A Fresh Story

Fresh Starts
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Personal Journals
  • Updated Weekly

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.

  1. Simple Tips to Support Yourself: What Can I Do to Be Gentle With Myself In Hard Seasons?

    20 hrs ago

    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 making self-care radically simple — a refreshing counter to the wellness “noise” around biohacking, optimization, and rigid routines that can leave you feeling like you’re already failing. For anyone navigating overwhelm, caregiving demands, or a major life transition, this conversation is a practical guide to building emotional resilience through small, sustainable actions rather than all-or-nothing effort. Throughout the episode, Rachel reframes rest and slowing down not as indulgence but as a foundation for endurance — pausing now is what allows you to keep going through big life transitions later. Her approach is especially supportive for busy parents, caregivers in the “sandwich generation,” and anyone rebuilding routines after a season of change, offering ways to quiet self-judgment and tune out the pressure to perform wellness “correctly.” If you’ve been craving a more compassionate, genuinely doable approach to your mental and physical well-being, this Simple Tips to Support Yourself episode delivers expert-backed, actionable guidance for caring for yourself one small, joyful step at a time.

    19 min
  2. Simple Tips to Support Yourself: How Can I Start Over After Divorce?

    4d ago

    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 practical products, services, and support in one place. Ron brings a rare combination of insider expertise and lived experience: a background in insurance product development, hands-on advocacy work in foster care, and his own journey through a difficult relationship and financial hardship. Listeners looking for grounded divorce recovery tips will come away understanding how to stop piecing together help from a dozen scattered sources and instead build a real support system as they navigate starting over after divorce. The conversation turns quickly to actionable strategies. Ron breaks down the concrete resources families can tap during a transition: vetted referrals for attorneys, mediators, divorce coaches, and financial planners; free and discounted mental health care sessions; real estate support that can offset closing costs by thousands of dollars; and career services designed to help at-home parents re-enter the workforce and close resume gaps with confidence. He also explains Support Insured, a first-of-its-kind insurance product that guarantees child support and alimony payments continue if the paying parent dies, becomes disabled, or involuntarily loses their job — a safety net that speaks directly to the financial anxiety at the heart of single parenting advice and effective co-parenting strategies. Beyond the logistics, Ron offers honest, expert-backed guidance on emotional resilience during life's hardest seasons. Drawing on his own experience working with a coach through crisis, he shares simple daily practices anyone can start today: journaling your thoughts, writing down goals and reviewing them regularly, clarifying your “why,” and anchoring each morning with movement, affirmations, and gratitude. His core message — “get comfortable being uncomfortable” — reframes discomfort as the doorway to growth. Whether you're newly separated, deep in co-parenting logistics, or simply feeling wobbly, this episode delivers clear, supportive tools to help you move forward with clarity and strength.

    13 min
  3. Fresh Reads: Are We Friends Yet? How to Deepen Your Relationships and Create the Community You Need by Alex Alexander

    Jun 17

    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 life. That loneliness isn't weakness. And according to author Alex Alexander, it isn't permanent either. But fixing it requires unlearning almost everything society has told us about what friendship is supposed to look like. In this episode of A Fresh Story: Book Talk, Olivia sits down with her longtime friend and fellow community-builder Alex Alexander to celebrate the release of Alex's debut book, Are We Friends Yet? How to Deepen Your Relationships and Create the Community You Need. Alex didn't set out to write a book — she set out to write 40 pages. What she discovered in the process were two foundational frameworks that had been quietly shaping her entire life's work: the idea that we aren't looking for one perfect person to fill every role, but a whole constellation of people, each showing up in the specific way that only they can. Alex's own origin story is woven into every page. She was the kid who desperately needed more adults in her corner, who felt the weight of having no one to turn to — and who eventually, through rock bottom moments and radical openness, built herself a family out of friends. What makes this conversation — and this book — so essential for anyone navigating a life transition is how radically it reframes what it means to belong. Alex dismantles the myth of scarcity that runs through so much of how we talk about adult friendship ("finding a good friend is like finding a four-leaf clover"). She makes space for the online friend, the long-distance friend, the friend who shows up at 10 p.m. with a crisis script for a devastating text. She talks about the "do less list" — a permission slip to stop performing friendship in ways that drain you, and start showing up in the ways that actually fit your life. If you've ever wondered whether you'll ever really find your people, this book will convince you that you already have more than you know — and show you exactly how to build more.

    23 min
  4. Fresh Reads: Divorce By Design: How building a divorce team can help you get divorced efficiently (without going broke!) by Melissa Murphy Pavone

    Jun 5

    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 meant for them. Melissa Murphy Pavone grew up watching what happens when someone has to make those decisions without the right team in their corner. Her mother was that person. And it shaped everything that came after. In this episode of A Fresh Story: Book Talk, Olivia sits down with certified financial planner, certified divorce financial analyst, and founder of Mindful Divorce Partners, Melissa Murphy Pavone, to discuss her book Divorce by Design. Melissa's origin story is one of the most quietly powerful in the Fresh Starts community: she became a CDFA because she watched her mother make decisions with her heart instead of her head during divorce — decisions whose consequences still ripple forward today. Every client she now sits across from, she sees her mom. That depth of personal mission infuses every page of this book. Written to be accessible and even — yes — occasionally funny, Divorce by Design dismantles the myths and misinformation that swirl around divorce, and replaces them with something far more useful: clarity, a framework, and a team. At the heart of the book is a simple but radical idea: you don't need one person to guide you through divorce, you need a whole team — emotional support first, financial expertise second, legal strategy third. Melissa argues that most people get this order completely backwards, lawyering up before they've regulated enough to make sound decisions — and paying for it for years afterward. Whether you're in the middle of a divorce, supporting someone who is, or simply want to understand the landscape before you ever need it, Divorce by Design is the book Melissa's mother never had. And now everyone can. 🔗 Check out Fresh Starts Registry: The first & only divorce registry + support platform ➡ https://www.freshstartsregistry.com/ 📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freshstartsregistry/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshStartsRegistry 🎙 Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/divorcehappenspod/ 📬 Magazine: https://divorceguidemagazine.com/

    10 min
  5. Fresh Reads: Fallout by Jordan Rosenfeld

    Jun 5

    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 deepened. And after more than twenty years as a novelist, a writing teacher, and a freelance journalist, she's still doing the same thing she did as a little girl: taking what she cannot control, and making something true out of it. Jordan is the author of the eco-thriller Fallout, a novel that crackles with urgency, danger, and the kind of moral complexity that only comes from a writer paying close attention to the real world. The story follows a journalist — a new mother — who gets pulled into a collective of eco-anarchist women on a mission to take down a dirty energy company that has poisoned both people and the earth. But beneath the thriller framework, Fallout is really a book about grief: what we do when the world as we knew it starts to fall away, whether we close ourselves off or rise up and fight for what's right. Jordan wrote it in the years she was first becoming a mother, watching parched California hills in January and feeling something she could only call grief. By the time she finished, a second character had emerged — a woman in her fifties navigating perimenopause — and Jordan recognized herself in her too. That's how she writes: gathering the mosaic, piece by piece, until the picture becomes clear. Jordan has also written seven books on the craft of writing — including her newest, The Sound of Story, a deep dive into developing voice and tone — and she brings that same care and precision to everything she makes. This episode is for the writer who has a story inside them and doesn't know where to begin. It's for the reader who wants a thriller that leaves them thinking long after the last page. And it's for anyone who has ever sat with something heavy — grief, rage, helplessness — and wondered what to do with it. Jordan's answer, the one she's lived since childhood, is this: write it down. Turn it into art. There is always someone out there who needs to hear exactly what you have to say.

    11 min
  6. Fresh Reads: The Quitters Club: A Novel by Jessica Strawser

    Jun 5

    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 stopped working. We stay in the fertility treatments, the career path, the life we chose at 22, long past the point where staying serves us — because we were never given a script for what comes next. Jessica Strawser, author of eight novels, noticed this gap everywhere she looked. And she wrote a book about it. The Quitters Club is Jessica's newest novel — an ensemble cast story about four lifelong best friends who, the year they all turn 40, plan a reunion getaway and make a pact: they will each go home and quit the thing that's been quietly breaking them. For one woman, it's a career. For another, it's a marriage that has drifted into something unrecognizable. For another, it's the fertility journey she's been on for years. The novel follows all four of them as they reckon with what it means to walk away — not in defeat, but in the direction of something truer. Jessica built the book around a central question she kept hearing in her own life, in conversations with friends, in the rooms where women talk honestly: when does quitting become not giving up, but saying yes to something better? She's had her own pivots — a magazine industry that collapsed almost the moment she entered it, a career that required its own reinventions — and that lived experience gives the novel a weight and warmth that goes far beyond entertainment. This episode is for every woman who has felt the specific exhaustion of holding something together that stopped working a long time ago and needed permission — from someone, from anywhere — to finally let it go. It's for the book club looking for their next conversation starter, the woman approaching 40 wondering what her second act looks like, and anyone who has ever whispered to themselves that something has got to give. The Quitters Club is proof that quitting, done right, is one of the bravest things you can do — and that you don't have to do it alone.

    14 min
  7. Fresh Reads: Perforated by Chloe Yelena Miller

    Jun 4

    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 Manhattan on the anniversary of September 11th, a day she experienced as a child in New Jersey who did not personally lose someone, but who nonetheless lost something. The collection asks us to sit with the strange complexity of grief — public and private, collective and intimate, named and nameless — and to consider the possibility that all of it is real, and all of it counts. Chloe's poems don't resolve that question so much as they hold it tenderly open, the way grief actually lives inside us. This episode is for the person who has ever felt uncertain about whether their grief was theirs to claim — whether their loss was significant enough, public enough, close enough to warrant the weight it carries.

    7 min
  8. Fresh Reads: Television for Women by Danit Brown

    Jun 4

    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 everything. And then you're in that hospital room, and the feeling you were promised doesn't come, and you are left holding a baby and a secret you're too ashamed to say out loud. Fiction writer Danit Brown knows that feeling intimately. It was the seed from which her debut novel grew. Danit is the author of Television for Women, a sharply observed, deeply human novel about Estie — a 32-year-old who decides, largely because she feels she's supposed to, that it's time to have a baby. Before the birth, her husband loses his job under circumstances that raise uncomfortable questions about who she actually married. After the birth, Estie begins to realize that motherhood looks nothing like what she grew up watching on screen.

    6 min
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5
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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, 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.

Information

  • Channel
    Fresh Starts
  • Creator
    Fresh Starts
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    294
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Fresh Starts Registry
  • Show Website
    A Fresh Story

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