Kelly Corrigan Wonders

Family Lore is a weekly narrative podcast that celebrates and investigates ancestral mystique. Each episode begins with a guest sharing a fascinating family legend, followed by a historical deep-dive to uncover the truth and meaning behind the tale. Available now. https://link.pscrb.fm/f0281/FLFD To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-p...

Kids walk into Rediscover Center in Los Angeles with nothing but an idea and leave with something that will last a lifetime. Jonathan Bijur has spent decades figuring out what makes that possible — and what gets in the way. In the sixth episode of our Wired to Create series, he makes the case for the most counter-cultural idea in education right now: that children learn more when adults get out of...

For Mother's Day, we're sharing the eulogy Kelly wrote for her mom, Mary Corrigan. Mother's Day means something different to everyone — whether you're celebrating today, grieving, or somewhere in between — we're thinking of you. (Previously aired) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit http...

Today's episode is a part of our "About Your Mother" series honoring Every Mother Counts. Bono lost his mother Iris when he was 14 years old. She had an aneurysm at her father’s funeral and as he says, he’s been singing to her ever since. This is a very special conversation, possibly my favorite interview of all time, made more lovely and intimate by the friendship between Bono and Christy going b...

Beth Stelling grew up making people laugh before she knew it was a skill worth taking seriously. It took years of open mics and a lot of hard-won stage time before she found her truest voice. In the fifth episode of our Wired to Create series, Beth talks about the family that shaped her, the speech and debate program that first put her on a stage, the years it took to finally sound like herself in...

Some people move through the world so quietly and so generously that you don't fully understand what they were doing until they're gone. Courtenay Rudzinski's almost 90 year-old mother was one of those people. This is the essay Courtenay wrote after losing her. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choic...

Jen G, as we call her in my house, is as special and wonderful as you think she is. She is such a ready learner that she carries around a pen and notebook everywhere she goes. She cares about all the right things and not one bit of the nonsense. She is still, in many essential ways, one of the “Garner girls” from West Virginia. Today’s conversation, co-hosted by Christy Turlington Burns, celebrate...

At 22, Blythe Harris was hit by an 18-wheeler in downtown San Francisco, pronounced dead on arrival, and spent the next several years rebuilding her identity from a hospital gurney. What she discovered in that long, humbling process set her on a lifelong inquiry into creativity — not the capital C kind that most people assume doesn't belong to them, but the small, daily, five-minute kind that turn...

Some teachers don't just teach you things — they show you who you are. Listener Nicole McDermott wrote this the night she found out her high school English teacher, Wendy Marber, had died — a caring educator who never went easy on her students, never stopped believing in them, and somehow shifted the way a teenager saw herself in a single hallway conversation. This one is for every teacher whose b...

This episode is part of our special 5-part series about moms in honor of Every Mother Counts. Christy and I recently spent an unforgettable Saturday afternoon talking to the singular force of nature that is Spike Lee about his mother, Jackie, who died when Spike was a sophomore at Morehouse College. Spike has 134 directing credits over four+ decades, in each case imploring us to Wake Up. Here’s a...

Jeff Kinney spent eight years working on Diary of a Wimpy Kid almost entirely in silence — no feedback, no applause, no guarantee it would ever amount to anything. He just kept going. In the third episode of our Wired to Create series, Kelly sits down with the creator of one of the bestselling book franchises in history to talk about why the siren song of instant validation might be the enemy of g...

Janice Finn Weekes retired from a career in adult training and wasn't sure she was qualified to teach an AARP safe driving course. Her friends set her straight: you don't have to be an expert driver, you have to be an expert trainer. Five years later, she's still showing up — and noticing something unexpected in her classroom. In a scary world, her students have gotten sweeter with each other. Som...

Funny with a touch of Irish melancholy. That's how actor, director, producer Edward Burns described Molly, his mother, to me and my co-host, Christy Turlington Burns (who has been married to Eddie for 20+ years). In celebration of his novel, A Kid From Marlboro Road, Eddie joined us in studio to talk about childhood, parenthood and grief. (Previously aired) Our About Your Mother series has raised...

Before there were algorithms and tape submissions and studio approved lists, Allison Jones was sitting in the back rows of comedy clubs — memorizing faces, taking notes, and developing the kind of taste that can't be taught. In the second episode of our Wired to Create series, Kelly sits down with the casting director whose fingerprints are on some of the most beloved comedies ever made — from Fre...

A listener named Jane Curran was coming in the door from her morning walk when she got the call that her sister had been airlifted to the hospital. She fell to the floor. Her 22-year-old daughter Jessica — a brand new nursing school graduate — took one look at her mother and quietly took over. This is a letter about what it looks like when a child becomes exactly who you hoped they would be, right...

Amy Schumer is as sharp a writer as she is a performer. I love her always-on-point work in Life & Beth, Trainwreck and all 44 episodes of Inside Amy Schumer. She’s honest in way I wish more people were and you’ll hear that in this candid conversation about her mother, Sandra. (Previously aired) Please consider supporting maternal health in 9 countries through Every Mother Counts, founded in 2010 a...

Ed Helms has a well-organized workshop, a banjo, a treehouse he built during the pandemic, and a deeply inconvenient habit of doing his best work at the last possible second. In the first episode of our new series Wired to Create, Kelly sits down with the actor, comedian, musician, and all-around maker to talk about what flow actually feels like, why limitations might be the secret ingredient in a...

As part of our Women of Consequence series, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jane Perlez writes a letter honoring a woman she watched from a distance as a child — a writer who sat on a balcony overlooking a river, filling up legal pads in a curvy scroll, and showed a young girl what one person could accomplish when they refused to be defined by others. Some influences arrive early and never leave...

Over the past month, Kelly sat down with five women who are quietly — and not so quietly — changing the world: an entrepreneur, an Olympic champion, a philanthropist, a governor, and a film/television producer. What she found wasn't a set of tidy leadership lessons or a checklist for getting things done. It was something harder to name and more useful to carry — a pattern of thinking that shows up...

Reese Witherspoon has built an empire by betting on one simple truth: when you put women in charge of telling stories, you uncover whole themes that get missed when men are calling the shots—and it turns out to be wildly entertaining. In this fifth and final episode of our Women of Consequence series, Kelly sits down with the actress, producer, and founder of the media company Hello Sunshine, to t...

As part of our Women of Consequence series, Kelly sits down with podcaster and author Nora McInerny, who says without hesitation that her life is the product of women. The woman at the center of it all is her grandmother Mary Jane — a ceramicist who lived alone in a one-room cabin in the Minnesota woods, went back to college in her eighties, and moved through the world with a kind of fearless deli...

For 16 years, advocates in New Mexico asked for a constitutional amendment to fund pre-K, and for 16 years the answer was no. Then Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham asked a different question: "If we can't agree on a constitutional amendment, what could we agree on?" The senator appropriated $320 million on the spot. Kelly reflects on what she learned from the governor about why the question you ask...

Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham once dyed her hair red, said goodbye to her husband, and went undercover in a nursing home to expose the neglect that no one else was willing to see—much less work to change. That's who she is. She grew up watching her parents navigate an impossible road for her disabled sister — no roadmap, no safety net, no one coming to help — and she has never forgotten what it...

As part of our Women of Consequence series, journalist Poppy Harlow sits down with Kelly to read a letter she wrote to her mother Mary, who is turning 80. There is so much in this letter — the leap to Sweden, the PhD, the art museum trips — but what stops you cold is the part about what Mary did when the love of her life died and her children still needed dinner on the table and someone to say it...

There's a problem with leading with your heart: empathy doesn't scale. One sick child and we open our wallets. A thousand sick children and we change the channel. Behavioral psychologist Paul Slovic has spent years studying this—the more people suffering, the less we feel. Kelly reflects on her conversation with investor and philanthropist Olivia Walton, who figured out how to beat compassion fade...