Rebecca Nelson spends her days surrounded by books, first as a bookseller helping run a romance book club, and now as a graduate student studying literature. In this conversation, she talks about the novels that unsettle her, the ones that comfort her, and the moment she realized her own life had started to read like one.

What began as a conversation about reading turned into something else entirely: a woman thinking out loud about the doors she'd quietly closed on herself, and finding, mid-sentence, that she was ready to open them again.

Writer and fairy tale scholar Kelly Jarvis joins Vanessa for a conversation about Beauty and the Beast, the tale at the heart of her debut novel, and why this one story keeps returning to us across centuries.

They talk about fairy tales as something far richer than children's fare, the small everyday magic that does the deepest work, the way a reader brings half a book to life herself, and why a real love story is built more from choice than from fate.

Kelly's debut novel, Sea and Stars, is a gothic Beauty and the Beast retelling set between the wild Isle of Skye and the old whaling town of Mystic, Connecticut. It comes out July 7th.

Almost twenty years ago, a dream about a wedding made me abandon my thesis on Saturn and depression, and write instead about the healing power of romantic comedies. That thesis became a spell I lived: ritual, artwork, dreams, and meeting my husband more than a year later. Then I forgot about it for nearly two decades. Until my mother died, and 131 romance novels brought it all back.

In this solo episode, I share the origin story of my work with romance as medicine. How the thesis returned in a deeper form during a cave year of grief, and what I discovered about how we read. I introduce three levels of reading: the surface pleasure, the personal psychology stirring underneath, and something I can only call the collective dream. And I give you a practice: three questions you can ask tonight about whatever book is on your nightstand that will change your relationship with your reading life.

Your bookshelf isn't a guilty pleasure. It might be the most honest map you have.

Listen to the full episode and try the three-question practice. And if this resonates, explore Forbidden Doors — a six-week romance-as-medicine intensive starting May 16.

What do you do when the monster shows up and everyone around you is either terrified or worshipping it?

Romance author and nurse Cassie Alexander chose a third way: curiosity. In this conversation, we explore what it means to approach AI — the most contested threshold of our moment — with a relational stance instead of fear or adoration. We talk about writing, creativity, consciousness, and what working with AI reveals about how you actually think.

And we sit with the question underneath all of it: if AI is the new monster, what might it be seeing about us?

This episode with author Layla Fae begins with the strangeness of our current moment — AI accelerating, the world destabilizing — but quickly widens into a conversation about creativity, desire, and the stories that shape us. Layla’s books were a lifeline during my cave year, not because of their plots, but because of what they stirred: the archetypal, the imaginative, the parts of us that remember how to navigate change. Together we explore how stories become portals, how desire becomes a compass when the world gets strange, and how women are using romance as a modern mythos for sovereignty and becoming.

While empires white-knuckle their dying world, we're midwifing what's being born through every story we love. From childhood under Brazilian dictatorship to wrestling with grief through ancient myth, I explore how we're already part of the WYRD network—everyone who's ever let a story rearrange their molecules. This episode reveals why your 'guilty pleasure' stories might be exactly the medicine needed for these times, and how imagination itself is both battleground and birthing ground for what comes next.

In this intimate conversation with Jessiemarie Duplessis, we explore how adult retail spaces—stripped of sexiness and bathed in fluorescent light—become unexpected confessionals for our deepest vulnerabilities. Drawing from her experience as an accidental threshold guide, Jessiemarie reveals the universal pattern of trying to purchase our way through transformation, whether that's seeking the perfect toy to "fix" our bodies or any quick solution to bypass the patient work of change. We discuss how asking better questions becomes the foreplay for crossing any threshold, why changing doesn't mean malfunctioning, and what happens when your VISA gets declined at the crossing that only accepts vulnerability as currency. This episode invites anyone who's ever clutched their metaphorical credit card at life's edges, hoping to buy their way past becoming who they're meant to be.