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The same month their dad moved out, Olivia Howell's two little boys put on a play. It was August 2019, and they were three and five. Olivia's cousin, a children's theater costume designer, sat down with them to write a script, make the costumes, and hand out roles to the entire family. Olivia still has the video, and it still gives her chills, because in the middle of their family changing, her kids got to see that they were part of something bigger. That memory opens this conversation with Lynne Streeter Childress, a playwright, teaching artist, theater director, and the founding artistic director of Building Better People Productions, a theater company for young audiences based in Annapolis, Maryland. Everything Lynne makes is about treating yourself and other people better, and she makes a case most parents have never heard: sitting in the audience is not passive. In her words, "audiences in live theater are part of the production." She tells the story of a recent night at You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, when the actor playing Lucy turned one line toward her own grandmother in the crowd and the whole room lit up. "It felt like we were being invited in." Olivia connects the dots in real time: the skills that make a child a good audience member are the same ones that make them a good friend and a good listener. Then Lynne shares the story behind her one-person show, Feeling All the Feelings. During the pandemic, her son, then in second grade, was asked to write about something good, something bad, and something that could be better. His answer: "Nothing's good, everything's bad." It stopped her. How often do we tell kids what we want them to feel? The show follows a fifth grader who senses that people only want her to be happy, so she hides behind giant emojis everywhere except one corner of her house. It is a tender, funny reminder that it's okay to "feel everything that you're feeling and own all of your feelings," and that the grown-ups are often masking too. Listeners will leave with two simple shifts: start small with community theater where kids are expected to speak up, and when you get there, as Lynne says, "Let them laugh." Feeling All the Feelings, a show for families about emotions, has two free performances on Saturday, October 24 at 11 AM and 12:30 PM at Highwire Improv, 400 South Conkling Street in Baltimore, as part of Free Fall Baltimore. Reserve tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/feeling-all-the-feelings-tickets-1999393228970?aff=oddtdtcreator 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry

Somewhere along the way, most women learn to smile through it. Through the pain no one warned you about in the doctor's office. Through the joke that wasn't funny. Through the stranger on the street who says you'd look prettier if you did. Hillary Frank, creator of the beloved parenting podcast The Longest Shortest Time, has spent years telling surprising, honest stories about parenthood and reproductive health. In this episode of A Fresh Story: Book Talk, she tells Olivia what happened when she took that familiar, crazy-making feeling and asked a different question: what if it were a thriller? The answer is Wedlocked, an original audiobook from Macmillan Audio. It follows Zara, the top instructor on a fitness app called Uplift, which her husband owns. Her job is to be the happiest person in the room. She is about to turn 40, she wants a baby, and her husband keeps saying he'll be ready when he's ready. Over the course of the story, Zara starts to realize she feels trapped in her marriage, and then that she might literally be trapped in it. Hillary wrote and directed the production herself, with a full cast led by narrator Helen Laser, so listeners hear Zara teach her classes and livestream with her husband as if they were members of the app. Olivia names why the premise lands so hard for anyone who has lived inside a marriage that looked fine from the outside: "there is a level of horror movie that goes into ordinary marriage stuff that we don't like to talk about because it's so ordinary." Hillary explains about writing suspense for the ear, why she hopes men listen too, and what it costs a person to keep swallowing the hard feelings so everyone else stays comfortable. If you are navigating marriage, motherhood, the mental load, divorce, or any life transition where you have been told to look on the bright side, this audiobook thriller, and this episode, may feel uncomfortably and usefully familiar. Listen to Wedlocked here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250372208/wedlocked/ 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry

Sometimes the most useful divorce recovery tools aren’t complicated—they’re the small, tangible things that help you feel more like yourself when everything else feels uncertain. In this episode of A Fresh Story: Simple Tips to Support Yourself, Olivia Howell talks with Tracy D. Galloway, Esq., M.A., a Massachusetts divorce attorney, litigator, online divorce coach and educator, and creator of Divorce Bootcamp. Drawing from both her professional experience and her own life, Tracy shares three surprisingly simple strategies for supporting your emotional resilience through divorce, single parenting, stressful transitions, and other seasons when you need help feeling grounded. Tracy’s tips begin with something as ordinary as getting dressed. She explains why putting on a favorite blazer—or any piece of clothing that helps you feel strong, held, and capable—can change how you approach a difficult phone call, meeting, or conversation. Her second tool is a funny coffee mug, which serves as a daily reminder that humor matters, bad days are allowed, and self-forgiveness is part of taking care of yourself. Finally, Tracy talks about investing in physical comfort, from the right pillow to the objects that make home feel safe and restorative. Together, these simple practices offer accessible self-care during divorce without pretending that a hard season can be solved with a perfect morning routine. The episode also explores one of Tracy’s most important mindset shifts for anyone starting over after divorce: feelings are not facts, and thoughts are not decisions. You are allowed to imagine another life without immediately acting on it. You are allowed to consider possibilities, think beyond your current circumstances, and ask what a different future could look like. For listeners navigating divorce recovery, single parenting, emotional overwhelm, or a major fresh start, Tracy offers practical encouragement for supporting yourself today while slowly making room for what might be possible tomorrow. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/ 💛 The Divorce Happens Community: https://divorcehappens.substack.com/

There is a particular kind of loneliness that can come with becoming a mother: the moment you realize everyone warned you that you would be tired, but almost nobody warned you that you might lose pieces of yourself. Creator and author Emily Feret built her platform by saying the things mothers are often afraid to say out loud—the house is messy, the baby won’t stop crying, your body feels unfamiliar, your marriage has changed, you miss who you used to be, and sometimes motherhood is simply really, really hard. In this episode of A Fresh Story: Book Talk, Emily joins Olivia to talk about the book that grew out of that radical honesty, Normalizing Normal: Motherhood Without the Filter. Covering the terrain from pregnancy through the early years of parenting, Normalizing Normal is less a traditional parenting manual than the big sister Emily wishes someone had handed her before she became a mom. She writes about postpartum life, identity, guilt, changing bodies, relationships, friendship, overwhelm, and the strange emotional duality of loving your children fiercely while sometimes not particularly enjoying motherhood. Emily and Olivia talk about the advice mothers are given—“sleep when the baby sleeps,” “don’t blink,” “enjoy every moment”—and all the things hidden underneath those phrases. What happens when you can’t enjoy every moment? What if the baby screams in the car for eight months? What if becoming a mother changes your marriage, your friendships, your relationship with your body, and the way you recognize yourself? And why are mothers so often expected to qualify every difficult truth with an immediate reminder that they are grateful? For Emily, writing this book was also the fulfillment of a deeply personal dream. Becoming an author had lived on what she calls her “deathbed list”—the things she knew she would regret never attempting—and, fittingly, the opportunity eventually arrived through an Instagram DM she initially thought was a scam. But the heart of the book is much bigger than accomplishing a dream. It is about removing shame through recognition: the relief of discovering that another mother has thought the thought you were afraid to say, struggled with the thing you thought everyone else could handle, or needed to find herself again after becoming responsible for everyone else. Normalizing Normal makes room for two truths at once: motherhood can be beautiful, and motherhood can be extraordinarily hard. If you are becoming a parent, deep in the early years, emerging from them, or simply trying to find yourself again after life changed you, this conversation is a reminder that honesty can be its own kind of village.

Picture a twenty-something widow in Paris, a sick one-year-old on her hip, and an attic full of paintings nobody wants—not galleries, not critics, not even her own family. That widow was Jo van Gogh, and the paintings belonged to her late husband's brother, a mostly forgotten failure named Vincent. What she did next didn't just save a legacy. It invented one. Bestselling author Jo Piazza tells her story in The Parisian Heist, and by the end of this episode, you may never look at a Van Gogh—or a woman rebuilding her life from nothing—the same way again. The Parisian Heist moves between two timelines that mirror each other in surprising ways. In the past, we watch Jo van Gogh turn grief and financial desperation into a masterclass in reinvention—she becomes an art dealer, manipulates the market, and manufactures the myth of the "tortured genius" we still associate with Vincent today. In a second timeline set in 1996, three broke art students get pulled into a heist against a corrupt, billionaire art-dealing family, guided by a widow with her own scores to settle. Piazza calls it a "delicious beach read," but underneath the spice—and yes, there's a very spicy memorable scene in the Louvre — sit real questions about who gets to be called an artist, who gets the credit, and what a woman is capable of when she has nothing left to lose. Piazza didn't just research Jo van Gogh's story — she recognized it. As a journalist-turned-novelist raising three kids, she's candid about the balls she drops daily, the deadlines she meets with help from what she calls "an army of babysitters," and a marriage where, in her words, she "married her glass ceiling." That honesty is exactly why this book lands the way it does: it isn't really about Impressionist art. It's about what a woman builds when the life she expected falls apart, and about the quiet, radical decision to keep going anyway. For anyone standing in their own version of that attic — starting over after loss, after motherhood rearranges everything, after the version of life they planned stops making sense — Jo van Gogh's story, and Jo Piazza's telling of it, is proof that reinvention isn't just possible. It's often where the real story begins. Go pick up a copy of The Parisian Heist by Jo Piazza HERE!

In this episode of A Fresh Story: Simple Tips to Support Yourself, Olivia Howell sits down with Rachel Lovitt, a holistic movement coach and Reiki practitioner who helps people reconnect with their bodies, rediscover childlike curiosity, and feel like themselves again. Rachel’s specialty is making self-care radically simple — a refreshing counter to the wellness “noise” around biohacking, optimization, and rigid routines that can leave you feeling like you’re already failing. For anyone navigating overwhelm, caregiving demands, or a major life transition, this conversation is a practical guide to building emotional resilience through small, sustainable actions rather than all-or-nothing effort. Throughout the episode, Rachel reframes rest and slowing down not as indulgence but as a foundation for endurance — pausing now is what allows you to keep going through big life transitions later. Her approach is especially supportive for busy parents, caregivers in the “sandwich generation,” and anyone rebuilding routines after a season of change, offering ways to quiet self-judgment and tune out the pressure to perform wellness “correctly.” If you’ve been craving a more compassionate, genuinely doable approach to your mental and physical well-being, this Simple Tips to Support Yourself episode delivers expert-backed, actionable guidance for caring for yourself one small, joyful step at a time.

In this episode of A Fresh Story: Simple Tips to Support Yourself, host Olivia Howell sits down with Ron Platt, co-founder of the National Association for Single and Divorced Families (NASDF) — the only national organization built to surround divorcing parents and single-family households with practical products, services, and support in one place. Ron brings a rare combination of insider expertise and lived experience: a background in insurance product development, hands-on advocacy work in foster care, and his own journey through a difficult relationship and financial hardship. Listeners looking for grounded divorce recovery tips will come away understanding how to stop piecing together help from a dozen scattered sources and instead build a real support system as they navigate starting over after divorce. The conversation turns quickly to actionable strategies. Ron breaks down the concrete resources families can tap during a transition: vetted referrals for attorneys, mediators, divorce coaches, and financial planners; free and discounted mental health care sessions; real estate support that can offset closing costs by thousands of dollars; and career services designed to help at-home parents re-enter the workforce and close resume gaps with confidence. He also explains Support Insured, a first-of-its-kind insurance product that guarantees child support and alimony payments continue if the paying parent dies, becomes disabled, or involuntarily loses their job — a safety net that speaks directly to the financial anxiety at the heart of single parenting advice and effective co-parenting strategies. Beyond the logistics, Ron offers honest, expert-backed guidance on emotional resilience during life's hardest seasons. Drawing on his own experience working with a coach through crisis, he shares simple daily practices anyone can start today: journaling your thoughts, writing down goals and reviewing them regularly, clarifying your “why,” and anchoring each morning with movement, affirmations, and gratitude. His core message — “get comfortable being uncomfortable” — reframes discomfort as the doorway to growth. Whether you're newly separated, deep in co-parenting logistics, or simply feeling wobbly, this episode delivers clear, supportive tools to help you move forward with clarity and strength.

Gina Pellettieri is a trained divorce mediator and matrimonial attorney based in Suffolk County on Long Island, New York, and in this episode she reframes mediation as a life skill rather than a legal formality. At its core, mediation is a structured form of negotiation: a neutral third party helps two people facilitate an agreement they can both live with. Where Gina’s expertise really shines is in communication — understanding what people actually want, and helping them say it clearly. Listeners looking for grounded divorce recovery tips and a calmer path through conflict will come away with a framework they can use far beyond the divorce table. Gina also shares practical communication tools listeners can apply immediately. One favorite: before responding to someone who’s venting, ask whether they want to be “heard, helped, or hugged” — a quick way to meet people where they are instead of solving a problem they didn’t ask you to solve. She breaks down the psychology of negotiation (why a little back-and-forth helps both sides feel they arrived at a fair outcome) and shows how the same skills apply to everything from co-parenting logistics to deciding what’s for dinner. Her closing insight ties it together with the show’s themes of emotional resilience and starting over after divorce: don’t lie to yourself. Ask the honest questions, write down your answers, and you’ll be far better equipped to ask them of anyone else. It’s practical, expert-led single parenting advice and self-advocacy in one accessible package. Learn more about Gina: https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/resourceguide/law-office-of-gina-m-pellettieri-pllc

At some point, most of us have stood on the edge of a new chapter — a divorce, a move, a loss, a reinvention — and felt the quiet, aching realization that we have no one to call. Not no one, exactly. But no one close enough. No one present. No one who really knows the texture of your everyday life. That loneliness isn't weakness. And according to author Alex Alexander, it isn't permanent either. But fixing it requires unlearning almost everything society has told us about what friendship is supposed to look like. In this episode of A Fresh Story: Book Talk, Olivia sits down with her longtime friend and fellow community-builder Alex Alexander to celebrate the release of Alex's debut book, Are We Friends Yet? How to Deepen Your Relationships and Create the Community You Need. Alex didn't set out to write a book — she set out to write 40 pages. What she discovered in the process were two foundational frameworks that had been quietly shaping her entire life's work: the idea that we aren't looking for one perfect person to fill every role, but a whole constellation of people, each showing up in the specific way that only they can. Alex's own origin story is woven into every page. She was the kid who desperately needed more adults in her corner, who felt the weight of having no one to turn to — and who eventually, through rock bottom moments and radical openness, built herself a family out of friends. What makes this conversation — and this book — so essential for anyone navigating a life transition is how radically it reframes what it means to belong. Alex dismantles the myth of scarcity that runs through so much of how we talk about adult friendship ("finding a good friend is like finding a four-leaf clover"). She makes space for the online friend, the long-distance friend, the friend who shows up at 10 p.m. with a crisis script for a devastating text. She talks about the "do less list" — a permission slip to stop performing friendship in ways that drain you, and start showing up in the ways that actually fit your life. If you've ever wondered whether you'll ever really find your people, this book will convince you that you already have more than you know — and show you exactly how to build more.

Divorce is the intersection of the biggest trauma of your life and the biggest financial decisions of your life — happening at the exact same moment. And yet most people navigate it alone, armed with a lawyer's phone number, a group chat of well-meaning friends, and advice that was never really meant for them. Melissa Murphy Pavone grew up watching what happens when someone has to make those decisions without the right team in their corner. Her mother was that person. And it shaped everything that came after. In this episode of A Fresh Story: Book Talk, Olivia sits down with certified financial planner, certified divorce financial analyst, and founder of Mindful Divorce Partners, Melissa Murphy Pavone, to discuss her book Divorce by Design. Melissa's origin story is one of the most quietly powerful in the Fresh Starts community: she became a CDFA because she watched her mother make decisions with her heart instead of her head during divorce — decisions whose consequences still ripple forward today. Every client she now sits across from, she sees her mom. That depth of personal mission infuses every page of this book. Written to be accessible and even — yes — occasionally funny, Divorce by Design dismantles the myths and misinformation that swirl around divorce, and replaces them with something far more useful: clarity, a framework, and a team. At the heart of the book is a simple but radical idea: you don't need one person to guide you through divorce, you need a whole team — emotional support first, financial expertise second, legal strategy third. Melissa argues that most people get this order completely backwards, lawyering up before they've regulated enough to make sound decisions — and paying for it for years afterward. Whether you're in the middle of a divorce, supporting someone who is, or simply want to understand the landscape before you ever need it, Divorce by Design is the book Melissa's mother never had. And now everyone can. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/

Some writers come to the page to escape. Jordan Rosenfeld has been doing it since she was seven years old — filling journal after journal, reaching for fiction the way a child who's seen hard things reaches for anything that helps make sense of the world. That instinct never left her. It deepened. And after more than twenty years as a novelist, a writing teacher, and a freelance journalist, she's still doing the same thing she did as a little girl: taking what she cannot control, and making something true out of it. Jordan is the author of the eco-thriller Fallout, a novel that crackles with urgency, danger, and the kind of moral complexity that only comes from a writer paying close attention to the real world. The story follows a journalist — a new mother — who gets pulled into a collective of eco-anarchist women on a mission to take down a dirty energy company that has poisoned both people and the earth. But beneath the thriller framework, Fallout is really a book about grief: what we do when the world as we knew it starts to fall away, whether we close ourselves off or rise up and fight for what's right. Jordan wrote it in the years she was first becoming a mother, watching parched California hills in January and feeling something she could only call grief. By the time she finished, a second character had emerged — a woman in her fifties navigating perimenopause — and Jordan recognized herself in her too. That's how she writes: gathering the mosaic, piece by piece, until the picture becomes clear. Jordan has also written seven books on the craft of writing — including her newest, The Sound of Story, a deep dive into developing voice and tone — and she brings that same care and precision to everything she makes. This episode is for the writer who has a story inside them and doesn't know where to begin. It's for the reader who wants a thriller that leaves them thinking long after the last page. And it's for anyone who has ever sat with something heavy — grief, rage, helplessness — and wondered what to do with it. Jordan's answer, the one she's lived since childhood, is this: write it down. Turn it into art. There is always someone out there who needs to hear exactly what you have to say.

Nobody ever taught us when it's okay to quit. We got the poster on the classroom wall, the T-shirt slogan, the well-meaning advice drilled in from childhood: quitters never win, winners never quit. And so we stay. We stay in the job that's making us miserable. We stay in the relationship that stopped working. We stay in the fertility treatments, the career path, the life we chose at 22, long past the point where staying serves us — because we were never given a script for what comes next. Jessica Strawser, author of eight novels, noticed this gap everywhere she looked. And she wrote a book about it. The Quitters Club is Jessica's newest novel — an ensemble cast story about four lifelong best friends who, the year they all turn 40, plan a reunion getaway and make a pact: they will each go home and quit the thing that's been quietly breaking them. For one woman, it's a career. For another, it's a marriage that has drifted into something unrecognizable. For another, it's the fertility journey she's been on for years. The novel follows all four of them as they reckon with what it means to walk away — not in defeat, but in the direction of something truer. Jessica built the book around a central question she kept hearing in her own life, in conversations with friends, in the rooms where women talk honestly: when does quitting become not giving up, but saying yes to something better? She's had her own pivots — a magazine industry that collapsed almost the moment she entered it, a career that required its own reinventions — and that lived experience gives the novel a weight and warmth that goes far beyond entertainment. This episode is for every woman who has felt the specific exhaustion of holding something together that stopped working a long time ago and needed permission — from someone, from anywhere — to finally let it go. It's for the book club looking for their next conversation starter, the woman approaching 40 wondering what her second act looks like, and anyone who has ever whispered to themselves that something has got to give. The Quitters Club is proof that quitting, done right, is one of the bravest things you can do — and that you don't have to do it alone.

Perforated is Chloe Yelena Miller's second full-length collection of poetry, and it holds a particular and beautiful question at its center: who owns a loss? The book is structured around what she calls the New York City poems — prose poems born from a lyric essay about returning to Lower Manhattan on the anniversary of September 11th, a day she experienced as a child in New Jersey who did not personally lose someone, but who nonetheless lost something. The collection asks us to sit with the strange complexity of grief — public and private, collective and intimate, named and nameless — and to consider the possibility that all of it is real, and all of it counts. Chloe's poems don't resolve that question so much as they hold it tenderly open, the way grief actually lives inside us. This episode is for the person who has ever felt uncertain about whether their grief was theirs to claim — whether their loss was significant enough, public enough, close enough to warrant the weight it carries.

Nobody tells you that the moment you've been waiting for your whole life might arrive and feel nothing like you expected. You've watched the movies. You've seen the Instagram posts. You know exactly how it's supposed to go — the birth, the first look, the wave of love so overwhelming it changes everything. And then you're in that hospital room, and the feeling you were promised doesn't come, and you are left holding a baby and a secret you're too ashamed to say out loud. Fiction writer Danit Brown knows that feeling intimately. It was the seed from which her debut novel grew. Danit is the author of Television for Women, a sharply observed, deeply human novel about Estie — a 32-year-old who decides, largely because she feels she's supposed to, that it's time to have a baby. Before the birth, her husband loses his job under circumstances that raise uncomfortable questions about who she actually married. After the birth, Estie begins to realize that motherhood looks nothing like what she grew up watching on screen.

Before she wrote the novel, before the residency, before the ninety thousand words that became her debut — Shasta Grant was a little girl in New Hampshire being raised by her grandparents, carrying questions about her mother that she didn't yet have language for. She didn't know then that those questions would one day find their form on the page. She didn't know she'd spend years writing shorter and shorter stories until fiction had compressed itself into flash, then sit down in a house in Orlando that once belonged to Jack Kerouac and finally let something large and long and true come through. She didn't know she was writing toward herself. But she was. Shasta is the author of When We Were Feral, a debut literary novel set in 1990s New Hampshire about three girls — Maggie and her friends — searching for answers about their missing mothers. It is a novel about friendship in its most primal form, about the particular cruelty and fierce loyalty that live side by side in female adolescence, and about what it means to grow up in the absence of a mother's presence. The book was born from a short story, expanded through a three-month writing residency where Shasta wrote a thousand words a day and didn't plan anything — just followed the girls where they led. The adult timeline she originally wrote got cut in revision, because, as she puts it, everything she loved about the book was in that child timeline. The longing. The wildness. The unresolved ache at the center of it all. Shasta grew up in the world she built in this novel, and she set it in 1990s New Hampshire because she still holds a longing for that place and that time — a longing the book finally gave her permission to explore. Writing it, she discovered something she hadn't expected: how many unresolved feelings she still held about her own mother and the particular wound of maternal abandonment. This episode is for anyone who has ever circled around a childhood wound in their adult life without fully looking at it — and for every reader who grew up in the 1990s and felt the complicated, electric tension of female friendship before they had words for it. It is for the writer who thinks they only know how to write short things, who needs to hear that the long story is in there waiting. And it is for anyone who has ever needed a novel that doesn't look away from what girlhood actually felt like — not the polished version, but the feral one.