Something (rather than nothing)

Episode 122 - Heather Dean

Heather Dean is a self-taught artist living and working in her hometown in the San Fernando Valley with her dog Jimi Hendrix.

Her work deals chronically with subversion, the dreamworld and the absurdity of life and death.

Episode 121 - Kola Shippentower-Thompson

Kola Shippentower-Thompson is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. She has co-founded and is the Director of The Wisáwca Project - Enough Iz Enough, a non-profit organization working together for change, for better communication and involvement.

Kola has developed a Safety Plan to be utilized by anyone in identifying safety methods, contacts, and procedures to keep one safe whether in an abusive relationship or a plan to track a missing person. She is a professional fighter and brown belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Kola is wife and mother to three children and takes personal safety to heart and especially in advocating for MMIWP. Kola also co-hosts a weekly podcast. Kola can be found on Instagram @kolashippentower

Episode 120 - Ivizia Dakini

“‘Ivizia is a gorgeous-witty-wild-flower plucked from the fields of Mars for our astral entertainment.” - An awestruck podcast host

“The episode is shockingly cryptic about whether it was recorded in the nude or not’” - An awestruck podcast listener

Ivizia Dakini is your rabble rousing roller girl! She is 2016 Miss Exotic Oregon, and won “Most Extreme Show” in 2017 EDI Awards. You can watch Ivizia on the Netflix documentary “Burlesque: Heart of the Glitter Tribe”. Specializing in fire performance, roller skating & puppetry, Ivizia has become one of the premiere variety entertainers around the US, calling Las Vegas her home.

 

Episode 119 - Loren Rhoads

It is my distinct pleasure to welcome back Loren Rhoads. Loren first appeared on Episode 49 of SRTN.

In this conversation we discuss her new book This Morbid Life and dig into issues of how to deal with death, what it means for our life, the meaning of things, flowers, anatomy, something and nothing.

Episode 118 - Hana Walker Brown

Hana Walker Brown is a Multi-Award-Winning Documentary and Podcast Creator, Composer, Writer and Creative Director.

Which basically means she tells stories; really good stories.

"It’s a real privilege; sitting down with a stranger and speaking until we are no longer strangers.

Holding a space for someone into which they can just talk; freely, openly. Where it is safe to be vulnerable.

I’m passionate about exploring the edges of vulnerability and courage, in the subtle art of holding space, in trust and how we can establish and maintain intimacy in our very modern world.

I am fascinated by humans and all their edges.

I have sat with their fear, their silence, with their joy, grief, courage and everything in between.

In that moment, we are together. And each time I leave a little different; altered somehow. Real fucking magic."

Episode 117 - Caustic Casanova

Since forming as teenagers at the College of William & Mary in 2005, heavy rockers Caustic Casanova have experienced their fair share of ups and downs. Having weathered lineup changes, life threatening injuries and relentless DIY touring, the group’s highly eclectic sound has made them favorites in a crowded scene. Stereo Embers wrote of the Washington, DC based upstarts: “Caustic Casanova is one of the most excitingly innovative bands on the planet…the band’s at home in psych, prog, metal, punk, and seemingly every other genre in the galaxy.”

2013 saw the band almost fall apart when drummer/vocalist Stefanie Zaenker endured serious injuries to her wrists that put her ability to drum in jeopardy. However, Caustic Casanova persevered, and by 2014, Zaenker, alongside bassist/vocalist Francis Beringer and guitarist Andrew Yonki had opened for sludge titans Kylesa and were signed to their label, Retro Futurist Records, allowing them to take things to the next level. The band toured heavily in support of their critically acclaimed 2015 LP Breaks, slugging it out both with Kylesa and on their own. Between 2013 and 2018 they also released a trio of EPs for their Pantheon series, where they paired original material with classics by Pentagram, the Melvins and Weedeater. This hard work led to a deal with Magnetic Eye Records, who in October 2019 released CC’s latest record God How I Envy The Deaf, which won two Washington Area Music Awards in 2020, for best hard rock album and best hard rock song (“Filth Castle”).

As CC looks to the future, they’re already recording the next album with their longtime producer J. Robbins (Jawbox) at Magpie Cage Recording Studio in Baltimore. Newly a four piece with the addition of guitarist Jake Kimberley, this relentlessly loud band is excited to see what sonic alchemies their genre mashing and off the wall songwriting will conjure up next. Road hardened rock and roll warriors through and through, Caustic Casanova plan on showcasing their “muscular, riff-roaring, bass-fuzzed blend of metal and hard rock, flavored with doses of noise and stoned psychedelia” (Creative Loafing) all across the world.

Episode 116 - Olivia Dolphin

Olivia Dolphin is a driven content creator with a passion for storytelling and language. 

She is up to some wonderful things. She is a musician and singer and her publication Wizards in Space is a love-creation with deep respect for creators and their imagination.

"Wizards in Space is a space for wizard writers. It’s a niche community within a community, for voices and art that you don’t quite know where it belongs. This is where you belong. For wizards. In space. In this space. We’re feel makers. Let’s make people feel stuff."

Olivia is a graduate  from The University of Rhode Island and makes magick in the art city named Providence, Rhode Island

Episode 115 - Aunia Kahn

Aunia Kahn was the 2nd guest ever on the SRTN podcast and I am so pleased Aunia is back with this lovely conversation that delves into art and its ability to heal and help us persevere.

Aunia Kahn is a multi-faceted creative entrepreneur and a globally awarded, collected, and exhibited figurative artist/photographer, published author, instructor, and inspirational speaker. She is also the owner of Rise Visible a full service creative digital marketing agency and Create for Healing.

Her work has been in over 300+ exhibitions in over 10 countries; at places such as San Diego Art Institute, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, iMOCA, St. Louis Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Mitchell Museum, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. She has also been a guest on podcasts like Entrepreneur on Fire, with 70 million downloads & 1 million monthly listens.

Aunia has curated several internationally recognized books and projects, including Silver Era Tarot, Inspirations for Survivors, Obvious Remote Chaos, Minding the Sea: Inviting the Muses Over for Tea, Avalanche of White Reason, XIII: The Art of Aunia Kahn, Witch’s Oracle and the Witch’s Oracle 2nd Edition, Moon Goddess (Modern Eden Gallery) exhibit, Tarot Under Oath (Last Rites Gallery), Lowbrow Tarot Project (La Luz De Jesus Gallery), etc.

Her forthcoming projects include; An Epidemic of Retrospective, Disintegrating Stars, and the Ethereal Realms Tarot.

She loves Animals, Prussian blue, Psychology, Design, Miracles, Hummingbirds & Life.

https://auniakahn.com/

Episode 114 - Liz Medina

Liz Medina is the Executive Director of the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO. She previously served as the co-chair of the Goddard College Staff Union, UAW 2322. Last year, she launched an oral history podcast called En Masse in an effort to build working-class culture.

En Masse is part of the Labor Radio Network. She is also a member of DSA.

 

Episode 113 - Joyce A. Miller

When Joyce A. Miller turned 60, her curiosity fueled the writing for her debut historical fiction novel, Joe Harris, the Moon, based on her granduncle’s life at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Her cousin, Bob Harris, who is a huge baseball fan and cares deeply about their family history, did most of the research for the story. It was a joy for Miller to piggyback on his research and dig deeper into the history of southwestern Pennsylvania and the baseball world. She wanted to unravel the truth of Joe Harris’ story through fiction.

Miller retired at 60 and moved to the Church Hill section of Richmond, Virginia. She moved to Richmond to be closer to her adult children, who went to college at VCU and never returned home. She lives in renovated, red brick building that was once a 1910 industrial brush factory. Miller can almost see her Uncle Joe as a young man leaning against the massive twelve-inch by twelve-inch oak wooden pillars in her living room.

 

Miller lives with her husband, Alan, and her retired racing greyhound, Coheed. Coheed, like all racing greyhounds, was registered with a racing name. The breeder gave him and his littermates the names of rock and roll bands, and he became CoheedandCambria. Miller just kept the Coheed part. Miller wonders if Coheed could name her, would he keep “Joyce” or name her something else.

Before Miller retired to write full time, she worked as a mechanical designer at Jefferson Lab, a nuclear physics laboratory, in Newport News, VA for over thirty years. How does a little girl born in southwestern Pennsylvania grow up to work at a state-of-the-art, cutting edge nuclear physics laboratory? She always loved to draw but was also good at math. Her dad told her to “learn a trade.” So, after a short stint at college to study German, she switched to a technical school and became a draftsman. Miller believes she had the same wanderlust that her granduncle Joe had. Her first job, where she was the only woman draftsman, was at a vacuum products company in Pittsburgh where most of their archived drawings had been destroyed in a flood. Her job, since her hand lettering was so neat, was to lay a piece of vellum over the wrinkled and water stained drawings and trace them. She learned about vacuum drying systems like freeze dryers for coffee, rotary dryers for pharmaceuticals and autoclave dryers for impregnating telephone poles with creosote. Because she had gained a little vacuum experience, her next job was at a German company that produced vacuum vane pumps in the United States. Miller’s job was to translate the German drawings into English. When she moved to Virginia, she worked for a ship design company making waste and oily wastewater piping drawings for Navy frigates. And with that accumulated experience of vacuum and piping, Miller got the job at the nuclear physics laboratory designing cryogenics piping, vacuum systems and superconducting magnets. 

It was at the physics laboratory where she met several French colleagues who came to the laboratory to do their experiments. As their work relationship blossomed into friendship, Miller traveled with them to unique areas of France about once every three years or so. They introduced her to great wine, stinky cheese and gourmet food. One day, Miller will have them take her to the Argonne Forest where Joe fought in the trenches.

When Miller is not writing, her friends say that she intentionally curates experiences for them. She still likes to draw and paint like she did when she was a child. In 2001, Miller adopted her first ex-racing greyhound named A Bar Kit and trained her to be a therapy dog. She and Kit visited the local library where kids would read to Kit. A friend suggested to Miller that she should try canine freestyle, also called dog dancing, with Kit. Canine freestyle is a dog sport where one teaches the dog to do certain tricks which are then choreographed to a piece of music; and it looks like the dog and handler are dancing. So, when Miller turned 50 years old, she signed up for an adult tap and jazz class so she could be a better dog dancer with her greyhounds. She likes to tap dance because it makes such a joyful noise. She continues to train dogs and volunteers with the greyhound adoption group.

She likes to practice yoga and swim at the beach now and then. But if Miller really had to swim to save her life, she would just perish.