Holly sings a new hymn

Phillip's new US citizenship status is the celebratory focus of this episode of TAPIT. It's a celebration 30 years in the making, and it ends in a custom poem worthy of an inauguration. Join us on the journey of a lifetime, as Phillip overcomes rage, discovers love, changes careers, adopts a new name, and learns to see the beauty in his own immigration story.  Host Todd Boss traces Phillip's path of self-authorship from Vegas to Baja to Mexico City to Texas to Hollywood, and back to Vegas, in a tale filled with setbacks and surprises... then taps President Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural poet Richard Blanco to guest write an extraordinary poem of rejoicing and recognition, that elicits a tear for every step along the way. 

Chapters in this episode: 

1. What's in a name?
2. How a place makes (and unmakes and remakes) a person
3. Phillip finds himself in fiction and film
4. The intricacies of immigration and the Texas/Mexico divide
5. Learning and loving in Las Vegas
6. Carving a path to citizenship and the truth about timing
7. Taking the law into his own hands
8. Bringing in Blanco
9. The poem, Your Name :: My Name
10. A wordless reaction says it all

This episode is dedicated to Phillip's mother, Olivia de Lourdes Meneses Moguel, and to mothers everywhere who read to their children.

Join the conversation and get bonus content at poeminthat.com ... or become a listener supporter by pitching in monthly to help us make TAPIT magic, here.

Do you think there's a poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line: 808-300-0449.

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Inspired by a poem of Todd’s in Poetry Magazine, “The Hush of the Very Good” in 2007, Connie became Todd’s very first private commission. The project ended with an unforgettable encounter in the snow-filled forests of northern Wisconsin. In this special holiday episode of TAPIT, Todd reaches back out to Connie after all these years, to revisit the magic they made together. 

Chapters in this episode:

1. How Todd came to take commissions
2. A blossoming friendship
3. Modeling a relationship & making a family
4. Rosamond's resilience
5. A poet's breakthrough
6. The poem: A Deer

Join the conversation and get bonus content at poeminthat.com ... or become a listener supporter by pitching in monthly to help us make TAPIT magic, here.

Do you think there's a poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line: 808-300-0449.

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Host Todd Boss converses with Holly about the tragic loss of her son Killian. Her changing relationship and communion with God and His will for her life inspire a graceful, grateful hymn.

Chapters in this episode:

1. Holly catalogs her losses
2. A bit of background
3. Killian's silence
4. Finding peace in a new place
5. A shifting sense of identity and God
6. Telling the truth about grief
7. The poem: Hymn

Join the conversation and get bonus content at poeminthat.com ... or become a listener supporter by pitching in monthly to help us make TAPIT magic, here.

Do you think there's a poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line: 808-300-0449.

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Host Todd Boss enlists the help of Indigenous poet Sasha LaPointe to  motivate Bonnie on her journey of healing and exploration, through the inspiring Skagit Valley landscape.  

Chapters in this episode:

1. One more great feat
2. Pain, glory, and a conservative church
3. Two worlds: Transformation is real
4. Skagit Valley and its heritage
5. However: Two worlds
6. Bonnie meets Sasha
7. Sasha LaPointe reads "Cycles"
8. A circle of fir trees in prayer

Join the conversation and get bonus content at poeminthat.com ... or become a listener supporter by pitching in monthly to help us make TAPIT magic, here.

Do you think there's a poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line: 808-300-0449.

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The image of an adult on a tricycle — precarious and uncertain — became the driving force behind the poem Ken needed for his wife Sue's memorial service. 

Chapters in this episode:

1. Introduction at the cabin
2. A couple of loons on tricycles
3. Ken and Sue take on the world together
4. Swiss miss, cuckoo clocks, and finding a home in one another
5. Sue’s diagnosis, surgery, complications, and passing
6. Lost time and post-life letters
7. The poem: “It Was a Lark”

Join the conversation and get bonus content at poeminthat.com ... or become a listener supporter by pitching in monthly to help us make TAPIT magic, here.

Do you think there's a poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line: 808-300-0449.

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Jon's wife Christy got pancreatic cancer ten years ago, but Jon still carries the fear of losing her. It's a long hallway from diagnostics to recovery, but Jon's found the right doctor: Todd helps him stop over-intellectualizing, cutting through the voices in his head, until only sweet remission (from the Latin "to relax,") colors the horizon. Revealed to Jon on the eve of Thanksgiving, 2022, Todd's tongue-in-cheek poem is written in the talky après-dinner-party style of Tony Hoagland, and features candid, ad-libbed cameos by Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Czesław Miłosz, and Raymond Carver, who, like all of us, just wants to be loved. From sorrow to joy and back again, this story lets Christy have the final word, and has Jon breathing a sigh of relief.

Todd's poem for Jon, "Thanksgiving," quotes a stanza of Tony Hoagland's "Among the Intellectuals," from his posthumous collection, Turn Up The Ocean (Graywolf Press). Used with permission.

Chapters in this episode:

1. I contain multitudes
2. Cancer for Christmas
3. Trying to figure things out
4. Deconstructing prayer
5. Recovery: "She really is okay."
6. Humility is an honest self-assessment
7. The poem: "Thanksgiving."

Join the conversation and get bonus content at poeminthat.com ... or become a listener supporter by pitching in monthly to help us make TAPIT magic, here.

Do you think there's a poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line: 808-300-0449.

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Todd helps Joan, a vocalist, make connections between the loss of her singing voice, three miscarriages, and her survival of a historic Amtrak train wreck. Along the way, we meet her daughters, learn how Indian ashrams and silent meditation retreats have been as important to Joan as her music, and discover the redeeming power of laughter. Todd's (three!) poems for Joan support her in her grief, affirm her choice to evolve her career as a composer, and present her with a surprising award. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you might even break out in song.

Chapters in this episode: 

1. Amtrak, Conrail, and Joan's fifth-car "wall"
2. Three boys lost in the second trimester
3. A dream choir and an expiration date
4. Daughters, mothers, and a lineage of strong women
5. Voice, meditation, and silence
6. The poem: "A Trophy"

Audio clip: 1987 Amtrak 20/20 Newsreel
Guest Joan Johnson Drewes website

Join the conversation and get bonus content at poeminthat.com ... or become a listener supporter by pitching in monthly to help us make TAPIT magic, here.

Do you think there's a poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line: 808-300-0449.

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New in March 2023! There's a Poem in That is a podcast in which award-winning poet Todd Boss helps strangers discover the poetry in their most intimate stories.  Each episode ends with the reveal of a custom poem written expressly for a guest stranger. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll  want a poem of your very own.

Join the conversation and get bonus content at poeminthat.com ... or become a listener supporter by pitching in monthly to help us make TAPIT magic, here.

Do you think there's a poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line: 808-300-0449.

Follow us on Facebook.

When sportswriter Mitch Albom started meeting with his former professor Morrie Schwartz toward the end of Morrie’s life, Mitch had no idea the impact those meetings would have — not only on him, but around the world. Mitch compiled those lessons into a book, and, nearly twenty-five years and 17 million copies of Tuesdays with Morrie later, Mitch Albom continues to apply the lessons learned from Morrie to live a richer and more purposeful life. Throughout this conversation, Hoda and Mitch connect on love, loss and legacy. As Mitch so beautifully details in this emotional conversation, “what we choose to fill our arms with, and what we choose to carry is actually what ends up defining us.”

In today's episode, our guest Diane Bingham, shares about losing an infant and raising her two daughters amid the reality of that loss.  The beauty of her prayer and her connection to the earth and her spouse speak volumes.

It was an honor to interview her, to know her child. I hope you will be honored as you listen.

Anyway, Today’s episode is about the death of a child. 

It is tender. 

There are tears from me and my guest.

It is beautiful and sad and profound and above all it was an honor to sit with my guest today.

Please know though, that it might be hard.

My Dad had 12 brothers and sisters.  

So growing up I had loads of aunts, uncles, and cousins.  Now I have loads of aunts, uncles, cousins, cousin in laws, first cousins once removed so on and so forth.

My Dad is the only one of his generation to die so far.  He died 15 years ago when he was 51 years old.

For my siblings and i we didn’t know if we belonged with his family.  Were we still part of that side of the family if he was dead? Did we still get to be at things?  Every family event was hard, emotional and fraught with our (or my) sense of not belonging.

Maybe a decade or so ago my great big family started having a family reunion every other year. The first year that my siblings and spouses and such decided to go I had a hard time.  My Dad’s siblings are reminders of the kind of person my father was (a good one) and a reminder of what I have lost.

I have a hard time not being jealous of my cousins. On one hand I wish people would talk openly about how much it sucks he is dead and how awesome he was and also I wish someone would love me as well as my Dad loved me.

Anyway, I remember being on the lodge porch at this state park having a family potluck meal. With a plateful of food I was trying to figure out where to place my body and my children’s bodies.  Feeling vulnerable and tender and not sure where I belonged I ended up next to my Aunt Diane and my Uncle Mike.  At some point in our chatting, probably about weather, I realized that they too knew what it was like to grieve. THey knew what it was like to walk into a family gathering and have your pain be in everyones awareness and no one’s discussion.  I realized that they knew loss.  In my accidentally bold way,  I dove in- Tell me, I asked, “What was Justin like?” 

Justin, is my cousin.  A dark haired little baby with a serious disposition, who was born in the spring of 1986 and died later that fall.  I was young when he was born.  In the years since i Have asked about JUstin, but moreover, I have felt a deeper sense of the way that grief is part of the unspoken grayspace in life.  I have felt the way that people survive, mangage and sometimes even thrive all while carrying the tremendous load of grief with them.  For today’s guest, all in while being accompanied by God.

Today’s guest is my dear Aunt Diane.  She is perhaps,of my Dads siblings the most similar.  She is Justin’s mother.  She is also the parent of Jill and Jennifer as well as the spouse of Mike.  She is a farmer, a midwesterner, a white, straight, cis gender Catholic.  

Per the passing of a friend so dear to us this week, I decided to do a grieving meditation to help those suffering.

We all must come to the realization that all forms disappear at some point in our lives. And with a strong belief in place of whatever God you choose, it makes the process of losing someone easier to handle.

If you are at a place today where you need to hear something to help you, please listen to this and share it with those you think may benefit from it. I do hope it helps someone out there. Thank you for listening.

Pacita, Rafi, (hermanito), Eva, this is for you & your family. In memory of Rafael. We love you.

 Guest appearances will vary on the show. If you would like to be considered for a guest appearance,  email below:

ROSANAMODPOD@GMAIL.COM

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The poet Christian Wiman is giving voice to the hunger and challenge of being religious now. He had a charismatic Texas Christian upbringing, and was later agnostic. He became actively religious again as he found love in his mid 30s, and was diagnosed with cancer. He’s written, “How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life?” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Christian Wiman — How Does One Remember God?” Find more at onbeing.org.

MOVIE DISCUSSION:

Melanie introduces Melvin to another long-standing classic drama, Good Will Hunting, and the joy had in overcoming toxic traits of the male psyche!

Topics:

• (PATREON EXCLUSIVE) 25-minutes of Melanie & Melvin playing "Would You Rather?" with some of the most absurd options available! Even so, it leads to some great real-talk about first-impressions, the resilience of the human body, and the fear of losing their memories. (PATREON EXCLUSIVE)
• Melanie proposed Good Will Hunting when she first joined the show. Now, they're talking about it. She shares why she felt it would be perfect for the podcast.
• The first counseling session between Sean and Will is a brilliant expression of the psychologically competitive way in which certain men often interact, and how this scene unfolds is dramatically satisfying, as well as quite funny.
• Melvin has two mini-tangents about how Good Will Hunting showcases mentorship, and also how parts of the movie made him think of Barbie. Nice!
• Although Good Will Hunting is undeniably masculine, Skylar is an exceptionally well-written female character.
• Proverbs 19:22 asserts that a person desires steadfast love, or a love that is full and permanent. Often, we presume to think we can never find such love, will never have such love, or that one must work towards it. God, through Christ, showcases something wholly different.
• A lot of movies about characters overcoming shame often - likely inadvertently -  ignore guilt. 

Recommendations:

• No Need to Argue - The Cranberries (1994) (Album)
• Warning: Do Not Play (2019) (Movie)

Support on Patreon for Unique Perks!

• Early access to uncut episodes
• Vote on a movie/show we review
• One-time reward of two Cinematic Doctrine Stickers & Pins

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