flourish Lunch Date: Recent Episodes
flourish
Grab your lunch and a mug of tea and join us for flourish Lunch Date, good conversation with women you’ll want to be friends with. We’ll be talking about big ideas relevant to our times, as flourish editor Mia Pohlman and each week’s guest choose articles, poems, stories or essays from their field to help us think about the week’s topic. Thanks for being here, meeting with us in this gathering-place.
The stories we carry within ourselves matter, and we are the people to tell them. Here, editor Mia Pohlman and children's book author Amanda Flinn discuss their writing journeys, the ways the stories we tell ourselves shape us and persevering through challenges in the writing process.
Composer Courtney Cannell wrote the song "In-Between" for our Winter 2021 "Space" issue. Here, she plays it for us and talks about her composing process, her musical inspirations and how she used the thesis of "space" — the way the music would look printed on the page — to approach writing this piece.
For this week's lunch date podcast, Editor Mia Pohlman and rustmedia Project + Brand Manager Jamie Phillips discuss how social media shapes the way we perceive the world in the context of Mia's essay "Images: Reflections on Susan Sontag, social media and the art of being human," featured in the Winter 2020 issue. Stay tuned to listen to Mia read her essay at the end of the conversation.
For this week's lunch date, we sit down with Cape Girardeau Regional Airport Manager Katrina Amos to talk about being a woman in a male-dominated field, the importance of having an airport as an economic tool for the region, and her work to help bring a professional pilot degree program to Southeast Missouri. Thanks for joining us!
We sat down with Lindsey Radcliffe, CEO of Morning Star Behavioral Associates, to talk with her about her revolutionary approach to applied behavioral analysis (ABA), growing her business, and how her own autism diagnosis at age 30 influences the way she sees the world and works with her clients. Join us to learn more about who and what has shaped her ABA philosophy.
The Honorable Abbie Crites-Leoni, the first woman to be appointed to work full-time as federal judge in Cape Girardeau, joins us to talk about her job as a judge, listening in a nonjudgmental manner, and her work with the Supervision to Aid Reentry Court, a program that assists individuals who have completed a federal prison term and have a high risk of reoffending to successfully reenter the community. Join us to listen in on her thoughts about these community issues.
Joy Booker, spearhead of Unwind Wednesday at Ebb & Flow Fermentations in Cape Girardeau, joins us to talk about the importance of building community, writing songs and making music, and the highs and lows of being a comedian. Bring your lunch and come hang out!
Here. is a literary magazine in which high school students residing in Southeast Missouri can publish their writing and artwork, which is chosen for publication by their peers on the Student Editorial Board. In this conversation, flourish editor Mia Pohlman talks with high school students and Here. Student Editorial Board members Greta Ripperda, Anya Spurgeon and Mia Timlin about their experiences with the Here. program, writing, and the issues they believe teens face in this region.
Stay tuned for a reading from Anya, Greta, and Mia at the end of the conversation.
The Central Academy Press, featured in our Spring 2021 issue, is wrapping up their first year as a journalism program at Central Academy in Cape Girardeau. This week, we sit down with Ms. Bri DeWitt and her students Kayla Rodgers and Chandler Farless to discuss what this program has meant to them this year, why writing and teenagers' voices matter, and how they're moving forward with all they've learned.
Under Head Coach Rekha Patterson's leadership, the Southeast Missouri State University Redhawks Women's basketball program has gone from last-place selection in 2015 to winning the 2020 OVC Conference Tournament Championship. In 2020, Rekha was named the OVC Coach of the Year.
In this lunch date, Rekha talks about her coaching philosophy that aims to shape the women on her team as both athletes and people. We also discuss risk and failure — how we can take chances for what is worthy and what we can learn from it when it doesn't work out the way we hoped.
How can we as women allow ourselves and others to experience and express anger? What has our society taught us about the ways we are allowed or not allowed to express this very human emotion? What do we do with our anger when we feel it?
Here, Jamie Phillips and flourish editor Mia Pohlman discuss how they have experienced anger throughout their lives, and Mia reads her essay featured in our Spring 2021 issue, "On Anger: What women in books, songs, movies and life have taught me."
Doula Marian Johnston decided she wanted to create for other women what she calls the "magical" childbirth experiences she had with both of her sons, so she became a trained and certified doula. Here, Marian shares about her role, which she describes as "kind of tribal, sometimes" in supporting women and their partners throughout the birth process. She also lets us in on what it's like to bear witness to new life.
Emily Scifers, co-owner of Laughing Stalk Farmstead, has a horticulture degree in sustainable agriculture and has worked on small, organic farms across the country. In 2012, she spearheaded efforts to found the Riverfront Market in downtown Cape Girardeau, and she has spent time working as the community garden coordinator for the city. Grab your lunch and join us as we talk about one of Emily's foundational texts, "The One-Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukuoka, and what the rhythms of farming teach us about life.
Dr. Sara Edgerton, professor of cello and string bass at Southeast Missouri State University and conductor of the Southeast Missouri Symphony Orchestra, joins us to talk about the ritual of the symphony and the ways music heals during life's unsettling moments. Stay tuned for her cello performance at the end of the conversation.
To hear more of Sara's performance, head over to our friends at the Scout's YouTube channel for Scout Sessions.
Kelly Downes, director of the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri, talks with us about the role of art in building an equitable community and in helping young people come alive. Along with the topics of cultivating wonder and being patient in process, we discuss Dave Eggers’ TED talk “Once Upon a School” and Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk “Changing Education Paradigms.”
Professor Jen Rickard, instructor of history and anthropology at Southeast Missouri State University, joins us to discuss her work as an underwater archaeologist in Australia and the Philippines. In this conversation, we talk about her underwater exploration of pre-historic societies, the ways language shapes how we perceive the world, and what we lose when we lose a language.
The TED Talk "How Language Shapes the Way We Think" by Lera Broditsky and On Being's Poetry Unbound with Padraig O'Tuama podcast episode "Ceist na Teangan (The Language Issue) by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill" guide our conversation.
Olivia Carter, 2021 National Counselor of the Year and counselor at Jefferson Elementary in Cape Girardeau, joins us to talk about childhood brain development, trauma-informed education and how we might prepare ourselves to be present to our children, especially when they are suffering.
Olivia and Mia discuss “Our Kids Are Listening Even When They Don’t Seem Like It,” as well as the short chapters “Recognizing the Presence of the Other” and “Being There When Someone is Suffering” from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s book “True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart.”