The Morning Glory Project By cover art

The Morning Glory Project

By: Betsy Graziani Fasbinder
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  • Summary

  • 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. Morning Glory People inspire me; I just know they’ll inspire you too.
    © 2023 Betsy Graziani Fasbinder
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Episodes
  • Cara Brown: Life in Full Color

    Cara Brown: Life in Full Color
    May 1 2024
    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 crushing 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.
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    35 mins
  • Leah Lax: Not From Here

    Leah Lax: Not From Here
    Apr 3 2024
    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. Through 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.
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    35 mins
  • Susanna Solomon: Finding Her Own Path

    Susanna Solomon: Finding Her Own Path
    Mar 6 2024
    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.
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    28 mins
Art Psychology Hygiene & Healthy Living Literary History & Criticism Personal Success
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