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The Morning Glory Project

…is my earnest attempt to listen to, learn from, and celebrate people of exceptional determination.

Whether they’ve overcome obstacles, endured traumas or tragic losses, experienced setbacks, disappointments, or failures, or they’ve accomplished what others might have thought impossible, I want to know these folks, and it’s my joy to introduce them to you. 

Morning Glory People endure, when others around them may not. They’ve survived what others might not have. I want to know what inspiration, practices, resources, and decisions keep them going when so many others might quit.

The stories of Morning Glory People are not all tidy, happy-ending stories. Those who endure do so with scars, but they endure. They survive. They thrive. They find meaning—life, love, joy, hope, passion—beyond their experience, and they turn their disappointments and disasters into determination. Some are activists, some are entrepreneurs. Some are artists, others champions for their cause. These are the candid, authentic stories of inspiring people with stories of determination.

Morning Glory People inspire me; I just know they’ll inspire you too. 

Susanna Solomon: Finding Her Own Path

Growing up as a girl in the 1950’s girls were not expected to have any career goals. They were

going to be housewives. Susanna Solomon’s mother complained bitterly about her lot in life. Her father told her she was too stupid to go to college, then he fell in love with someone else—someone other than Susanna’s mother. When her mother took her own life when Susanna was fourteen, the upheaval in the family was seismic.

At 20 she met a guy who was loving and warm and wonderful. At first he was great fun, but

he liked to drink. Each year went by things became more difficult, as he would yell and stagger, and diminish Susanna and their two children. After 11 years, Susanna made the decision to get a divorce, but she knew she didn’t have enough skills to support herself and her kids on her own and that “women’s jobs” of that era wouldn’t provide enough.

She decided that she would need what was then called a “man’s” career, with a “man’s income”. Everyone she knew, but for her brother, made fun of her for what seemed like an absurd choice. After six-and-a-half years, she graduated Summa Cum Laude, got a job and ended her marriage, becoming a single parent.

In her delightful short story collections, Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls, and More Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls, Susanna takes the tidbits of sheriff’s call incidents published in her local small-town paper and imagines what the late Paul Harvey might have called “the rest of the story”. In her more recent publication, Paris Beckons, she continues to do what she’s always done… breaking from the expected, weaving her lived experiences and fictional storytelling throughout a collection of short stories that put a different light on loss, memory, and independence.

Kathryn Abdul-Baki: Dancing Into the Light

Kathryn Abdul-Baki was born in Washington, DC, to an Arab father and an American mother. In addition to her bi-cultural immediate family, she had a globetrotting childhood, growing up with dramatic changes in community and culture as her father’s work brought them to Iran, Kuwait, Beirut, and Jerusalem.

The geographical and cultural changes were huge, but dwarfed in comparison to the tragic losses her family would sustain. When she was 7, Kathryn’s brother was born and would be struggle with a heart defect that required extensive treatment. During this time, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Her brother died at the age of 18-month. Her mother at age 32, and Kathryn’s whole world changed.

Kathryn, despite a happy marriage and beloved children of her own, would find herself in the throes of depression as she came to her own thirtieth birthday. With what were then inexplicable feelings of abandonment, she’d make an attempt to take her own life. Behind the scrim of her own life, there would always be the image of the mother she lost before she ever got to really know her.

It was by reconnecting to the joyful aspects of her early life that Kathryn was able to heal, and specifically through dancing that she’d reconnect to this joy. Her memoir, Dancing Into the Light gives readers a unique glimpse into her story, into Arab culture, and into the psyche of a young Arab woman.

Donna Stoneham: Life after Life

Donna Stoneham and her mother found a special closeness in the end of Mary Ruth’s life. Theirs had been a relationship fraught with challenge throughout most of their shared lifetime but in her mother’s final years, the two found healing and deep connection. When Mary Ruth passed, Donna was launched into a new kind of transformational grief journey in which the conversation with her mother did not end with her passing at age 88. Catch Me When I Fall is a moving collection of poems and letters through which Donna keeps her heart open to the mystery and power of transcendent, eternal love that lives on beyond the human lifetime.

Donna’s lifelong experience as a poet accustomed to seeking meaning, her professional experience as an executive coach, and her history as a hospice chaplain inform her rich and deep exploration of connection with her mom as a part of not only grieving death, but embracing life. A balm for a grieving heart, Catch Me When I Fall is an inspiration for anyone who has lost someone they love. Part love song, part grief map, this collection offers another way to look at loss and a thousand ways to embrace life.

Donna is also the author of The Thrivers Edge: Seven Keys to Transform the Way You Live, Love, and Lead.

Jennifer Marshall: Her Turn to Talk

Jennifer Marshall experienced four psychiatric hospitalizations within five years—two before any diagnosis was reached, and two more because she was trying to protect her son during her own postpartum psychosis and later after going off medication to protect her unborn daughter. All of those hospitalizations were because she was unmedicated at the time. Then, seven years later, after seven and a half years of stability, she suffered a manic episode after the death of her friend and partner who had helped her launch her non-profit, Anne Marie Ames. Living in recovery with bi-polar disorder is a daily struggle, but Jennifer is determined to live successfully despite mental illness. With good health practices, good medical care, and the support of friends and loved ones Jennifer continues her campaign to de-stigmatize mental illness and to celebrate the brave people who put their names and faces to it. Jennifer founded “This is My Brave”, an organization to celebrate the stories of those who struggle with or have relationships with those who struggle with all forms of mental illness.

Gretchen Cherington: A Deeper Search for Family Truth

As a follow up to her memoir Poetic License which came out in 2020, Gretchen Cherington dug deeper into family myth and lore, resulting in her new memoir The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy—A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry.

In the early 1900s, Gretchen’s paternal grandfather was recruited by George A. Hormel to help him build what is now the multi-billion dollar food conglomerate Hormel Foods. As a child, Gretchen listened to riveting stories about these two men from her father. Third in the trio was the company’s comptroller, Ransome J. Thomson, who, over a decade, embezzled $1.2 Million from the Hormel company and nearly brought it to its knees. Rumors suggested Gretchen’s grandfather was “in cahoots” with the embezzler. But was he? Gretchen sent out to investigate this question.

Research led Gretchen to business documents, letters, and historical records that helped her find a few of the missing pieces of the picture that is her family’s history puzzle. Kirkus calls this new book “A dazzling account that deftly combines crime, drama, history, and introspective remembrance…a mesmerizing story filled with drama, suspense, and told with remarkable emotional insights.”

Nicki Traikos: Life I Design

Nicki Traikos has been an artist at heart her entire life, though in her early career she thought she had to choose a more “practical and profitable” way to earn a living. But her creative self found its way into every job until eventually she decided she wanted to be a full-time artist, but not a starving artist. Today Nicki is the living embodiment of her company’s name: Life I Design. She has built a successful art career as a teacher, as a creative who sells her own work, and now as a published author with an upcoming book to help others develop their artistic skills.

While the medium Nicki has used through her career may have changed greatly over the years, the goal has always been the same: to have the courage to try, and to find joy in the moments exploring. Known best for her “Watercolors Made Simple” online classes and new book of the same name, Nicki has a casual and approachable philosophy about making art and inspires other artists to adopt it, too. It’s not about achieving perfection, but about having the joy of experiencing artistic expression, developing techniques so that they can create art that pleases them, and for each creative person to find their own style.

Interviews Coming Soon!

04/03/2024

Leah Lax

When Leah Lax was asked to write a libretto for an opera intended to celebrate local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to the stories of upheaval, migration, and arrival, told to her in confidence by people from around the globe. She felt she had discovered the song of America, found its great beating heart. But Leah also discovered troubling truths about America, through the eyes of immigrants, and in so doing was inspired to uncover the lost history of her own Jewish family. Though this interwoven experience of their story and hers, Leah found not only a larger context for the story of immigrants, but a new way of looking at how her own identity, rather than as a member of a small “minority”, but as a part of a very large majority who are here in this country because either they or their parents immigrated from another country. Nearly two decades after Leah had those conversations, long after the opera she wrote had left the stage, she captured those stories into this “libretto” of a story, her extraordinary new book, Not From Here: The Song of America

 Leah was a guest on The Morning Glory Project after her deeply stirring memoir, Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home, which was the first gay memoir ever to come out of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox world.  Leah’s dual career as an author and as a librettist has brought her many well-deserved accolades. When she’s not writing, you can find her playing cello or kayaking around the world with her wife.

Find out more about her at:

LeahLax.com

05/01/2024

Cara Brown

Cara Brown is an award-winning watercolor artist and teacher, though she came about this having this be her life quite unexpectedly.  When she was 24, her first husband proposed marriage to her – in front of a group of friends. She didn’t say yes or no, she said “I want kids.”  She had always yearned for the whole experience available to people in female bodies – becoming a mother, including being pregnant and giving birth. When life circumstances deemed that not possible, she went into a dark time, wondering how her life could be fulfilling, how it could have meaning, given this crushin disappointment.  She prayed for the energy to pursue adoption – or to be given something else.  

 Within a few years, it became obvious what that something else would be.  She was asked by a friend to show her art for the first time in 2007.  In 2011 she led her first groups of watercolor student-artists.  In the years since, these two aspects of her life have evolved, grown, and flourished.  She almost stumbled upon a rich and fulfilling life of art making and providing instruction and the supportive environments in which people best expand and learn.  Living a Life in Full Color is Cara’s mission, for herself and all of us.

 You can find out more about Carta and see her art at: LifeInFullColor.com and find her podcast about art and life, Watercolor Conversations wherever you find your favorite podcasts. 

The Morning Glory Project Team

Host – Betsy Graziani Fasbinder

As host of The MGP, Betsy Graziani Fasbinder brings her background as a storyteller and her 30+ years of experience as a therapist, writing coach, and speaking coach to every conversation. In these interviews she explores the stories of survivors, thrivers, innovators, and trailblazers of all kinds, trying to understand the tools and insights they’ve used to cope with, and overcome the heartbreaks, losses, obstacles, and traumas they’ve experienced.

Betsy coaches writers of both memoir and fiction, helping them to get their stories out of their heads and onto the page. She is a public speaking coach, assisting both the bold and the bashful to find skill and confidence in front of audiences of any size.

She is the author of Fire & Water (a novel), Filling Her Shoes (a memoir), and From Page to Stage: Inspiration, Tools, and Public Speaking Tips for Writers. She has a novel in progress, slated for publication in August 2021. The working title is The Anatomy of Lightning.

Find out more on betsygrazianifasbinder.com.

Why Morning Glories?

Morning glories are beautiful flowers, but for me, they are much more than that. They are nature’s inspiration for determination and a symbol of endurance. 

Any gardener knows these beauties to be among the most tenacious of vines, so dedicated to life that they reach over, under, around, and through any obstacle in their path in order to find the light they need to flourish and blossom.  They’ll crawl through rubble and darkness, over thorny obstacles, always determined to find light. Even when you try to chop them down, morning glories sprout again, their blossoms a symbol of their survival. 

Like these beautiful, formidable, indomitable blooms, Morning Glory People endure, reach for the light, survive, and thrive. 

Co-Producer – Angela Washington

Angela Washington serves as co-producer and social media wizard for The Morning Glory Project. She brings with her a host of amazing skills, talents, and experience. In addition to those, she brings a heart that loves the inspiring stories of people who’ve had some life thrown at them.

Angela comes from the world of journalism, starting her career in Monroe Louisiana as a reporter for Gannet News Service and at the News Star World where she was honored with the Louisiana Press Association’s “Best Breaking News Coverage Award”. She continued her work in San Francisco where she worked in commercial post-production work, leading Clio Award-winning projects, and later as an Executive Producer in corporate promotions for companies including Nike, EA Sports, and Coca Cola. In 2012 Angela hosted and produced her passion project: The Simple Truth, a live-streaming talk show focused on professional, personal, and spiritual balance, featuring guests such as Angela Alioto and Golden State Warrior Alvin Attles.

Today, Angela runs her own social media and event consulting company, producing and promoting events for organizations and individuals doing work that she believes makes the world a better place, particularly for seniors and other vulnerable people.

Angela is a marathon runner, and frequent walker on San Francisco’s steepest stair-cased sidewalks, and a proud mom of two amazing and successful adults.

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