Reframing Trauma Through Pop Culture with Jen Sookfong Lee

On this episode of Reframeables, we are reframing rage with author Kathryn Mockler. She spoke with us about the despair of writing and editing climate justice work, and how she’s moved forward from rage and exchanged hurt for the earth for human connection. She calls it ‘post-hope,’ though instead of ‘hope,’ her preferred word is ‘possibility’ — a possibility for shared concerns in community, be it in her writing or in her teaching.

Kathryn Mockler is a writer, screenwriter, experimental filmmaker, editor, and publisher and the author of the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023). She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. Her films have screened at TIFF, EMFA, the Palm Springs Film Festival and most recently at the Arizona Underground Film Festival and REELPoetry/HoustonTX. She runs the literary newsletter Send My Love to Anyone.

Links:
Anecdotes
For more from Kathryn, check out her website

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If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

This week, we are reframing fiction as truth-telling with novelist, playwright, and clothing line creator Claudia Dey. You’ll hear our conversation filled with so many truths born of fiction, creating constraints to create, and the companionship of language. We talk about Claudia’s newest novel Daughter, and Hamlet, and theatre school memories of Claudia’s play Trout Stanley. We also get into how we can’t waver from value systems in terms of what we put out in the world. For Claudia, that shows up in her books and her clothing brand. For us here, it’s tied to who we bring on the show.

Claudia Dey is a bestselling novelist, playwright, and essayist based in Toronto. She has written the novels Stunt, Heartbreaker, and Daughter, as well as the plays Beaver, The Gwendolyn Poems, and Trout Stanley. Other writing of hers has appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, Toro, and The Globe and Mail. Claudia is also the co-founder of the clothing line Horses Atelier.

Links:
Daughter
Horses Atelier
For more from Claudia, follow her on Instagram and take a look at her website

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

Is reframing burnout even possible? According to Emilie Aries, the founder of Bossed Up, it is — sort of. Emilie is a speaker and author whose company is committed to closing the gender leadership gap. In this episode, you’ll hear our conversation about the systemic nature of burnout culture, particularly for women. We unpack “role overload,” try and take a really realistic look at boundary setting, and learn the difference between active and passive rest. These and other important ideas will sustain us through the holidays and beyond!

Emilie Aries is an award-winning speaker, podcaster, writer, and the founder of Bossed Up, a personal and professional training organization that helps women craft sustainable careers. She is the current host of the podcast Bossed Up, and former co-host of Stuff Mom Never Told You. Previously, Emilie served on national political campaigns as an organizer and digital strategist.

Links:
Bossed Up
How to Recalibrate Your Career, a recent episode of Emilie's Bossed Up podcast that continues where our conversation leaves off
For more from Emilie, check out her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

This week on Reframeables, we spoke with author Lisa Whittington-Hill about her new book Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture is Failing Women. With Lisa, we jumped right in with a discussion about female rage, considered the failings of media for middle age women and teenage girls, and shared some nostalgic memories of Courtney Love — who Lisa has defended loudly enough to get her thrown out of parties. We are unhappy with the misogyny that is baked into pop culture and social media, but we are happy to have conversations with someone like Lisa who is doing work to interrupt it.

Lisa Whittington-Hill is a writer based in Toronto, Canada. Her work has appeared in Longreads, The Walrus, Hazlitt, Catapult, and more. She is also the publisher of This Magazine, a progressive magazine of politics, ideas, and culture, and teaches in the publishing program at Centennial College.

Links:
Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture is Failing Women
For more from Lisa, follow her on Twitter and Instagram

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

Pop culture is supposed to be light — downright breezy. Or, as we discovered in our conversation with celebrated Canadian author Jen Sookfong Lee, it can be something more: a bridge to navigating the complexities of intergenerational trauma, reckoning with one’s place in the world, and, perhaps most poignantly, facing the self. We hope you are able to take Jen’s pop culture wisdom and use it to help you reframe some of your own self-work — we did!

Jen Sookfong Lee describes herself as one who “writes, edits, and sometimes sings badly on a podcast.” She is a familiar voice as a columnist for CBC Radio One on shows like The Next Chapter and is a prolific writer of fiction, children’s literature, poetry, and memoir. For this episode of Reframeables we talked to Jen about her memoir Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart. Jen was born and raised in East Vancouver.

Links:
Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart
For more from Jen Sookfong Lee, check out her website and give her a follow on Twitter and Instagram

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

This week we are reframing pop culture as self-care (or reframing the inside joke) with author R. Eric Thomas. In a wonderfully meandering conversation we talked about faith, office cake, gardening, hiking up (and then running down) mountains, looking to Oprah as a way to prepare for big feelings, and using Chekhov for life metaphors. Finally, we landed on using pop culture references as bridges to help us connect with others. We really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.

R. Eric Thomas is a television writer, playwright, and author of Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America. His latest book is Congratulations, The Best Is Over! For four years, Eric was a Senior Staff Writer at Elle.com, where he wrote a column called Eric Reads the News. This past week he gave Reframeables a shout out in his weekly humor newsletter. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a long-running host of The Moth StorySlams.

Links:
Eric's newsletter
Congratulations, The Best Is Over!
Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America
For more from Eric, check out his website, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

This week, we are reframing friendship — or more specifically, the friendship fail. To find out how a deep friendship has the potential to be rehabilitated, we talk with friendship expert Shasta Nelson, who has been called the Brené Brown of friendship. We talk about reframing loneliness, qualities every friendship needs, not downplaying our successes, and so much more. Listen for all the goods — your friendships will thank you.

Shasta Nelson has been studying friendship, both personally and in team environments, for 20 years. Her research has been made accessible for readers in Friendships Don’t Just Happen!, which teaches us how to make new friends as adults, and Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness, which teaches us how to make our closer relationships more meaningful and healthy. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review.

Links:
Follow Shasta on Twitter and Instagram, and check out her website

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

This week, we are reframing vegetarian eating with food writer Alicia Kennedy. We talk all things vegetarian — politics, the meat industry, how food and relationships are connected, and (in Alicia's words) her desire to make vegetarian food both compelling and delicious. We walked away from this conversation with a lot of new ideas to chew on.

Alicia Kennedy is a writer from Long Island now living in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her work on food and culture has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Eater, Bon Appétit, and many other publications. Her new book, No Meat Required, comes out on August 15 with Beacon Press.

Links:
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy
No Meat Required
Hippie Food by Jonathan Kauffman
Appetite for Change by Warren Belasco
Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé
Brooks Headley's Fancy Desserts by Brooks Headley
Sweet + Salty by Lagusta Yearwood
The Bloodroot cookbooks
The Bloodless Revolution by Tristram Stewart
The Vegetarian Crusade by Adam Shprintzen
Red Meat Republic by Joshua Specht
For more from Alicia, check out her website and follow her on Instagram

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

We're joined by author L'Oreal Thompson Payton to reframe all things perfectionism — breaking streaks, embracing shitty first drafts, or learning to stop waiting for the right moment. We take a hard look at how our own perfectionist tendencies show up in ourselves, where this pressure comes from, and how it impacts others. L'Oreal also treats us to insights on her own practice as a writer, struggles with fertility and postpartum feelings, and the non-linear path she has followed towards success.

L'Oreal Thompson Payton is a Chicago-based lifestyle and wellness writer, motivational speaker, and author. Her work has appeared in publications like Fortune, Bitch, Bustle, SELF, Shondaland, Well + Good, and ZORA. Stop Waiting for Perfect: Step Out of Your Comfort Zone and Into Your Power releases this August.

Links:
Stop Waiting for Perfect
The Self-Compassion Test
Check out L'Oreal's website for more of her writing, and follow her on Instagram and Twitter

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too. 

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

This week, we are chatting with Vanity Fair contributing editor Leah Faye Cooper. We met Leah at South by Southwest, where she was facilitating a panel of influencers that went down the road of Botox and fillers and the external work one can do on oneself. That prompted us to ask Leah to come on Reframeables and talk about the more holistic work that we can do on ourselves and in the world, but through the eyes of a fashion writer. We talk all things fashion and culture (and what we may or may not want to do to our faces), as well as what the industry is really like — who stays, who gets out.

Leah Faye Cooper is a Vanity Fair contributing editor, covering fashion and culture. Previously editorial director at Coveteur, her work has appeared in Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, W, and The Hollywood Reporter. She is currently working on her debut book, Full-Court Dress, chronicling the rise of the NBA as a fashion powerhouse.

Links:
Black Farmers Star in Chef Omar Tate's Summer Dinner Series
Follow Leah on Instagram

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.