Unfixed Podcast

Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe

This conversation is going to stay with me for a long time. Together, Josh and I walked the fine threshold between grief and storytelling, illness and healing, and I found myself feeling lighter and more stable when we finished. In Josh’s words: You can’t treat grief with a pill. But you can treat it with a story. Last week I spoke with @Kimberly Warner, author of “Unfixed,” a memoir about family...

Heather Kennedy, also known as Kathleen Kiddo , joins me for a deeply honest, funny, and tender conversation about living with Parkinson’s, invisible illness, and the strange spiritual terrain of a body that no longer behaves the way it once did. We talk about suffering as teacher, humor as survival, the pressure to make illness sound inspirational, and the quiet difference between fighting and al...

In this episode, Kimberly Warner sits down with novelist-turned-memoirist Rachel Weaver to talk about what it really means to live inside a body that won’t cooperate—and how you keep building a life anyway. Rachel shares what it felt like to release her memoir Dizzy after years of writing fiction (“it felt like I left my diary out”), and why hearing “me too” from strangers has made the exposure wo...

A tiny Wi-Fi glitch tried to take us out at the start… but we left it unfixed (obviously) and rolled right into one of the sweetest, funniest conversations. This episode of Unfixed: Uncut is with Monica Ticknor , the founder of Charter Book Club Adventures —aka the woman who casually slid into my DMs with an idea that was basically: “Want to do a virtual book club… and then end it on a freaking sa...

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In this conversation, Leah Johansen, M.D. centers her work on the power of asking the right question. Rather than chasing solutions, she invites us to identify the core question—or limiting belief—quietly shaping our lives beneath the surface. From this root inquiry, she explains, patterns of thought, behavior, health, and relationship naturally unfold. By bringing conscious attention to that cent...

In this joyful, intimate conversation, Kimberly Warner reunites with artist and writer Elizabeth Jameson—whose work many listeners may remember from the original Unfixed docu-series and their later collaboration, MS Confidential . Together, they explore what it means to live inside an “imperfect body” without reducing that life to tragedy or inspiration. Elizabeth shares how she once refused to lo...

This conversation with the brilliant David Roberts kept circling back to insecurity, not the dramatic kind, and not financial, but the quieter feeling of being a little outside things. Of not quite knowing how to perform confidence, how to bluff, how to talk the talk. David reflects on how that lack of ease stayed with him even as his career advanced, and how, in hindsight, it may have saved him....

Living with early-onset Parkinson’s, writer Eileen Dougharty has turned what she can’t fix into a full-on creative rebellion. In this salty, tender conversation, we talk about death & bucket lists, deep brain stimulation & love thugs, and why most things are actually small things when it comes down to it. Eileen reminds us that saying I love you might be the fiercest act of defiance. Thank you Nan...

A juicy teaser: Kimberly : Some people might see like this story of yours is actually a true redemption arc, you know, like, Oh, she solved this resolved this. So I’m curious, how does the broken part, how do the broken parts still live in you? And how do you hold them differently? Like, do you relate? Like, do you still visit self-doubt and depression? Absolutely. And all that stuff. And so what’...

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What a tender, joyous celebration. The festivities were abundant with laughter and tears, and overflowing admiration for my publisher Empress Edition’s & Alisa Kennedy Jones game-changing vision and artistry. ❤️❤️❤️ I never imagined a simple reading from my Unfixed launch party would ripple like this, but here we are. This book was born on Substack, chapter by chapter, held and then lifted by a co...

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"I'm no fan of myself. I've learned to tolerate myself. Like, okay, this is who I am. I don't know if anybody runs around and goes, gosh, I'm so glad I'm me. So, I don't have that, but there is an acceptance, and I think that gets better as you get older, and I think it's easier as you get older… but when I write I get to be my best self." -Adam Nathan, writer Ah, dear listener, what a delight awa...

"Writing is the most true to myself that I can be." "To me, it's just exhilarating, the notion that you can have a seed of an idea and then the only way to find out where the plot is going to go is by inhabiting those characters and the situation and just writing it and finding out. And that's pretty much how I do everything when I write." -Nathan Slake, writer, scientist, dreamer Occasionally, I'...

"I love that imagination gives us access to certain kinds of truth that don't exist in the factual world. There is sometimes way more truth we can explore in fiction than we are able to in our very limited lived experiences." -Gail Marlene Schwartz, author, queer mom, persistent student of collaboration When Gail Marlene Schwartz posted a section from her debut novel Falling Through the Night on S...

"By experiencing deeply and profoundly the grief, I floated on this ocean of loss. And I felt saved in my life by that." -Mary Tabor, author (Re)Making Love: A Memoir , The Woman Who Never Cooked, Who by Fire When I read anything by Mary Tabor , I do it slowly. Deliberately. I liken the experience to being deeply engrossed in a 5000 piece, handcrafted jigsaw puzzle, each piece just as important an...

"You can come to a place in your life where you run out of resilience because you're in such an adversarial relationship with your body. And so it's about how to recast and reframe and re-narrativize a body that loves you, a body that can speak to you and say, "This one thing that's here is a part of you, and it's pushing you to be the person you were meant to be." - Alisa Kennedy Jones , tv write...

"There are times when I'm with someone at the end of their life or I'm with a tiny bird and there is that moment where I'm just like Oh, Oh yeah, I think there's some God here. I love more deeply because of death and birds." -Chloe Hope, end-of-life doula, baby bird carer, author of Death & Birds   Sharing time with Chloe this past month felt like a forest bath, a Maranasti "death awareness" medit...

"Must the alternative to mindfulness be some kind of zombie existence, a living death? That's not cool. And frankly, I don't believe that's how it works—so often we stumble on beauty, grace and insight in our darkest and ugliest moments. It's ALL life, every minute of it, for everyone, everywhere." Mr. Troy Ford, author Windows and mirrors are often used to describe the diversity, or lack of, foun...

"Language. I burn it to stay warm." -Bertus Meijer Interviews aren't supposed to be this fun. My conversation with Bertus felt more like hanging out in a sandbox with an old friend, making castles and then destroying them with just as much delight. But describing my sandbox mate is a bit of a challenge, and I think he prefers it this way. Bertus Meijer is an imaginative, free-spirited, deeply inte...

"I think the solve for humanity, if there is a solve, is empathy. If there was a way to put an empathy chip in every single human, so many of our problems would go away." Ben Wakeman - author, musician Today's interview is with author Ben Wakeman, a brilliant and stirring author and musician whose songs, short stories, essays, novels, and immersive audio, to name a few, explore deeply thought-prov...

What a joy to gather LIVE this morning with Gail and Troy to celebrate their beautiful new books on launch day! We wandered through so many layers—storytelling, fiction vs. nonfiction, collective authorship, and the deep truths that live beneath our words. A rich thread on masculinity sparked thoughtful reflections from the audience, adding even more depth to the conversation. If you missed us liv...

Dogs are unspoken healers. For some, they offer companionship, to others they act as an essential lifeline. In this episode, two women living with chronic illness explore the joy and purpose dogs brought into their lives. Morgan was born with spastic diplegia cerebral palsy, while Jennifer developed debilitating autoimmune diseases. For Morgan, her service dog Dewey became her reason to get out of...