The Morning Glory Project

As the co-author, with Ellen Bass, of the iconic and groundbreaking book The Courage to Heal Laura Davis rode the hurricane-force that was unleashed by empowering women to talk about surviving sexual abuse, while also being catapulted to fame for the worst thing that had ever happened to her. In her new memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother Daughter Story Laura reveals what it was like...

In this Extra Blooms episode, we catch up with past MGP guest, Damien Posey, an award-winning Bay Area mentor, affectionately known as Uncle Damien to his community. When the coronavirus pandemic hit and other service organizations had to shut down, the most vulnerable took the brunt, and Damien stepped up what they do every day in a big way. Now, through his organization Us4UsBayArea Damien and h...

British-born Claire Hennessy is an award-winning storyteller, producer, podcaster (The Bonkers Brit) and author. She reconnected with her first boyfriend after not seeing him for 30 years and then uprooted her entire life in England and took her two kids to live in California to marry him. She then wrote a humorous memoir about her journey and is hoping to find an agent before she is too old to go...

Judy Temes was just five years old when she was left by her parents seeking to escape Communist Hungary. With borders sealed in 1969, there were few options for crossing the East-West divide. Her father—a Holocaust survivor desperate to leave behind Hungary’s totalitarian government and the legacy of the Holocaust—used tourist visas to take his wife and twelve-year-old son to the West. These visas...

Lisa Lucca was enjoying what anyone might call an idyllic 1970s Midwest family life. But as an adolescent, the image of the ideal was shattered when she learned her father was gay, beginning a long journey from confusion and shame to acceptance. Lisa shares this experience in her work as a life coach and with listeners on her weekly radio talk show, Live True.

In our first conversation with Amy S. Peele, we focused on her newest role as a newly elected City Council member.  But this time we're chatting about how she's brought her long career in the fascinating world of organ transplantation into writing medical murder mysteries.  "A murder mystery with a mission and a side of humor" is how Amy describes her series. First CUT and now MATCH, the adventure...

Toni Gattone fell in love with gardening in her grandfather’s backyard in Chicago, but it wasn’t until she moved to Northern California that her passion began to bloom. She was a Sales Executive in corporate America for seventeen years but when the gardening bug kept biting, she started a sales company selling gifts and garden products to the retail market. Twenty-eight years later, Toni closed th...

Julie Ryan McGue is an adult domestic adoptee and an identical twin. In her new memoir, Twice a Daughter, she tells the story about finding out who you are, where you come from, and making sense of it. At 48, Julie was sent for a breast biopsy, and for Julie and her twin sister, this event highlighted what they could not know about themselves due to their closed adoption. What followed was a five-...

Fay Darmawi is a film festival producer, community development banker, and urban planner using all forms of storytelling and media to achieve social justice. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the SF Urban Film Fest, a film festival focused on civic engagement inspired by great storytelling which just completed its 7th season in February 2021, as a virtual film festival. Her 25 years of...

Leah Lax is a refugee from extreme religion. Leah’s memoir Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home is the only gay memoir ever to come out of the hasidic world. She is also the mother of seven children. Uncovered was on many “best of” lists, Susan Stamberg read it on NPR, and it is soon to be an opera by premiere American composer Lori Laitman. Leah’s next book project is Not From...

Cynthia Lim thought she had the perfect life with her family in Los Angeles. A loving marriage to husband who was a successful attorney, a fulfilling career in education, two teenaged sons. Then in 2003 her husband suffered cardiac arrest that resulted in profound brain injury, changing their lives forever. Married for twenty years at the time, Cynthia doesn’t know how much of her husband’s former...

Anita Gail Jones is a writer, visual artist, and oral tradition storyteller originally from Albany, in southwest Georgia. In response to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and the long odds on the campaigns for two Georgia senate seats, Anita co-founded “The Peach Corps,” a grassroots organization that focused on voting turnout in the community where she grew up. In tandem with efforts...

Diane M. Barnes, M.D. is a writer, actor, speaker and retired radiologist. A graduate of Stanford, and Yale School of Medicine, she trained at UCSF and Stanford, and practiced at Kaiser. After a brain hemorrhage, Diane segued from medicine to performance. Her stroke and recovery is chronicled in her first award winning solo show, My Stroke of Luck. Now a Meisner trained actor, Diane studied improv...

Myriam Martinez has never been one to keep quiet, but she was born into a Peruvian immigrant family that valued “not rocking the boat”. When an uncle molested her when she was eleven, true to form, Myriam told…loudly. The molestation stopped, but the family encouraged her silence and still gathered for events with the perpetrator of her abuse. She became a depressed, self-destructive teen who atte...

Lisa Dailey is an avid traveler and writer. In her time abroad, she unearthed new ways of looking at her life through her discoveries in remote corners of the world, and she continues to enrich her life through travel. Square Up is her first book detailing a seven-month trip around the world with her husband and two teenage sons on the heels of extraordinary loss.

When Barbara Abercrombie’s husband died, she found the language of condolence, no matter how well intended, often unhelpful and sometimes downright irritating. In her grief, she yearned for words that acknowledged the reality of what it felt like to survive a loved one’s death and that could unflinchingly speak to the sorrow and loneliness (and sometimes even guilt and anger) that can show up in t...

Patricia Maisch is an unlikely activist. She led a modest, non-public life with no desire for a public one. She and her husband owned and operated an HVAC business in Tucson, Arizona. They raised their son, saved their money, and planned for retirement. But her life changed when she decided to attend a “Congress on Your Corner” event on January 8, 2011. It was at this event that Patricia became fi...

Judy Bebelaar loved teaching in San Francisco public high schools for 37 years, where she nurtured young poets and writers in her classes, many of them winning writing prizes, including eight on the national level. As a co-founder of Opportunity I and II, public alternative schools, never could she, or really any of the educators then, have imagined that literally dozens of the Opportunity student...

Along with her dedication as a writer and coach to other writers, Pam Houston has had a long love affair with nature and has been a fierce advocate for environmental protections. Her memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, is a love story to the ranch she calls home and bounty of beauty that she’s found all over he world. The memoir won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains B...

Edward Doyle-Gillespie is a walking stereotype buster who shatters assumptions among his colleagues and in his community. First headed toward a career in academia where he could study history, literature, and philosophy, the events of 9/11 redirected his path and he became a Baltimore City police officer where he now teaches community policing, ethics, and counterterrorism. In his department Ed fo...

Terry Sue Harms is the author of her third book, a remarkable accomplishment for a woman who didn’t start reading until she was in her early twenties. This new release is a memoir titled The Strongbox. In it, she reveals the grit, tenacity, and courage it took to not only tackle her reading disability but also to find her absent biological father and face his rejections. Terry Sue didn’t begin wri...

At age forty, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect the well-crafted myth of her famous family? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth? In her memoir, Poetic License, Cherington candidly retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. She examines what she calls both the gifts and the harms...

Angela Alioto is a legal and political lioness who has taken her family’s political legacy and made it her own. Fighting for health, opportunity, justice, and the environment, she has served both in the political arena and the courtroom. Her memoir, Straight to the Heart, covers her eight years in San Francisco politics and is appropriately based on Dante’s Inferno.