Susan reconnects with award winning flash fiction writer and friend Meg Pokrass. Meg discusses her journey from acting to poet to flash fiction writer, how a rare illness changed her life and informed her creative work, and the key lesson she tries to impart to her students. She also shares a few of her flash fiction pieces and she and Susan reminisce about their teenage friendship.

“I like to live in that space of not really knowing the answers. People have different motives simultaneously and exactly what the right thing to do isn’t 100% clear.”

Award winning playwright Gina Gionfriddo joins Susan to discuss two of her plays; Becky Shaw and Rapture, Blister, Burn, and how they relate to the world at large in a conversation that explores how we react to difficult and challenging subjects, what we do in situations of moral greyness and responsibility, and moving forward to push back against assumptions of what the “ideal life” is like.

“If you examine your thinking process, you may come to the same conclusion; that thoughts happen to us, we don’t necessarily control them.”

Psychiatrist Dr Dan Mierlak returns to In the Balance to discuss his new book, The Spanish Molecule, a purposefully sassy and thought-provoking read. He and Susan discuss some of the central themes of the book - and by extension, themes of the human condition - including how to avoid becoming captive to the choices we make in life, why it’s important to respect and go with the flow, and what happens to the population at large when a world-changing event like the covid-19 pandemic forces us to ask ourselves how we want to live our lives?