By The Badass Lady-Folk Podcast

Badass Lady-Folk host Christine Sloan Stoddard interviews Bernadine Franco, art historian, educator, speaker, and founder/host of the podcast Beyond the Paint With Bernadine.

Beyond the Paint With Bernadine https://beyondthepaint.net. 

The intro music is from "Talking Hands" by Toxic Moxie.​​ https://www.facebook.com/toxicmoxierva/

Show host ​site: www.worldofchristinestoddard.com

© Quail Bell Press & Productions, www.quailbell.com, 2021

By Gillian Bowles

*Editor's Note: This essay is from our "Rebirth" series. Learn more about the series and submit your own by reading the content at this link. 

Pressure in my abdomen folds me up and I cinch in half, a whining hinge. If I unfurl I’ll crack in the middle, the heat corroding my midsection and thinning me out. A weak spot. My feet are kicking the wall with light pitter patters, trying to cope. Letting them know. Hey, I’m out. 
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By Mehreen Ahmed

*Editor's Note: This piece was first published in The Cabinet of Heed and Portland Metrozine.

Two helicopters flew over our heads, like a duo dragonfly in the autumn sky. This afternoon, my sister and I sat under an old oak tree in our garden by the River Bhairab. Those were the days when we chatted silly and talked about every nonsense that entered our heads, giggling over nothing. 
    
“You always live in your head,” my sister declared.
    
“Let me guess, you don’t like that. This life of the mind kind o’ thing,” I laughed
    
“You know how it is, thinking, dreaming.” I laughed first, then she laughed with me.
    
I hadn’t actually realized it until now that she mentioned it. Yes, I was the more reflective one, she, the extroverted. But that was all the difference we had; we both stood on a common ground of compassion. Well-bonded in togetherness.

*Editor's Note: This essay is the first of several essays from our "Rebirth" series. Learn more about the series and submit your own by reading the content at this link. TW/CW: This essay contains references to sexual assault. 
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By Gretchen Gales

Balls and dances were a pivotal aspect of society in Regency England. They were great for socializing and for the upper class to display wealth, but also for chaperones to pair up unmarried ladies and gentlemen. Think of an elite tea party, but with a lot more pressure to be at your best.
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By T. L. Sullivan

​The vast majority of my dreams are ones that aren’t particularly good, and aren’t particularly bad, but they certainly don’t make any sense. To be fair, neither does real life.
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By Alex Carrigan

​Since 1994, Ricepaper Magazine has been publishing the work of Asian-Canadian authors as part of the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop (ACWW). The Vancouver-based organization has collected work into several anthologies, showing the best poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from Asian authors all over the world. In 2021, their newest collected anthology, Belief, has been released. Compiled partially as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the anthology (edited by JF Garrard, Allan Cho, Dawn Chow, and Silvia Leung) seeks to show the "beliefs" of the authors featured, whether it be a nonfiction piece about their heritage and identity or prose pieces that examine parts of their culture through a new lens.

By Alex Carrigan

​Microfiction carries the challenge of conveying as much information or hinting at deeper implications as possible in as little as one paragraph. It's genuinely a talent to be able to give the reader a look into the mind and state of the narrator of a microfiction piece with so few words. To build a collection of microfiction would require the author to figure out the best way to draw all these short pieces together and find some sort of throughline that can hint at greater meanings.