Episodes

  • Cynthia Breheny: What It Takes to Reclaim Your Voice After a Life Shaped by Fear

    Cynthia Breheny: What It Takes to Reclaim Your Voice After a Life Shaped by Fear
    Apr 9 2026

    Cynthia Breheny does not speak from distance. She speaks from inside the life she survived.

    In this episode of Red Tent Storyteller, Peeja and Hazel Moon Audio sit with Cynthia as she traces a childhood shaped by instability, fear, and silence, and the path that led her to reclaim her voice through writing, art, and activism. From a low-income upbringing marked by chaos to navigating identity, trauma, and survival, her story does not move in a straight line. It moves through rupture, reflection, and rebuilding.

    What gives this conversation weight is its clarity around fear. Not as an abstract idea, but as something that shapes families, choices, and entire ways of seeing the world.

    Cynthia connects generational trauma, cultural displacement, and personal experience into something precise: fear can protect, but it can also trap.

    The conversation moves between past and present. From growing up without reliable guidance, to finding grounding through books and storytelling, to building real-world impact through her work and her book Don’t Feed the Fears. Her message is consistent across all of it: fear does not get to decide who you become.

    This episode is not about perfection.

    It is about awareness.

    And the moment you realize you can choose something different.

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    • Please Don’t Feed the Fears: Meet Fear. He’s small, anxious… and very hungry.

    If this conversation resonates, step deeper into the work.

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    1 hr and 51 mins
  • Andreia Nobre: Keep Speaking When Silence Would Be Easier

    Andreia Nobre: Keep Speaking When Silence Would Be Easier
    Apr 2 2026

    Andreia Nobre speaks from a place most people never have to name out loud.

    In this episode of Red Tent Storyteller, Peeja and Hazel Moon Audio sit with Andreia as she reads from her work and reflects on a life shaped by survival, motherhood, and the long consequences of choices that were never truly hers to make.

    Her story moves through abuse, generational hardship, and the reality of becoming a mother under circumstances that cannot be simplified or softened.

    What gives this conversation weight is its clarity. Andreia does not attempt to reframe what happened to her in language that makes it easier to accept. She speaks directly about what it means to carry those experiences forward while still building something meaningful from them. Her writing becomes the mechanism through which she processes, connects, and refuses to disappear.

    Again and again, the conversation returns to a single idea: keep speaking. Not because it guarantees change, but because silence guarantees nothing does. Even when progress is slow. Even when agreement is partial. Even when the cost is personal.

    This episode is not about resolution.

    It is about endurance.

    And the women who decide, again and again, not to go quiet.

    Follow Andreia on X

    New book: "No Truce - The Quest For Life"Award-winning author for The Grumpy Guide to Radical Feminism.


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    House Blackbird Studios: She is Peeja Blackbird and this is her art. Just Art. Just Her.


    Hazel Moon Audio: From her remote croft in the Wild Outer Hebrides, she brings stories to life as an audiobook narrator while growing willow and handcrafting baskets.
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    2 hrs and 1 min
  • Unfiltered, Unapproved, Unmoved: Jennifer Brown a.k.a Redhead Ranting™

    Unfiltered, Unapproved, Unmoved: Jennifer Brown a.k.a Redhead Ranting™
    Mar 26 2026

    Jennifer Brown, also known as Redhead Ranting™ on X, opens this conversation exactly where she stands: in truth, not agreement.

    Peeja and Nat La Pirate sitting in for Hazel Moon Audio, sit down with Jenn to trace the through-line of a woman who has always written, always observed, and ultimately chose to speak in her own voice without waiting for permission. From childhood journals to self-publishing, her path is not framed as ambition, but as inevitability. Writing was never the question. Only when to say it out loud.

    What quickly becomes clear is that this is not a conversation about craft. It is about positioning. Jennifer speaks plainly about the shift away from traditional publishing structures and toward independent platforms that allow women to create and distribute their work without ideological filtering. The barrier is no longer access. It is willingness.

    The conversation holds on one central principle: you do not need to agree with someone to respect them. Jenn describes choosing her circles based on character, not alignment. People who stand in what they believe, even when she disagrees, earn more respect than those who reshape themselves to fit expectations.

    There is also a deeper current running underneath. A growing refusal to trust institutions that have proven unreliable. Jennifer speaks to the impact of being misled, and how that shifts how you move through the world, who you listen to, and what you are willing to accept without question.

    At the same time, the episode does not drift into isolation. It comes back to something practical. Women supporting women in ways that actually move the needle. Leaving reviews. Sharing work. Building visibility deliberately. Not waiting to be discovered, but making sure each other is seen.

    Jennifer Brown does not position herself as part of a movement. She resists that framing. What she offers instead is something more durable. Speak honestly. Create anyway. Stand in it.

    Nothing in this episode asks for agreement.

    It asks for character.

    And for women willing to use their voice without softening it to be accepted.

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    ⁠https://redheadranting.com/ginger-snapped/A short, funny, easy-to-pick-up collection of stories and rants about the everyday absurdities that test our patience and make us laugh at the same time.

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    1 hr and 56 mins
  • N.A.A. from the Archives: Save Women's Sports with Coach Linda Blade, Marshi Smith, and Guests!

    N.A.A. from the Archives: Save Women's Sports with Coach Linda Blade, Marshi Smith, and Guests!
    Jan 30 2026
    This archival episode of North American Angst turns its focus to another arena where women are being told to surrender quietly: sport.Peeja, Emmi, and Carol bring together athletes and advocates who have spent their lives inside competitive sport, only to watch policies reshape women’s categories in ways they say undermine fairness and opportunity. Coach and author Linda Blade and former NCAA champion swimmer Marshi Smith speak candidly about the moment each realized that women’s competition was being redefined without meaningful debate, and what it means for girls now coming up through the system.What makes this conversation land is not ideology but experience. Stories surface of young athletes losing podium places, scholarships, and confidence. Coaches speak privately while fearing professional consequences. Parents worry about daughters competing in environments they feel are no longer fair. Meanwhile, women who raise concerns face backlash while institutions insist the changes are necessary and settled.The discussion moves beyond wins and losses to what sport actually builds. Both Blade and Smith describe how athletics shaped their own lives, opening doors to education, careers, and personal confidence. For them, protecting women’s sport is not nostalgia or exclusion. It is about preserving a pathway that has allowed generations of women to compete, grow, and succeed on equal terms.The episode also explores the growing legal and political pushback now unfolding across North America. Lawsuits against governing bodies, proposed legislation, and grassroots organizing are beginning to challenge policies that once seemed untouchable. Women who once spoke only in private are now stepping forward publicly, often at personal cost.Throughout the conversation, one theme repeats: silence was expected. Resistance was not.Blade and Smith describe a movement slowly gaining confidence as more athletes, parents, and supporters decide they are no longer willing to accept policies they believe harm female competitors. They argue that meaningful change will come not from outrage alone, but from sustained public pressure, legal action, and everyday people refusing to look away.This episode ultimately serves as both record and rallying point. It captures a moment when women in sport are deciding whether to stand down or stand firm.And it leaves listeners with a question that extends well beyond athletics: when fairness becomes negotiable, who pays the price?Nothing in this conversation asks for anger alone.It asks for courage.Because the girls competing now do not get to choose the policies shaping their futures.The responsibility to change them falls to everyone watching from the outside.Check out Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport by Linda BladeLearn more about ICONSICONS on XFollow Coach Blade on XFollow Marshi Smith on XThe tent remains open. The fire does not go out.Truth survives because women carry it.Sign up to The Quill and get the latest from The Red Tent Collective.Have tech skills? Need tech skills? Become an official member.
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    1 hr and 59 mins
  • N.A.A. from the Archives: Heather Mason & Amie Ichikawa on Keeping Prisons Single Sex #KPSS

    N.A.A. from the Archives: Heather Mason & Amie Ichikawa on Keeping Prisons Single Sex #KPSS
    Jan 19 2026
    This archival episode of North American Angst opens a door most people never look behind.Peeja & Carol, hosts of N.A.A., bring together women who have lived the reality of incarceration and emerged determined to speak. Heather Mason and Amy Ichikawa, both formerly imprisoned, recount what happens inside women’s prisons when policy abandons biological reality. Their testimony moves from Canada to the United States, tracing how institutional language has been used to justify the placement of male offenders into female facilities, often without consent, warning, or recourse for the women already there.What makes this episode devastating is not theory but specificity. Mothers describe fear inside mother and child units. Women recount locking themselves in rooms to avoid harassment or assault. Guards are disciplined for objecting to strip searches of male inmates. Complaints vanish. Charges are not laid. Survival becomes a strategy of silence. The system functions not because it protects women, but because it exhausts them.This episode stands as documentation. It preserves voices that institutions prefer remain unheard. And it makes one thing unmistakably clear: when truth is buried, women are expected to absorb the cost.Heather Mason speaks with the clarity of someone who has seen the machinery from the inside. Formerly incarcerated at Grand Valley Institution for Women, she has since become one of the most consistent advocates for sex-segregated prisons in Canada. Her work includes organizing nationwide protests, documenting institutional failures, and giving voice to women who cannot safely speak for themselves. She understands not only the policy language, but how it plays out on the ground, day after day, inside prison walls.Amy Ichikawa brings a parallel authority shaped by five years in a California state prison and subsequent advocacy in the United States. Her work began when women inside reached out in fear as new policies took effect. She now acts as a point of contact, connector, and defender for incarcerated women navigating assaults, retaliation, and bureaucratic stonewalling. Her involvement in documentary work with the Independent Women’s Forum has helped surface stories that would otherwise remain hidden.Together, Heather and Amy offer something rare: cross-border clarity. Their accounts differ in jurisdiction but align in outcome. When women’s safety is treated as negotiable, harm follows predictably.Nothing in this episode asks for outrage alone.It asks for responsibility.These women cannot protest. They cannot speak freely. They cannot risk being labeled difficult, hateful, or non-compliant. That burden falls to those on the outside.Take the next step:Follow Heather on XFollow caWsbar on XHistory in the Making: Follow caWsbar's Charter ChallengeFollow Amie Ichikawa on XVisit Women II WomenSupport Women II Women's sponsorship of SB 311The tent remains open.The fire does not go out.Truth survives because women carry it.Sign up to The Quill and get the latest from The Red Tent Collective.Have tech skills? Need tech skills? Become an official member.
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    2 hrs and 5 mins
  • N.A.A. from the Archives: Lisa Bildy on Justice, Gender and Speech in Canada

    N.A.A. from the Archives: Lisa Bildy on Justice, Gender and Speech in Canada
    Jan 7 2026
    This episode is a reckoning.In a raw, unflinching conversation, the ladies of North American Angst sit down with Lisa Bildy, a Canadian constitutional lawyer and Executive Director of the Free Speech Union Canada, to confront the slow erosion of free expression across professional life in Canada. What begins as her personal story — a trial lawyer turned homeschooling mother turned reluctant dissident — unfolds into a chilling map of how ideological enforcement has crept into law societies, professional regulators, universities, healthcare, education, and beyond.Lisa walks us through the landmark battles she’s fought: from helping dismantle compelled DEI oaths within the legal profession, to defending nurse and women’s rights advocate Amy Hamm against a 22-day tribunal for gender-critical speech expressed entirely outside her workplace. Again and again, we hear the same pattern: regulators asserting authority over private speech, conscience, and belief — backed by human rights frameworks that now punish dissent rather than protect liberty.This episode is not despair — it’s a warning and a call to arms. A reminder that history moves in cycles, that silence is never neutral, and that freedom only survives when ordinary people are willing to stand visibly, imperfectly, and together.Lisa is not a commentator. She is a front-line defender.She has:Successfully helped dismantle compelled ideological pledges within Canada’s legal professionDefended professionals targeted by regulators for lawful, off-duty speechFought precedent-setting cases involving gender-critical beliefs, free expression, and conscience rightsHelped launch Free Speech Union Canada, part of an international network pushing back against global speech suppressionHer authority comes not from theory, but from consequence. She knows what it costs — professionally, socially, emotionally — to refuse ideological compliance. And she shows up anyway.When Lisa says, “The debate didn’t end — it never began,” she isn’t speculating. She’s describing the machinery she’s seen from the inside.This episode makes one thing unmistakably clear:Freedom does not disappear overnight.It disappears case by case, silence by silence, professional by professional.Follow and connect with Lisa on X — support the work of Free Speech Union Canada and those defending civil liberties on the ground.Follow caWsbar's Charter Challenge⁠ — the biggest case on the books in Canada. Follow Carol, Emmi Pinkhurst, and Peeja, North American Angst Hosts, on XThe fire is lit. Your voice belongs here.Join The Red Tent Collective; let's light up the world.Read this episode's blog article.
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    2 hrs
  • From Willow to Whisper — A Life Rewoven with Hazel Moon Audio

    From Willow to Whisper — A Life Rewoven with Hazel Moon Audio
    Dec 5 2025

    On this Red Tent Storyteller episode, we sit down with willow-weaver, grief-walker, and audio alchemist Hazel Moon Audio to trace the winding path from London suburbs to wild Hebridean shores — and from women’s refuge work to bringing other women’s stories to life in her own voice. Hazel shares how a girl who “didn’t fit” in a sporty family grew into a woman who chose books, music, radical feminism, and eventually a law conversion course and Women’s Aid work… only to walk away from the city and start again on a remote island where she had to learn to cut peat, build stone walls, grow food, and talk to neighbours instead of avoiding eye contact on the street.

    From there, we follow her into the craft: the moment a friend dragged her to a basketry course, the older woman with arthritis who handed her the torch and said, “Of course you’re good enough to teach,” and the years of planting willow, making baskets, and slowly becoming the village basketmaker. Hazel speaks honestly about the years of caregiving for her partner Carly, and the way grief stripped all the colour out of the world — even the beauty of the island — and how reading aloud to Carly at night became the quiet, unseen apprenticeship for what would come next.

    That “next” was Hazel Moon Audio: an unexpected nudge in a Dyke Voices Twitter space, months of learning ACX, microphones, mastering, and the sheer stamina of narrating whole lives into a microphone. Hazel walks us through the practical and emotional labour of audiobook narration — from auditioning for projects like Ray, The Well of Loneliness, The Candlemaker’s Woman, and feminist titles like Girls Matter and The Grumpy Guide to Radical Feminism — to setting boundaries around what she will and won’t read, mentoring other women who want to try it, and refusing to let AI erase the human warmth and history in a woman’s voice. This is an episode about craft, courage, and starting a new life chapter when the world has already taken more than its share.Hazel Moon is not just “a nice voice.” She’s a woman who has lived several lives and stitches them all into the way she tells a story.

    Hazel’s authority doesn’t come from industry hype — it comes from lived experience, craftsmanship, political clarity, and a voice that has literally read women to sleep and back into life.If you want more conversations like this — women telling the whole truth about their lives, work, grief, and craft — follow us on X and join Ember for free, The Red Tent Collective’s flame of ongoing broadcasts.Follow Hazel Moon Audio on X
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    1 hr and 58 mins
  • “Please, Don’t Feed the Fears” — with Cynthia Breheny

    “Please, Don’t Feed the Fears” — with Cynthia Breheny
    Nov 20 2025

    Today, we’re stepping into a conversation every one of us has brushed up against—some of us bruised, some of us bitten, some of us still crawling back from the dark. We’re talking about fear… the real kind. The kind that lives under the ribs. The kind that swallows children whole and follows adults into every room.

    Our guest today—writer, illustrator, and truth-teller Cynthia Breheny—has written a book that does what so many others fail to do. Please, Don’t Feed the Fears doesn’t teach children to run from fear, suppress it, medicate it, or pretend it doesn’t exist. Instead, Cynthia walks us straight into Fear’s belly and shows us the way out.

    This episode is a lighthouse for anyone who has ever felt stuck, small, or alone.
    It’s a hand reaching back through the dark saying:
    “Come on. You can do this. I’ve been here too.”

    Stay with us.Take a breath. Let’s open the door.

    Fear has teeth. It can freeze you mid-step, swallow you whole, and convince you that you will never crawl back into the light again. But in this Scarlet Frequency episode, author and illustrator Cynthia Breheny turns toward that monster with an unexpected truth:
    Fear isn’t the enemy. Misunderstanding it is.

    Reading her Quill essay aloud, Cynthia brings listeners deep inside the emotional ecosystem behind her children’s book, Please, Don’t Feed the Fears—a gentle, whimsical guide for anyone (child or adult) who has ever felt swallowed by their own worry. Instead of preaching avoidance or “fighting your demons,” she offers something far more radical: integration. Listening. Understanding. Compassion for your own biology.

    Cynthia pulls back the curtain on her own story—growing up in a house where Fear ruled everything, where bravery was discouraged, and where trust was treated like a liability. When no one came to help, she became her own guide. Over years of therapy, study, panic attacks, and spiritual searching, she discovered what no self-help book had ever told her:

    Fear is not an illness. Fear is not a curse.
    Fear is a part of you, and it can be befriended.

    This episode is for every child who trembled alone in the dark.

    For every adult still carrying the echoes of those rooms.

    For every parent desperate to help a child who hides inside their own mind.


    Follow Cynthia on X

    Don't Feed the Fears, available on Lulu

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    5 mins