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by Abhra Pal
Stories and Stanza is a podcast for curious minds hosted by Abhra Pal - poet, storyteller & public speaker. Through two distinct series, the show explores the human experience with honesty, depth, and literary intention. Between The Lines brings intimate conversations with writers and creators uncovering the vulnerability behind their craft, the stories that shaped them, and the creative struggles that lead to transformation. Fail With Me features raw, unfiltered conversations with doctors, psychologists, and mental health advocates exploring emotional intelligence, resilience, and the courage it takes to rebuild. Because awareness builds bridges — and people suffer silently until someone speaks first.
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- 5 days ago45 min
Leading Without Authority: What Service Teaches Us About Leadership | Jada Hoerr
Send us Fan Mail What if the strongest leadership lessons are learned in places where you have no authority at all? In this episode of Fail With Me on Stories and Stanza, Abhra talks with Jada Hoerr, Chief Resource Officer at Midwest Foodbank. Jada spent 21 years in sales and marketing at Caterpillar before moving into nonprofit leadership. She shares how service, volunteering and community work became an unexpected training ground for leading with influence, confidence and accountability. ...
- 2 weeks ago44 min
Diana Rampton on Regency Romance, Self-Publishing and Finding Your Voice
Send us Fan Mail “If you want to be a writer and you’ve put pen to paper already, you are a writer.” Diana Rampton trained as an engineer and spent years working in construction in Sydney and London. It took about ten years, and three books, before she felt ready to call herself an author. Six books in, she writes sparkling Regency romantic comedies, with plenty of humour, no sex and a lot of historical detail. In this episode of Between the Lines, Diana shares her journey from engineer to au...
- 2 weeks ago49 min
Bad Poetry as a Tool for Mental Health with Margaret Bryden
Send us Fan Mail What if you didn’t have to be a good poet to heal through poetry? In this episode of Stories and Stanza, I’m joined by Margaret Bryden, a licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor, author and founder of Sage Insight Therapy. Margaret shares the idea at the heart of her book, How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience, and why she calls it “bad poetry”: writing that is honest rather than impressive, accessible rather than perfect, and free of the...
- 3 weeks ago44 min
Lisa Lacy: What Did You Have to Perform to Survive?
Send us Fan Mail What did you have to perform in order to survive? That's the question writer, trauma educator and memoirist Lisa Lacy puts at the centre of this conversation. It's one that tends to stay with you long after the episode ends. For nearly three decades, Lisa worked in corporate healthcare education and ran a highly successful consulting business. From the outside she looked polished and put together. Behind the scenes, she was being swallowed by addiction and a mental health c...
- 3 weeks ago10 min
The Silence Men Keep — A World Mental Health Day Recap | Stories and Stanza Live ft. Joelle Camille
Send us Fan Mail World Mental Health Day Community Talk: Men’s Mental Health, Support Systems & Real Change | Stories and Stanza Live ft. Joelle Camille Host Abhra reflects on Stories and Stanza’s second in-person community talk show event in Melbourne — held on October 10th, World Mental Health Day — with guest Joelle Camille, somatic therapist, men’s coach, and body-brain rewiring practitioner. The event was postponed by a week after Joelle fell sick, but the shift turned out to be sere...
- Oct 4, 202637 min
Embrace the Mud: A Veteran Poet on Discipline and Craft
Send us Fan Mail #StoriesAndStanza #BetweenTheLines #PeterGunn #EpicPoetry #CreativeDiscipline "Embrace the suck. Embrace the mud." Peter Gunn learned that lesson crawling under barbed wire in Air Force boot camp, and he's been living by it ever since. In this episode of Between the Lines, I sit down with Peter, a 20-year U.S. Air Force veteran, bodybuilder, guitarist and poet, who is on a mission to bring epic poetry back from the dead. We talk about how he went from being a morbidly obese...
- Sep 24, 20261h 7m
Why "Use Your Words" Doesn't Work: How Children Learn Emotional Language | Dr David Marcus
Send us Fan Mail "Use your words," we tell our children. But what if they don't have the words yet? In this Fail With Me conversation, clinical psychologist Dr David S. Marcus explains why emotional language is a skill that has to be built, not something children simply pick up, and how parents can build it with them. Most of us parent the way we were parented, for better or worse. Dr Marcus has spent 40 years working with families under stress, and he unpacks what actually helps a child fee...
- Sep 24, 20261h 2m
Why We Repeat Patterns We Know Are Hurting Us: Shadow Journaling, Self-Acceptance and the Reveal, Reclaim, Rewrite Method with Oliver Mann
Send us Fan Mail Why doesn't self-awareness lead to change? Shadow journaling coach Oliver Mann, author of Shadow Journaling: A Field Guide to Personal Alchemy, explains why self-acceptance is the missing step between knowing your patterns and changing them. In his third conversation on Stories and Stanza, Oliver makes an uncomfortable point: awareness is only the first step, and on its own it can keep us more stuck than before. He and Abhra explore the hidden benefit in the patterns we say ...
About Stories and Stanza
Stories and Stanza is a podcast for curious minds hosted by Abhra Pal - poet, storyteller & public speaker. Through two distinct series, the show explores the human experience with honesty, depth, and literary intention. Between The Lines brings intimate conversations with writers and creators uncovering the vulnerability behind their craft, the stories that shaped them, and the creative struggles that lead to transformation. Fail With Me features raw, unfiltered conversations with doctors, psychologists, and mental health advocates exploring emotional intelligence, resilience, and the courage it takes to rebuild. Because awareness builds bridges — and people suffer silently until someone speaks first.
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