SHAMEBOOTH Podcast

Nadia Bolz-Weber is a bad ass: A Lutheran pastor and the founder of House for All Sinners & Saints in Denver, the author of three (!) New York Times Bestsellers, she has a podcast, a huge following and she just doesn’t look like your typical pastor. One of her books, Shameless, got us running to her because we know how deep the connection between shame and religion can be and we want to get that shame right out of the ...

Eve Ensler is most well known for The Vagina Monologues, a play she created that has been performed around the world countless times. She’s also a feminist, activist and author. We spoke about her groundbreaking, heart wrenching book, The Apology. Written by her, channeling her father, it is an apology, one she never received from him but that wrote in his voice, for the years of sexual and physical abuse he inflicted upon...

Debbie Millman’s resume is impressive, to say the least: Designer, artist, brand consultant for some of the most recognizable companies, author of six books, host of the first-ever and longest-running design podcast, Design Matters. It’s easy to think someone this accomplished had it all handed to them. But with Debbie, you’d be wrong. She struggled through and survived a deeply challenging childhood, which she first revea...

New York Times bestselling author and journalist Peggy Orenstein has spent a good part of her career focusing on girls and young women in groundbreaking books like Cinderella ate my Daughter and the infamous, Girls & Sex. As the #metoo movement was ramping up and boys and men were being taken to task, Orenstein wanted to hear from them, to better understand what boys were feeling and thinking and how was ...

Tania Ketenjian:

This year has been an amazing one in the world of SHAMEBOOTH. We are approaching our 24th podcast episode, we produced a portable booth that Paula has been lugging around with her around the country (and soon to the border), we have presented at national events, had a two week residency in San Francisco and now we even have a shop where you can get SHAMEBOOTH merch (get your FUC...

The holiday season can be a lot of things: joyful, connective, fun. It can also be downright isolating and lonely, especially for those who struggle with mental illness. Our most recent guest, British-Chinese comedy writer Amanda Rosenberg, knows this struggle all too well. In this episode, Amanda discusses her book, That’s Mental: Painfully Funny Things That Drive Me Crazy, and uses her dark humor and cutting wit to delve...

On average, 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States —  that's more than 12 million women and men over the course of a year. In this episode, we speak with Leslie Morgan Steiner, a feminist, author, TED speaker, activist, and domestic violence survivor. Her book, Crazy Love was a New York Times Bestselling Memoir, charts her marriage t...

This was one of the toughest episodes we have ever produced: Speaking with Nicole Hockley of Sandy Hook Promise about the tragedy that came into her life when there was a shooting at her son’s school, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. On that fateful day, December 14th, 2012, 28 people died, 20 of them were children between the ages of 6 and 7. Nicole Hockley’s son was amongst them. Since then, Nicole co-founded...

As we know, shame finds itself everywhere, as does its sister, Pride. In this episode, we are touching on two key places where shame & pride seems to rear its head: Education and race. Our guest on the show is a graduate of Harvard University, a black woman, Ghanaian parents. When she went back for her 10-year reunion, she explored what success means for a graduate of such a prestigious school. We also wanted to know w...

It’s PRIDE. Millions of people, literally, are descending on to New York for the 50th Anniversary of Pride, and people around the world are taking to the streets to shed their shame and get proud about who they are and who they desire. It’s powerful. It was powerful 50 years ago and, to be honest, it’s just as potent today, if not more so! We are all about pride, here at SHAMEBOOTH, and in celebration, we brought on our de...

Death. It’s the one thing that is absolutely inevitable in our lives. And yet, it’s the thing we try and escape the most. Until we get ill, or tragedy strikes, and it becomes all too real. That’s what happened with BJ Miller. A stunning, athletic young man at Princeton, he was climbing the top of a train and 11,000 volts of electricity pulsated through his body. He lost both legs and half of his arm. Rather t...

Eva Hagberg is a journalist, professor, and author. She has a Ph.D. in Visual and Narrative Culture from UC Berkeley and has written for the leading publications: NY Times, Tin House and countless others. So yeah, she’s a badass. And for a long time, she carried a lot of shame, buried it in alcohol and drugs, and it wasn’t until she got sober and, later, became sick that she found a path to loving others and,...

When we see the word shame, it pricks up our ears. We want to know more and we want to understand what people are saying, and doing, about it. Because guess what? We want to eradicate shame. Let’s do it! Wait, wait, what’s that you say? There are some good things about shame too? We never thought of it that way, not until we had author and psychotherapist Joseph Burgo on the show. He had some exceptional insi...

Do you remember the first time you thought there was something different about your body? Maybe it happened before you were even verbal. You noticed you were taller, or your fingers were longer, your hair was curlier. And, as a toddler, you were fascinated by this difference, certainly not having any judgment about it. And then, as a youth, even before you turned 10 years old, someone made a comment—a classma...

Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir has been hailed as “a tapestry of heart and heartache” (Boston Globe), “raw, cathartic” (O Magazine), “staggering” (Elle.com), “stunningly honest” (The Atlantic) and “a refined, warm, generously poetic library work.” (Entertainment Weekly). Written as an elegy to his mother, with whom Kiese had a complicated and deep relationship, Kiese speaks about body shame, gambling, violence, b...

You are born in the south, raised moving from small town to small town because your father is a minister in the church, you’re gay and you know it but you can’t come out, and all you hear from your family is how homosexuality is a sin, an abomination. You’re stuck, at least it feels that way. So you get married, your wife knows that you have sexual inclinations towards the same sex and she loves you so she’s open to it. Bu...

We all know that child abuse is shitty, and we all know that it exists. If awareness is part of the answer, then why does it continue to be a local and national epidemic? How do we care for the abused, and YES, the ABUSER so that the cycle can be broken? As one interviewee observes, it must be spoken about. In this episode of SHAMEBOOTH Podcast, Founder Paula Williams speaks with Katie Albright, JD and CEO of Safe and Soun...

Let’s face it- we’re all recovering from something. Do you hide away in the kitchen feeding that chocolate addiction, do you need to get high to make love, is there something that you are compelled to do that keeps you away from being free? There are all sorts of addictions and every day we are recovering from one kind or another.

Be it our own journey or the journey of a loved one, recovery from addiction of any kind is s...

In this episode of SHAMEBOOTH Podcast we follow one artist’s journey out of shame and silence into unrepentant, uncompromising, balls-to-the-wall self-honesty.  Her generational anthem “Quiet” went viral at the Women’s March January 27, 2017 receiving 14 million views in 48 hours. A survivor of abuse, anorexia, and depression, Quiet is her thesis on her journey as a woman, an Asian American, a Feminist and as a Human Bein...