TONTS.

My guest today is a very good pal of mine Felicity Odgers. Flick was a primary school teacher and is now a qualified play therapist with a masters from Deakin University. Flick and I team taught many years ago in a remote community in the Kimberlys, working with a very special group of first nations children. What I learnt from Flick and her approach to working with little people has been invaluable not only in my career as an educator but especially as a parent. We talk today about the power of play and of rest, about co-regulation, about how to build trust and safety with our kids and so much more. If you are a parent especially I think you'll get so much out of this conversation but also so much of what we discuss can also be applied to us as humans in general.

For more about play therapy you can head to the Play Therapy Association at https://appta.org.au/

For more information for parents about Play Therapy: https://www.bapt.info/play-therapy/info-parents/

Additional resources:

The Goodbye Book by Todd Parr

The Memory Tree by Brita Teckentrup

Something Very Sad Happened by Bonnie Zucker

The Grief Wave by Trace Moroney

The Tiny Star by Mem Fox

The Invisible String (a book for children about grief)

Dr Becky Good Inside (lovely parenting advice & child appropriate language to use)

Play Matters with Dr Kathy Walker

Flick’s favourite parenting books:

No Bad Kids by Janet Landsbury

The Whole Brain Child by Daniel Siegel and Tina Bryson

Attachment Play by Aletha Solter

For more from Claire you can head to www.clairetonti.com or @clairetonti on instagram

You can email the show at [email protected]

Show credits:

Editing - RAW Collings and Claire Tonti

Theme music - Avocado Junkie

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today is Shameless Media's Rhiannon Joyce. Rhi is an integral part of the Shameless team – spear heading brand partnerships which is an integral role in growing what is a really fresh new approach to media. If you haven’t heard of Shameless let me fill you in. Co-founded by Zara McDonald and Michelle Andrews two young women in their 20s in 2018 –it started as a podcast called Shameless a show for smart people who love dumb stuff. Think: Pop culture! Hollywood! Influencers! Reality TV! Basically, all the things we’re told we shouldn’t care about, but secretly do. Fast forward to 2022 and Shameless is now a media company that also represents a community of whip-smart young people who connect via Instagram, TikTok, an ever-passionate book club, and a weekly newsletter called ASK SHAMELESS. After launching they have quickly become a leading voice for Gen-Z and Millennial Australians. With more than 40 million podcast downloads, 280,000 social media followers and 40,000 newsletter subscribers under their belts, they have also grown from a team of two to a company of seven. Today, the team that works to bring you Shameless every week comprises of Co-founders Zara McDonald and Michelle Andrews, Partnerships Director Rhiannon Joyce, Podcast Producer Annabelle Lee, Content Coordinator Ruby Tonzing, Researcher Justine Landis-Hanley, and Video Editor Sarah Ruhullah.

Rhi talks today about how she came to be on the Shameless team, about being a young woman in the advertising space at a high level and what she loved and also hated about working in that environment. About her incredible mum and the role model she gave her for womanhood. We talk about fear and career ambition and what happens when you are a strong opinionated young woman. Rhi also talks about her first meeting with Zara and Mich and what it took to take a leap of faith and join their team. She also talks openly about living alone during lock down and what she has learnt about looking after her mental well being. Rhi is wise and warm and funny and as a friend recently coined an entire vibe in and of herself. I was so thrilled to record this conversation at Shameless HQ and cannot wait to watch Rhi’s star continue to rise. 

For more from Rhiannon Joyce you can head to @rhiannonjoyce or you can find Shameless Media at https://shamelessmediaco.com/

For more from Claire you can head to www.clairetonti.com or @clairetonti on instagram

You can email the show at [email protected]

Show credits:

Editing - RAW Collings and Claire Tonti

Theme music - Avocado Junkie

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today is Freya Bennett musician, illustrator, writer and founder of the digital magazine Ramona.

Ramona Magazine is full of content from cis and trans women, as well as non-binary people who are comfortable in a space that centres the experiences of women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and BIPOC (black, Indigenous and people of color). It’s a place to share stories and experiences of womanhood and feminine energy and feminism. To fan girl over Harry Styles, to learn about our bodies, to explore sexuality and to ultimately relish in our power and diversity.

Freya herself is passionate about teaching other women and humans how hormones and cycles and fertility work and why it is so important we understand our periods. She isn’t afraid to speak openly about her battle with anxiety and also about this complex thing many of us are embarking on called motherhood. In this chat we talk about the origins of Ramona, about her period educator mother, about creative expression and feminism and self doubt and we also talk about the book series that inspired the title of Ramona – Ramona Quimby by Beverly Cleary. The series follows Ramona Quimby and her family. One of the best things about this children’s book series is that Ramona is able to be both loud and brash while also sensitive, constantly questioning herself and her place in things. It’s special particularly to Freya as it was a formative text in allowing her to understand that girls can be many things – something which in a lot of children’s literature they don’t always get to be. We also chat about her deep love of the Brady Bunch and Harry Styles. Can we all just have a moment to pause and appreciate the gift that is Harry. Anyway I digress. After the mikes were turned off I talked to Freya for another hour and I could have kept going. I hope you feel like this too – in the book series Ramona Quimby (of which I own the box set and can’t wait to share with my kids) Beverly Cleary writes (of Ramona) she was not a slow poke grown up. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next. AND that my friend is the energy Freya moves with. Not sure if I’ve ever related to something more in my life. I’ve never been a slow poke grown up and as Freya so rightly demonstrates through her Instagram and her work. There’s SO MUCH to be and do and see and find out. One shouldn’t ever be afraid to be enthusiastic and love things and fan girl all over the place. Life is simply too short for not caring. And Freya is someone who clearly lives caring about A LOT. Let’s all be fan girls and relish in it. Here she is Freya Bennett on TONTS.

For more from Freya you can head to @freya___bennett or follow @ramona_mag

For more from Claire you can head to www.clairetonti.com or @clairetonti on instagram

You can email the show through [email protected]

Show credits:

Editing - RAW Collings and Claire Tonti

Theme music - Avocado Junkie

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today is Zahra Biabani from Soulful Seeds. Zahra is a climate activist and influencer. I found her through the Suggestible podcast community and immediately resonated so much with her work. Her instagram and TikTok accounts are called Soulful Seeds and her message is all about figuring out how to live with the planet in mind. No small ask. Zahra is a bloody good dancer and each video she makes is her rocking out some sweet moves while sharing the latest climate research. It really helps as some of this stuff is really hard to read and the way she shares it makes you not feel completely hopeless. She also shares weekly earth wins which I think are my favourite parts of her content. Zahra is also an activist against modern day slavery a topic I quickly realised I knew nothing about until I started speaking to Zahra and listening to her story and the story she shared from the lived experience of a friend in her home town. We look at the intersection of trafficking and climate justice through one of her favourite movies Slumdog Millionaire. Zahra has just graduated from the Vanderbilt University studying Environmental Sociology and minoring in Earth and Environmental Sciences and Human and Organizational Development, with a focus on Community Development.

Tucked away in our backyard studio just before Christmas I had a late night conversation with Zahra that changed my perspective on a lot of things I thought I understood.

For more from Zahra you can head to @soulful_seeds on instagram or her blog www.soulfulseedsblog.com/links/

For more from Claire you can head to www.clairetonti.com or @clairetonti on instagram

You can email the show through [email protected]

Show credits:

Editing - RAW Collings and Claire Tonti

Theme music - Avocado Junkie and Alice in Winter

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Wilson is a journalist, multi-New York Times bestselling author, podcaster and social entrepreneur who hiked the world with one bag of belongings for eight years to understand our need to reconnect with life again. The salve, she found, to our loneliness, overwhelm, climate anxiety and angst was to rediscover her “wild". Sarah wrote a book about her discoveries which is both moving, rage inducing and ultimately uplifting called This One Wild and Precious Life. She now also hosts a podcast inspired by her wonderful book called Wild with Sarah Wilson where you can join Sarah as she explores the big philosophical, spiritual and social themes of our times with the big minds she encounters around the world.

You might also recognise Sarah from her best selling book and hugely successful company I Quit Sugar.

I found Sarah however through another one of her books called First we make the beast beautiful. In this book she uncovers what it means to live with anxiety and it is both a frank record of her life growing up on a rural property in a minimalist household as well as a guide for others seeking to find comfort and help in navigating what it means to be human and how to live with mental illness. Sarah’s search for meaning and her giant intellect and thirst for knowledge has taken her to so many wild places and I felt so privileged to sit with her for an hour and ask her question after question. I hope you enjoy this big conversation about everything from why we are here and the meaning of life to Sarah’s incredible gift for entrepreneurship running a thriving enterprise as a child called Creation Engine making library bags and elephant pins in her bedroom.

Sarah has also just launched on Audible – Make Anxiety Your Superpower where she speaks with 10 people living with different flavours of anxiety, in honest and open conversations about their shared experience. From panic attacks to high functioning anxiety and control, Sarah listens to these incredible, yet all too familiar, stories and shares her philosophy and practical tips to not only help reframe anxiety, but to go one step further...to make it our superpower.

For more from Sarah you can find her at www.sarahwilson.com or @_sarahwilson_

You can email me with suggestions for episode topics and guests to [email protected].

Show credits:

Editing - RAW Collings and Claire Tonti

Theme music - Avocado Junkie and Alice in Winter

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joanna Bennett wears her insides on her outsides. She is also known as the poet Tatterhood and is the author of 3 books Swimming Underwater, Tiny Lungs and These Are My Delicious Sandwiches. Her poetry speaks to the heart of things. Little things that really are big things. What it feels like to watch someone you birthed into the world sleep beside you. The stretchy long days of parenting through isolation during a pandemic. The low hum of irritation at the socks on the floor or the blinding sentimentality of your box of Christmas decorations stored somewhere in the back of the cupboard to be rifled through when the time is right. Jo writes in a way that makes sense to a sleep deprived addled sometimes hormonal brain. Her poetry gifts us fragments of womanhood and motherhood and aching love and the daily grind of parenting tiny humans. I first heard her poetry spoken about by Pandora Sykes on the High Low podcast and very quickly ordered her 2020 book of poems called Tiny Lungs. Illustrated by her son each group of words for me was a window into the heady mix that is parenthood the fear, the exhaustion and the love. For me poetry helps especially when I’m bone achingly tired and overwhelmed or hormonal or just plain over everything. There’s no pressure to finish a whole chapter let alone a whole book - poems can put your restless mind in touch with something bigger and brighter and deeper and wider than the dishes you’re meant to be stacking in the dishwasher or the never-ending pile of clean washing filling up baskets all over the house. Whether it’s her words about the light on a sequin or the heart breaking simplicity of her poem Bones about grief and miscarriage and friendship Joanna Bennett helped me through some of the isolation this pandemic and Covid 19 brought over these last few years. We had second babies, daughters who want to eat wires and scale precipitous heights (from her poem wires about parenting a her daughter) about the same time in 2020 and while Jo lives in Bristol and I in Melbourne her third book These are my delicious sandwiches speaks into so much of what I felt being pregnant when the world was beginning to lockdown and what that would mean for me but also for my baby and our little family unit. Jo is exactly as warm and funny and honest as I hoped she’d be and her voice leapt out at me across the internet air waves late at night in our backyard studio.

I read somewhere once that sometimes putting art into the world is like sending out a beacon to your people to say hello here I am is anyone else out there feeling the same as me? And that’s how I reckon it is with Jo. I hope you fall as much in love with her as I did during this conversation.

A little more about Joanna in 2017 she was longlisted for the Out-Spoken Prize For Poetry and in the December was commissioned by GOSH Arts to write a book for Great Ormond Street Hospital which was subsequently turned into a film read by Rupert Everett.

Follow Joanna Bennett on instagram @tatterhood_

Subscribe here for – tontsnewsletter

You can find me on instagram @clairetonti or at www.clairetonti.com

You can email me with suggestions for episode topics and guests to [email protected].

Show credits:

Editing - RAW Collings and Claire Tonti

Theme music - Avocado Junkie

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

TONTS. is back for a second season. Dropping March 21st every Monday. From climate activism to miscarriage, creativity and inner critic, womanhood and motherhood this season is full of in depth interviews with writers, artists, activists and deeply feeling humans who talk to host Claire Tonti about the stories that have shaped who they are. So let's go into the deep together. More connection, less shallow, more love.

Trailer credits:

Editing - Claire Tonti and RAW Collings

Theme Music - Alice in Winter

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on TONTS. I talk to James Clement (otherwise known as my husband man or Mr Sunday Movies). This is the final episode in the season and is one of my favourites. James and I discuss why the film Office Space changed the trajectory of his life, what it's like to become a parent, why he does what he does and his relationship with his inner critic.

As always thank you to RAW Collings for editing this week's episode.

Subscribe here for – tontsnewsletter

You can find me on instagram @clairetonti or at www.clairetonti.com

You can email me with suggestions for episode topics and guests to [email protected]. Feel free to leave me a voice memo to be included in the show.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jennifer Grey’s character of Baby in the 80s iconic film Dirty Dancing was a revelation writes the Guardian’s Melissa McEwan and in re-watching this classic movie for this episode I whole heartedly agree. I remembered this movie for the swoon worthy Patrick Swayze, the corny but brilliant soundtrack and that lift at the end. In the re-watch I discovered frank, feminist and funny dialogue that while unfolding on a cheesy back drop of the Catskills in the 60s was absolutely ahead of it’s time. During lockdown in Melbourne I rang up my wonderful pal Ellen Steele who is a teacher and educator, a mum and an avid reader of all things pop culture to dissect Dirty Dancing and talk about our approach to raising girls. A chat with El is one of my favourite things to do because she is always across everything I want to be reading and finds equal joy in discussions of parenting dilemmas to politics to the Gwyneth Paltrow’s vulva scented candles. I called her up one night in the depths of the pandemic back in August 2021 when we were experiencing so much uncertainty. Trying to work and parent and frankly survive with no real light at the end of the tunnel yet. As of Friday the 22nd of October Melbourne came out of hibernation and for the first time in a months I was allowed to venture out of my house for whatever reason I damn well pleased. So with this in mind I reckon what a fun time to do a deep dive into one of my favourite feminist movies with my good pal and now yours too, the smart, funny woman that is Ellen Steele.

You can find me at @clairetonti on instagram or at www.clairetonti.com and subscribe to my newsletter here

As always thank you to RAW Collings for editing this week's episode.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Benjamin Law grew up in Queensland, gay, Asian and from a big, hilarious, hardworking family. Benjamin is my guest this week and he is a writer of books and TV shows and plays. You might recognise him from the award winning SBS TV series The Family Law based on his memoir of the same name. He is also warm and articulate and funny. Benjamin wrote a book on sex and relationship advice called Law School with his mum Jenny Phang who also happens to be in his wonderful documentary series for the ABC called Waltzing the Dragon where he explores his Cantonese roots and the relationship Australia has with China. Not only does Benjamin share his coming out story in this episode he also talks about what it is like to have your parents divorce when you are 12 and the racism that he experienced when the red headed politician Pauline Hanson swept into popularity in the 90s on an incredibly racist, anti Asian platform. He has a PHD in creative writing, has written many pieces including the Quarterly Essay Moral Panic 101 and was editor of Growing up Queer in Australia. He also co-hosts a weekly pop culture show called Stop Everything. Benjamin’s writing is at once moving and funny, walking that line of making you laugh while hitting you with searing honesty and it was a joy to meet him. Here he is all the way from Adelaide quarantine, Benjamin Law.

For more from Benjamin you can head to www.benjamin-law.com and here is a recommendation recipe from Ben for Chinese Chicken Congee https://lilydalefreerange.com.au/recipes/Chinese-Chicken-Congee

You can find me at @clairetonti on instagram or at www.clairetonti.com and subscribe to my newsletter here

As always thank you to RAW Collings for editing this week's episode.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.