreams.
    31 min
  • Isidra Mencos: Promenade of Desire
    Isidra Mencos was born and raised in Barcelona when her home country was under the oppressive rule of Franco and strict religious teachings. Isidra spent her twenties experimenting with the new freedoms afforded by the end of Franco’s dictatorship, causing her to have a double life of “good girl” and “rebel.” She immersed herself in books and dancing, and working at various jobs. In 1992 she moved to the US to earn a Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American contemporary literature at UC Berkeley, where she taught for twelve years. After a ten-year stint in the corporate world managing teams in several countries, in 2016 she focused on creative writing. She tells of her journey in her memoir, Promenade of Desire, A Barcelona Memoir, published in 2022.
    36 min
  • Meesh: The Miracle of the Psyche
    It can be a helpless feeling to watch a loved one slipping away, becoming increasingly lost to mental illness, drug use, and even homelessness. In this very personal episode, the host of The Morning Glory Project welcomes a loved one, once thought lost. Using only a nickname to protect her privacy, Meesh, now stable, self-sufficient, and four years sober, shares her story of how the toxic cocktail of un-medicated mental illness and methamphetamine use dragged her from her life to the fringes of society—to homelessness, repeated incarceration. She’ll share not only the experience of being lost, but how even in her broken mental state, her psyche served to protect her and help her find her way to health.
    45 min
  • Kathia: Rejecting Cynicism, Keeping Love
    With over 6 million books sold (and counting), Kathia’s novels have been #1 bestsellers around the world. They’ve received starred reviews, have consistently earned Editor’s Picks for Best Romance, and have been featured by O, The Oprah Magazine. Kathia has written over 40 books and counting, some translated into several languages, all about hope and dreams and the bonds of friendship and family. In addition to writing, Kathia is an acclaimed artist and kung fu master. She wields both the paintbrush and the sword with great flare.
    Underlying her prolific writing, her art, and her unabashed sense of adventure, what may stand out most about Kathia is her unrelenting belief in love. When she found and married her own “miracle man”, one who could support her career and share in her adventures, she thought she had it all. Later, however, betrayal not only ended the marriage, but posed a threat to her career and cost her the ownership of 19 of her published works! Has her view of love changed? Is she still a romantic? And how has she healed? That’s what we cover in this episode of The Morning Glory Project.
    34 min
  • Kirsten Casey: What’s Poetry Got to Do with Anything?
    In troubled times, what good is art of any kind, much less poetry? To many, poetry seems so much the purview of the elite, the dalliances of the fanciful. It can seem esoteric and out of reach for most.
    Kirsten Casey, both as a poet herself and in her work with teen writers, has found that poetry is far more than fancy, that it can be not only accessible, but essential, and that engaging young people with poetry is a gateway to other meaningful connections. She shares this conversation with us on The Morning Glory Project.
    In 2022, Kirsten is the poet laureate of Nevada County, California, a California Poet in the Schools, creative writing teacher, and the author of Ex Vivo: Out of the Living Body and Instantaneous Obsolescence in which she explores historical and literary characters struggling with social media.
    33 min
  • Laura Talmus: Beyond Differences
    Following the unexpected death of their daughter Lili Rachel Smith in October 2009, Laura Talmus along with her husband, Averell “Ace” Smith founded Beyond Differences.
    Passionate about bringing awareness to the issue of adolescent social isolation, Laura is the full-time Executive Director of Beyond Differences, a student-led social justice organization dedicated to ending social isolation among middle school students.
    Beyond Differences’ Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum is now being used in over 9000 schools across all 50 states. They are best known for the national holiday, No One Eats Alone Day.
    The work of Beyond Differences strives to have an effect on every layer of society when it comes to suffering from social isolation. Working with families, schools, local and state programs, and even on the national level, this non-profit organization works to advance social-emotional learning and children’s mental health.
    Laura has received numerous awards and recognitions including being selected as an AARP Purpose Prize Fellow, a Jefferson Prize Award winner, receiving the MLK, Jr. Humanitarian Award from the Marin County Human Rights Commission, the Courageous Leaders Award from the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco, and the North Bay Business Journal’s Award’s Nonprofit Leadership Award. She is also a member of the Washington, D.C.-based organization, the Coalition to End Social Isolation and Loneliness (CESIL).
    35 min
  • Karen Grassle: Bright Lights, Prairie Dust
    For many, Karen Grassle is synonymous with Caroline Ingalls, the beloved character she portrayed in the long-running series, Little House on the Prairie. But she does not profess to always be as straightforward and agreeable as the character for which she’s best known.
    In this conversation, Karen offers us a glimpse behind the curtain of an actor’s life. In her candid memoir, Bright Lights, Prairie Dust, she reveals the elements of her life as a woman who came of age in the turbulent ‘60s, as a stage and screen actor, and as one who faced her own struggles with depression and alcoholism. She reveals the tenacity, work ethic, and dedication to her craft that kept her moving forward as her life and career. This memoir is a soulful, candid story filled with humor, heart, and wisdom, celebrating and honoring womanhood, in all its complexity.
    28 min
  • Lizbeth Meredith: Rescuing My Kidnapped Daughters
    Thinking she was doing everything not to duplicate her own dangerous and abusive childhood, Lizbeth Meredith found that she’d somehow fallen into the trap of a treacherous family pattern that made her daughters vulnerable. Finally divorced from an abusive ex-husband, Lizbeth’s world was turned upside down when he abused his visitation rights and left the country with the two girls, landing in his native country of Greece. Pursuing, finding, and rescuing her daughters became Lizbeth’s everything. Her harrowing story is captured in her memoir, Pieces of Me: Rescuing My Kidnapped Daughters and premiered in March 2022 as a true story film on Lifetime as “Stolen by Their Father,” starring Sarah Drew.
    Lizbeth is an author, speaker, and online teacher who holds a master’s degree in psychology. After a career working with domestic abuse and child abuse victims, Lizbeth then worked for 20 years as a juvenile probation supervisor. Today, she’s happy to write, speak, and teach online from her home in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
    44 min
  • Kirsten Mickelwait: Love after Life
    At thirty-one, Kirsten Mickelwait was ready to pursue a serious career as a writer and eventually, she hoped, marriage and family. When she met Steve Beckwith, a handsome and successful attorney, she began to see the future materialize more quickly than she’d dared to expect.
    Twenty-two years later, Steve has become someone quite different from the man Kirsten first met. Unemployed and addicted to opioids, he uses money and their two children to emotionally blackmail her. The couple separates but, just after their divorce is finalized, Steve is diagnosed with colon cancer and dies within the year, leaving Kirsten with $1.5 million in debts from properties that are no longer hers.
    As she fights toward recovery, Kirsten begins to receive communications from Steve in the afterlife—leading her on an unexpected path to forgiveness. The Ghost Marriage is her story of discovery: that life isn’t limited to the tangible reality we experience on this earth, and that our worst adversaries can become our greatest teachers. This is a book about life after divorce and life after death. It’s a story of how forgiveness is the best revenge.
    34 min
  • Gina Frangello: Blow Your House Down
    Gina Frangello is an author, editor, book reviewer, and journalist published in many prestigious journals and publications. She is the author of Every Kind of Wanting, A Life in Men, Slut Lullabies, and My Sister’s Continent.
    Despite these many accomplishments, Gina has come to wider reputation for her newest book, a memoir, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason.
    Her book was called “Searing, honest, heartbreaking, heart-mending, and a hell of a ride,” by Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers.
    Part memoir, part social commentary, this poignant book of raw candor does what its title implies…it blows the house down, departing from the customary expectations of women’s memoir, and daring to tell the truth about being an imperfect woman who has the sheer audacity to rise into a happy life after making mistakes in her life.
    47 min

About The Morning Glory Project

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The Morning Glory Project is my earnest attempt to listen to, learn from, and celebrate people of exceptional determination. Whether they’ve overcome obstacles, endured traumas or tragic losses,…