PODCAST · society
A Fresh Story
by Fresh Starts
A Fresh Story Podcast is a top 2% personal journals podcast, hosted by sisters Olivia Dreizen Howell and Jenny Dreizen, that delves into courageous life choices, creative concepts, and fresh start stories through candid conversations. The podcast explores cultural subjects often overlooked, offering listeners a fresh perspective on various life experiences. Join the sisters and guests on a journey discussing bravery, significant decisions, and fresh starts, navigating the complexities of the human experience.
Episodes
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How Live Theater Teaches Kids Empathy and Big Feelings with Lynne Streeter Childress
The same month their dad moved out, Olivia Howell's two little boys put on a play. It was August 2019, and they were three and five. Olivia's cousin, a children's theater costume designer, sat down with them to write a script, make the costumes, and hand out roles to the entire family. Olivia…
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Trapped in a Picture-Perfect Marriage: Hillary Frank of The Longest Shortest Time on Her New Audiobook, Wedlocked
Somewhere along the way, most women learn to smile through it. Through the pain no one warned you about in the doctor's office. Through the joke that wasn't funny. Through the stranger on the street who says you'd look prettier if you did. Hillary Frank, creator of the beloved parenting podcast…
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3 Simple Recovery Tools From Divorce Attorney Tracy Galloway
Sometimes the most useful divorce recovery tools aren’t complicated—they’re the small, tangible things that help you feel more like yourself when everything else feels uncertain. In this episode of A Fresh Story: Simple Tips to Support Yourself, Olivia Howell talks with Tracy D. Galloway, Esq.,...
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Fresh Reads: Normalizing Normal: Motherhood Without the Filter by Emily Feret
There is a particular kind of loneliness that can come with becoming a mother: the moment you realize everyone warned you that you would be tired, but almost nobody warned you that you might lose pieces of yourself. Creator and author Emily Feret built her platform by saying the things mothers…
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Fresh Reads: The Parisian Heist: A Novel by Jo Piazza
Picture a twenty-something widow in Paris, a sick one-year-old on her hip, and an attic full of paintings nobody wants—not galleries, not critics, not even her own family. That widow was Jo van Gogh, and the paintings belonged to her late husband's brother, a mostly forgotten failure named…
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Simple Tips to Support Yourself: What Can I Do to Be Gentle With Myself In Hard Seasons?
In this episode of A Fresh Story: Simple Tips to Support Yourself, Olivia Howell sits down with Rachel Lovitt, a holistic movement coach and Reiki practitioner who helps people reconnect with their bodies, rediscover childlike curiosity, and feel like themselves again. Rachel’s specialty is…
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Simple Tips to Support Yourself: How Can I Start Over After Divorce?
In this episode of A Fresh Story: Simple Tips to Support Yourself, host Olivia Howell sits down with Ron Platt, co-founder of the National Association for Single and Divorced Families (NASDF) — the only national organization built to surround divorcing parents and single-family households with...
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Simple Tips to Support Yourself: How Can I Ask Better Questions to Be Heard More Clearly?
Gina Pellettieri is a trained divorce mediator and matrimonial attorney based in Suffolk County on Long Island, New York, and in this episode she reframes mediation as a life skill rather than a legal formality. At its core, mediation is a structured form of negotiation: a neutral third party…
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Fresh Reads: Are We Friends Yet? How to Deepen Your Relationships and Create the Community You Need by Alex Alexander
At some point, most of us have stood on the edge of a new chapter — a divorce, a move, a loss, a reinvention — and felt the quiet, aching realization that we have no one to call. Not no one, exactly. But no one close enough. No one present. No one who really knows the texture of your everyday…
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Fresh Reads: Divorce By Design: How building a divorce team can help you get divorced efficiently (without going broke!) by Melissa Murphy Pavone
Divorce is the intersection of the biggest trauma of your life and the biggest financial decisions of your life — happening at the exact same moment. And yet most people navigate it alone, armed with a lawyer's phone number, a group chat of well-meaning friends, and advice that was never really...
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Fresh Reads: Fallout by Jordan Rosenfeld
Some writers come to the page to escape. Jordan Rosenfeld has been doing it since she was seven years old — filling journal after journal, reaching for fiction the way a child who's seen hard things reaches for anything that helps make sense of the world. That instinct never left her. It…
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Fresh Reads: The Quitters Club: A Novel by Jessica Strawser
Nobody ever taught us when it's okay to quit. We got the poster on the classroom wall, the T-shirt slogan, the well-meaning advice drilled in from childhood: quitters never win, winners never quit. And so we stay. We stay in the job that's making us miserable. We stay in the relationship that...
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Fresh Reads: When We Were Feral by Shasta Grant
Before she wrote the novel, before the residency, before the ninety thousand words that became her debut — Shasta Grant was a little girl in New Hampshire being raised by her grandparents, carrying questions about her mother that she didn't yet have language for. She didn't know then that those...
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Fresh Reads: Perforated by Chloe Yelena Miller
Perforated is Chloe Yelena Miller's second full-length collection of poetry, and it holds a particular and beautiful question at its center: who owns a loss? The book is structured around what she calls the New York City poems — prose poems born from a lyric essay about returning to Lower…
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Fresh Reads: Television for Women by Danit Brown
Nobody tells you that the moment you've been waiting for your whole life might arrive and feel nothing like you expected. You've watched the movies. You've seen the Instagram posts. You know exactly how it's supposed to go — the birth, the first look, the wave of love so overwhelming it changes...
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Fresh Reads: Black. Single. Mother. Real Life Tales of Longing and Belonging by Jamilah Lemieux
For years, Jamilah Lemieux carried a secret fear alongside her story: that if she wrote a book about being a single mother, she would be one forever. That putting it on the page would somehow seal the fate she was quietly desperate to escape — the judgment, the shame, the longing for a different...
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Fresh Reads: The Love Project: A Journey of Intimate Conversations by Alison van Diggelen
Sometimes it takes being broken open to finally go looking for love. For journalist and author Alison Van Diggelen, that breaking came violently and unexpectedly — a terrifying encounter with a dog while hiking in Mexico that shook her to her core and forced her to ask questions she hadn't known...
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Fresh Reads: Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice by Jocelyn Jane Cox
There's a particular kind of courage it takes to host a child's birthday party while your mother is lying in a hospital bed — to blow up balloons and slice cake and smile for photos while your heart is quietly breaking somewhere else entirely. Jocelyn Jane Cox knows that courage intimately. She...
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Fresh Reads: Rattled: How to Calm New Mom Anxiety with the Power of the Postpartum Brain by Dr. Nicole Pensak
Nobody tells you that becoming a mother is a neurological event. Nobody hands you a map for the identity that dissolves in the delivery room — or for the one that quietly, haltingly begins to take shape in its place. Nobody tells you that the intrusive thoughts, the rage, the moments of feeling...
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Fresh Reads: The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up―and Then Pushes Them Down by Stefanie O’Connell
There's a moment most ambitious women know well — the moment you realize that doing everything "right" didn't get you where you were promised it would. You leaned in. You asked for more. You claimed space at the table. And somehow, the table shrank. Author and financial journalist Stefanie...
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Fresh Reads: Honest Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself by Libby Ward
There's a moment most mothers know — the one where you're nodding and smiling and saying yes to everyone in the room, all while something small and essential inside of you is screaming. Libby Ward, the Ontario-based content creator, author, and speaker who built a multi-million-person following…
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Fresh Reads: Sexual Pleasure For Dummies by Myisha Battle
There are questions most of us carry in silence—questions we've never felt safe enough to ask out loud, things we didn't learn in any classroom, and experiences we've quietly wondered about in the dark. Myisha Battle has spent her career in those silences, helping people finally say the words...
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Fresh Reads: Parenting a Spicy One: A Compassionate Guide for Raising a Deep-Feeling and Wonderfully Strong-Willed Kid by Mary Van Geffen
There is a moment—one most parents have had but few will ever admit out loud—where you look at your child and feel something uncomfortably close to dislike. Not a fleeting frustration, but a deep, bewildering wall between you and the small person you love more than life. If you have ever stood...
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Fresh Reads: Extra Sauce: The Good, the Bad, and the Onions by Zahra Tangorra
Some connections defy explanation. They arrive on a random Tuesday afternoon through a phone scroll, a face you haven't seen in decades, a name that pulls you back to childhood hallways — and suddenly, the universe has done the thing it sometimes does, folding time neatly in half. That is exactly...
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Fresh Reads: Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online by Fortesa Latifi
There is something quietly radical about a journalist who turns her most pressing obsession—the thing that keeps her up at night, filling spreadsheets and firing off emails at 2 a.m.—into a book that asks the rest of us to pay closer attention. Fortesa Latifi is that journalist, and her debut…
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Fresh Reads: Rewrite the Mother Code: From Sacrifice to Stardust - A Cosmic Approach to Motherhood by Dr. Gertrude Lyons
What if the very word "mother" has been quietly shrinking you your whole life — not because you didn't love being one, but because no one ever told you that you were allowed to be more than one? That's the question at the heart of this week's conversation on A Fresh Story: Book Talk, and it's the...
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Fresh Reads: Cosmic Goodness: Surrendering the Shadows to Live in the Light by Cassidy Gard
Some of us learned very early that love could be unpredictable. That the sound of a car pulling into the driveway meant something different in our house. That being the last kid picked up from school wasn't just inconvenient—it was a whole education in holding your breath. Cassidy Gard, debut...
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Fresh Reads: UNBREAKABLE DIVORCE: The Winning Divorce Guide Every Woman Needs to Reclaim Her Life with Heather Quick, ESQ.
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes when your life is being dismantled — not by accident, but by necessity. When Heather Quick walks into a courtroom, she carries with her more than case files and legal strategy. She carries two-plus decades of watching women rebuild from the…
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Fresh Reads: Our Home: The Love, Work, and Heart of Family by Lori Sugarman-Li
There are moments that crack something open in you — moments you can't unhear, can't unsee, can't unfeel. For Lori Sugarman Lee, that moment came across a desk from an insurance agent who looked at her years of raising children, moving her family across continents, building communities from...
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Fresh Reads: The Perils of Girlhood: A Memoir in Essays by Melissa Fraterrigo
There is a specific kind of ache that comes from looking at your daughter and seeing yourself — not the version of yourself you've carefully curated, but the girl you tried to leave behind. That's where Melissa Fraterrigo's memoir begins: standing in a doorway, watching her twin daughters…
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Fresh Reads: Map of a Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Finding the Way Home by Jacque Gorelick
Some people lose their footing early. For Jacque Gorelick, that unmooring came at eight years old, the morning her mother died. What followed was a childhood she describes as a snow globe someone had shaken and never set down — chaotic, rootless, and full of grief she didn't yet have words for.…
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How to Stop Losing Yourself When You Love an Addict | Expert Tips from Therapist Meredith Beardmore
In this episode of A Fresh Story: Simple Tips to Support Yourself, host Olivia Howell sits down with Meredith Beardmore — therapist, author, and YouTuber — whose entire practice is dedicated to helping women navigate the painful and often overlooked experience of loving someone with an addiction....
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From Sperm Donors to Divorce Court: Elizabeth Wilson’s Honest Story of Same-Sex Motherhood
When Elizabeth Wilson decided to start a family, she knew the road ahead wouldn’t be easy—but she never imagined how much it would ask of her heart, her body, and her marriage. As a lesbian woman navigating a system built for heteronormative couples, she encountered outdated forms, unnecessary...
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He Lost His Wife the Day His Daughter Was Born: Matt Logelin on Rebuilding a Family After Unimaginable Loss
There are stories you follow for so long that they weave themselves into your own becoming. This episode is one of them. From the opening minutes, Matt Logelin brings us back to the moment his life split in two—when joy and devastation arrived within hours of each other. He describes, with rare...
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Wake Up Fresh With Olivia Howell: Feeling Safe Is a Valid Goal
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Olivia Howell reframes emotional safety as a meaningful and worthy goal. Rather than equating growth with constant discomfort, this daily morning reflection encourages listeners to honor their need for steadiness, calm, and nervous system support. As part of a...
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Wake Up Fresh With Jenny Dreizen: A Quiet No Still Counts
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Jenny explores the idea that boundaries don’t always arrive loudly or dramatically. As part of a daily morning ritual, this reflection encourages listeners to trust subtle signals of hesitation and honor quiet no’s before they turn into burnout or resentment....
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Wake Up Fresh With Olivia Howell: Slow Is Still Forward
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Olivia Howell offers reassurance for anyone who feels pressure to move faster or accomplish more. This daily morning reflection reframes slowness as a valid and often necessary form of progress, supporting a more sustainable approach to personal growth. As part…
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Wake Up Fresh With Jenny Dreizen: It’s Okay If People Need Time to Adjust
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Jenny explores the emotional reality of change within relationships. As part of a daily morning ritual, this reflection reassures listeners that growth can require adjustment — both internally and externally. Designed for anyone navigating new boundaries or...
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Wake Up Fresh With Jenny Dreizen: You Don’t Have to Hold Everything Together
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Jenny explores the habit of emotional over-functioning and the pressure to hold everything together. As part of a daily morning ritual, this reflection encourages listeners to release responsibility that doesn’t belong solely to them. Designed for anyone who…
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Wake Up Fresh With Olivia Howell: Your Nervous System Is Trying to Help You
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Olivia Howell reframes the nervous system as a source of support rather than something to control or fix. As part of a daily morning ritual, this reflection encourages listeners to approach their bodies with curiosity and compassion, especially during moments of...
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Fresh Friday with Olivia and Jenny: When ‘Spirituality’ Becomes Manipulation – The Dream Story That Wasn’t a Dream
Some Fridays feel like a finish line. And some Fridays feel like the moment you realize you’ve been running the whole time—quietly, bravely, on fumes and faith—while the world keeps asking you to prove it counts. In this cozy, funny, unexpectedly tender weekly wrap-up, sisters Olivia Howell and...
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Simple Tips to Support Yourself: How do I tell my kids we're getting divorced?
In this Simple Tips to Support Yourself episode of A Fresh Story, host Olivia Howell is joined by therapist and author Oona Metz to offer clear, practical guidance on one of the most difficult parts of divorce: talking to your kids when your co-parent refuses, avoids the conversation, or isn’t...
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Wake Up Fresh With Olivia Howell: Protecting Your Energy Is Not Selfish
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Olivia Howell explores the idea that protecting your energy is a necessary and compassionate practice — not a selfish one. As part of a daily morning ritual, this reflection invites listeners to reconsider boundaries, rest, and capacity through a lens of...
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Simple Tips to Support Yourself: How can I heal my broken heart after my divorce?
In this Simple Tips to Support Yourself episode of A Fresh Story, host Olivia Howell is joined by therapist and Fresh Starts Expert Oona Metz to break down one of the most universal—and misunderstood—experiences of divorce and major life transitions: healing a broken heart. With nearly 30 years…
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Wake Up Fresh With Jenny Dreizen: You’re Allowed to Change Your Mind
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Jenny explores the permission to change your mind without guilt or over-explaining. As part of a daily morning ritual, this reflection supports listeners in honoring evolving needs and trusting themselves as circumstances change. Designed for anyone navigating...
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Wake Up Fresh With Olivia Howell: You Are More Than What You Produce
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Olivia Howell offers a compassionate reminder that personal worth is not defined by productivity. As part of a daily morning ritual, this reflection encourages listeners to release hustle culture expectations and reconnect with their inherent value — even on days...
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Fresh Reads: Unhitched - The Essential Divorce Guide for Women by Oona Metz
There’s a moment in the middle of the night, when the house is quiet and the questions feel loud, that this conversation begins. In this A Fresh Story: Book Talk episode, Olivia Howell sits down with therapist and Fresh Starts Expert Oona Metz, whose new book Unhitched: The Essential Divorce…
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Wake Up Fresh With Jenny Dreizen: Clarity Is Kinder Than Niceness
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Jenny explores the difference between being nice and being clear. As part of a daily morning ritual, this reflection encourages listeners to practice honest communication without guilt or over-softening. Designed for anyone navigating boundaries, people-pleasing,...
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Wake Up Fresh With Olivia Howell: You’re Not Lost — You’re Listening
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Olivia Howell reframes uncertainty as a meaningful and necessary part of personal growth. Rather than treating not knowing as failure, this daily morning reflection invites listeners to see uncertainty as a sign of listening, recalibration, and self-trust.…
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Wake Up Fresh With Jenny Dreizen: You Are Not Responsible for Other People’s Feelings
In this episode of Wake Up Fresh, Jenny explores emotional responsibility and the difference between kindness and over-functioning for others’ feelings. As part of a daily morning ritual, this reflection supports listeners in setting boundaries without guilt or self-blame. Designed for anyone who...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
A Fresh Story Podcast is a top 2% personal journals podcast, hosted by sisters Olivia Dreizen Howell and Jenny Dreizen, that delves into courageous life choices, creative concepts, and fresh start stories through candid conversations. The podcast explores cultural subjects often overlooked, offering listeners a fresh perspective on various life experiences. Join the sisters and guests on a journey discussing bravery, significant decisions, and fresh starts, navigating the complexities of the human experience.
HOSTED BY
Fresh Starts
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does A Fresh Story have?
A Fresh Story currently has 300 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is A Fresh Story about?
A Fresh Story Podcast is a top 2% personal journals podcast, hosted by sisters Olivia Dreizen Howell and Jenny Dreizen, that delves into courageous life choices, creative concepts, and fresh start stories through candid conversations. The podcast explores cultural subjects often overlooked,...
How often does A Fresh Story release new episodes?
A Fresh Story publishes regularly with 300 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to A Fresh Story?
You can listen to A Fresh Story on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts A Fresh Story?
A Fresh Story is created and hosted by Fresh Starts.
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