The Truth So Help Me Good

Hello Co-journeyers! For over two decades my special guest, DR. BARBARA LAZIO has been a frontline neurosurgeon and writer. Now, as a respected medical school faculty member, she operates and teaches essential neurosurgery skills to budding neurosurgeons. In a world where gravity and seriousness rule, she strives to find tenderness and humor. She is here to speak with us today about her memoir Off the Top of My Head.

Hello Co-journeyers! My special guest Paige Gordon, recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal, is a writer, advocate, and women’s commissioner whose work lives at the intersection of writing and systemic disruption. Drawing on her lived experience with bulimia, her passion is championing large-scale, biologically informed studies that reframe eating disorders as neurobiological conditions rather than moral failures.  Thank you for listening! Executive Producer: Jake Landry

Kara Kavensky is a corporate communications expert, public relations strategist, author, and podcaster. She has decades of marketing and sales experience in executive leadership and she has been a professional writer for over 25 + years. Her specialty is a strong passion for honest, powerful, effective storytelling catalyzing meaningful, positive change. She has written thousands of personal interest stories for a variety of publications. Kara was inspired to write her first memoir titled TELL ME ABOUT JOY as a result of one of those interviews. Please have a listen and hear all about it! Executive Producer Jake Landry.

Edward McDonald headed the Justice Department’s largest and most successful Organized Crime Strike Force in Brooklyn throughout the 1980s. He was responsible for the convictions of the leaders of four of the five Mafia families in New York, over sixty La Cosa Nostra capos and soldiers, more than seventy corrupt labor union officials, and countless others associated with the LCN. He also successfully tried New Jersey Senator Harrison Williams and successfully prosecuted five US congressmen.

In his debut memoir, written with Jake Brown, Ed, for the first time, takes us inside the real-life investigations, prosecutions, and trials of two front-page courtroom battles, the Lufthansa Heist and the Boston College point-shaving scandal.

The stories of the legendary Lufthansa heist and the Boston College point shaving fix are iconic, interesting cases that have captivated the public for years. With an entertaining storytelling style, Ed provides singular, insider accounts of how the investigations and trials were conducted. With behind-the-scenes detail of trial strategies and stages, Ed’s memoir also serves as a window into criminal trial practice, presented in an understandable and gripping way for non-lawyers, while never leaving out descriptions of the antics of all the colorful characters he encountered along the way.

Hello Co-journeyers! Welcome to The Truth So Help Me Good Mini POD!! MiniPODs are short episodes that share ideas, spark curiosity, and inspire reflection as we continue exploring this journey we call life—together! Thank you for listening! Executive Producer: Jake Landry

* The discussion of awareness, expression, and connection is informed by my training in Grief Yoga and the work of Paul Denniston.

My special guest, Tim Smith, never set out to become a writer, but he carried a story that refused to stay buried. His memoir, Fault Line - Still Standing, follows Tim’s long, uneven path toward healing, identity, and personal truth. With a voice that is direct, reflective, and at times unexpectedly humorous, he explores resilience and what it means to build a life after survival—and the quiet realization that you can carry your past without letting it define you. Both devastating and defiant, Fault Line is more than a memoir of abuse. It is a testament to endurance, an unflinching look at generational cycles, and a reminder that even in the harshest landscapes, something can still grow. Executive Producer: Jake Landry.

Hello Co-journeyers! Please join me with the second edition of The Truth So Help Me Good Mini POD!!

Mini PODs are short episodes that share ideas, spark curiosity, and inspire reflection as we continue exploring this journey we call life—together! Thank you for listening! Executive Producer Jake Landry.

Ana Hebra Flaster was nearly six when her family fled Cuba and settled in Nashua, New Hampshire. After graduating from Smith College and enjoying a career in software consulting, she began her writing career. Her writing about Cuba and Cuban Americans has appeared in the The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and elsewhere.

Her commentaries and storytelling have aired on NPR’s All Things Considered and PBS’s Stories from the Stage. 

Property of the Revolution, her first book, was shortlisted for the 2023 Restless Book’s New Immigrant Writing Prize and the 2022 Cintas Creative Writing Fellowship. 

After forty years in the Boston area, she recently moved to southern New Hampshire with her family.  When she’s not writing, Ana loves birdwatching, walking in the woods, and digging in her garden.

Cuba Curious Substack

https://anahflaster.substack.com/

Amazon buy page

https://tinyurl.com/y39pzkzm

Ana Hebra Flaster Personal Website

https://anacubana.com/

Lena Fein is an author, retired engineer, and philanthropist based in San Francisco. A graduate of Engineering at UC Berkeley, Lena spent decades as Vice President of Sales and Marketing at a successful high tech company. When Lena was fifty-one, her mother died which propelled Lena on a path of healing from childhood abuse and trauma. Her debut memoir, Shattering the Mirror, explores her transformative journey to wholeness. Lena believes it is never too late to reclaim your freedom and truth. Now in her late sixties, Lena can often be found taking long walks by the San Francisco Bay and hugging her grandchildren. Executive Producer Jake Landry.

Hello Co-journeyers! Nancy Shear, author of I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms, was only fifteen when she began sneaking into Philadelphia Orchestra concerts through the stage door, and seventeen when she was hired as a member of the orchestra’s library staff to help prepare the music; one year later, she became Leopold Stokowski’s musical assistant. Being young and female, she was a pioneer in both positions.

It is a privilege to share with you my conversation with Nancy that is both inspiring and insightful. Where she takes us into rehearsals and concert halls, revealing the choices musicians must consider, and what conductors, players, and composers really do.

Executive Producer Jake Landry