We Can Do Hard Things
Let Our Sundance-Winning Film Remind You What Love Is with Megan Falley
Thu, 06 Feb 2025
383. Let Our Sundance-Winning Film Remind You What Love Is with Megan Falley Glennon, Abby and Amanda sit down with poet and friend, Megan Falley, to discuss the magic that is their Sundance Award-Winning documentary film, Come See Me in The Good Light. The documentary follows Meg and her partner, Andrea Gibson, as they navigate a year of life, love, and living through an incurable cancer diagnosis. -How to make a gift of your suffering -Why seeing yourself through the loving eyes of another can be life-changing -Why frat guys are finally relating to queer poets -What this movie has to do with body image and loving yourself On Megan Falley: Megan is a nationally-ranked slam poet and the author of three full-length collections of poetry – most recently her book “Drive Here and Devastate Me”. Since transitioning to writing prose, excerpts from her memoir-in-progress have won several first- and second-place national prizes. She runs an online writing workshop called “Poems That Don’t Suck” which has been heralded as “a degree’s worth of education in 5 short weeks.” On Andrea Gibson: Andrea is one of the most celebrated and influential spoken word artists of our time. Best known for their live performances, Andrea has changed the landscape of what it means to attend a “poetry show”. Andrea’s poems center around LGBTQ issues, spirituality, feminism, mental health, and social justice. Andrea is the author of seven books, most recently “You Better Be Lightning”. Previous appearances on the pod: 215. The Bravest Conversation We’ve Had: Andrea Gibson 245. An Unforgettable Double Date with Andrea Gibson & Megan Falley 265. Megan Falley Knows What Love Is To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who are Megan Falley and Andrea Gibson?
Megan Fowley is a nationally ranked slam poet and the author of three full-length collections of poetry. Most recently, her book Drive Here and Devastate Me. Since transitioning to writing prose, excerpts from her memoir in progress have won several first and second place national prizes.
She runs an online writing workshop called Poems That Don't Suck, which has been heralded as a degree's worth of education in five short weeks. Andrea Gibson is one of the most celebrated and influential spoken word artists of our time. Best known for their live performances, Andrea has changed the landscape of what it means to attend a poetry show.
Andrea's poems center around LGBTQ issues, spirituality, feminism, mental health, and social justice. Andrea is the author of seven books, most recently, You Better Be Lightning.
Megan Fowley and Andrea Gibson are the subjects of the most beautiful doc we have seen, which hopefully you will see soon, called Come See Me in the Good Light, which just won the Festival Favorite Award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival that we were all at. Welcome, Meg Fowley.
Yeah, buddy! Fowley, Fowley, Fowley. Hi. Hi, Amanda. How are you? It's so nice to see your beautiful face, Megan.
It's so good to see you. All of you. Okay. Pod squad. How do we describe what's happening right now? Okay. Today's episode is going to be a conversation between us and our dearest love, Meg Fowley. who you might know from so many previous episodes.
I just really like to be here. I live here now.
Oh, God, that's my dream. So what we have to tell you, PodSquad, is I think the most beautiful creative story, one of the most beautiful creative stories we have ever been a part of as a team, which is a story of friendship and also a beautiful piece of art. that was made called Come See Me in the Good Light, which is a documentary about Andrea Gibson and Megan Fowley.
And I would say, no, no, you say what it is. Yeah, Meg. And then we're going to tell you, PodSquad, how this magical situation came into the world and the story of how we all ended up in a six-bedroom, house in Park City at Sundance full of lesbians plus Sara Bareilles because Sara Bareilles is always an honorary lesbian. I don't know how she's pulled this off, but she is.
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Chapter 2: What is 'Come See Me in the Good Light' about?
So Come See Me in the Good Light is a documentary and it focuses on the last year of Andrea, my partner's cancer journey. And what has been incredible is that that sounds like just a pretty sad log line for sure. But when you watch the movie, TIG has compared it to a Will Ferrell movie because there is so much laughter. And of course, there's tears. Of course, there's hardship.
It follows us through doctor's appointments and scans and good news and bad news and Radiation, but also it's followed us through our everyday life, which includes a lot of tiny dogs, a lot of working together as artists and. a lot of love and a lot of troubles with our mailbox and just the everyday parts of life. And I do think that it's sort of impossible to write the synopsis of it.
You know, a poet with incurable cancer, it just doesn't sound like what it is. We've noticed that a surprising community that's really responding it seems to be the bros. I know. Like frat brother feeling people. And I was trying to figure out why. And I think it has a really sort of YOLO message. And I think frat boys tend to gravitate in this direction.
And rather than get it from like a free solo or a surfing movie or something, they're seeing it in two different
queer poets lives in there every day wow okay Glennon you have to tell the kind of the the origin story of like how this kind of happened like What, from your perspective, because I think I want to give the listener like a kind of a timeline of like when this and I know you're not great with numbers, so I'll help.
Right. And also because it feels like a love story. The story for me is a love story. The movie is a love story and it has all of the beauty and brutality of all of it. And then the making of the project feels like it's like a parallel love story at the same time. You know, that's why I think it's so pure and beautiful because it was made just by people who love y'all and love each other.
So tell that love story too, Glennon.
Okay. I'm going to tell it from how it happened from my perspective. And then I want to hear from Meg's perspective, how it intersected differently. Also, I would say
before I start this, that if Ticket called us and said, this story needs to be made about Andrea and Meg and Andrea's love of life and Meg's love of life and Andrea and Meg's love of each other and there were no cancer involved, I would have said, that is a hell yes. Like, it's not the cancer. That's right. It's the way that you two live individually and together that is the YOLO message.
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Chapter 3: How did the documentary come to life?
I'm like... Something about the body thing, something about the life in it, something about it. I just am like, oh, okay, this is true enough. Then I find... through Andrew's books, Megan. Then I order Megan's work. Then I, I'm like, oh my God, I can't do anything except ingest these two human beings. Okay. I completely ignore my marriage. One day, Abby takes a picture of me at breakfast.
We're by ourselves at a table of two at a restaurant and I'm just reading your books and Abby's by herself. Yeah, I've had enough. I mean. So Abby takes a picture, DMs it to Andrea, right? That day, we end up in a conversation where Andrea says that they have to figure out how to tell the community that they had just found out that the cancer was incurable.
Chapter 4: Why are frat guys connecting with the film?
Because, of course, Andrea's thinking, how are they going to handle this? How are my people going to handle this? I'm worried about them. The three of us end up on an episode of We Can Do Hard Things. where Andrea is discussing their incurable diagnosis on the podcast. We all somehow become friends. That moment, I guess, is when we become friends. One night, Abby and I are in bed at 7.30 p.m.
This is like many months later. Tig calls us. Tig is our dear friend and Andrea and Meg's dear friend. Tig calls us and says... I think that there needs to be a documentary about Meg and Andrea. And I think you guys should be involved. So tell me if you want to meet sometime. So we send Tig a link immediately to get on Zoom from bed. Tig says, pitches the idea.
And we say very responsibly because we've heard this is what grownups do. We say, we hear you. We would like to think this over. And we'll get back to you. We hang up the Zoom link, and 30 seconds later, we text Tig and said, we've thought it through. We've consulted our bodies and brains. We believe it's a good idea. We're all in.
Throughout, just fast forward, and then I'm going to turn it over to you, Meg. During this, Tig contacts these two people from Tripod Media, Ryan White and Jessica Hargrave, who... are unfreaking believable artists and directors and producers. They are all in. There is a moment where, and you'll see it in the doc, where Andrea is doing a performance, a show.
Chapter 5: What is the origin story of the film's creation?
Chase and Abby and I are sitting there and I get a text from Sara Bareilles. And she's like, turn around. And I'm like, what? Because we're in this theater. Andrea was performing a live show. Right. Right. And Sarah. Last May. Sarah has flown to the show to secretly be there because she's so obsessed with Andrea and Mike. Okay. I go into the back room with Andrea and there's a huge set of flowers.
Set of flowers? Okay. Okay. From Brandy and Kath. because Kath and Brandy are so obsessed with Andrew and Meg that they have said, so- Brandy Carlisle and Katharine Carlisle. I'm like, oh my God, it's just like this moment. So then we pull Sarah and Brandy into executive producing the doc. So then the doc becomes, Andrew and Meg are the people who it's about. Subjects. Subjects.
Tig Notaro and Steph Willen And Ryan and Jessica are making it. The executive producers are me and Abby, Brandy and Cass, Sara Bareilles, just this. And then we become this little family. And then it's the most beautiful thing that's ever happened. And then it gets into Sundance.
And then we all have a house that we call the snuggle down where all of us just stay in this house for all the premieres. Okay, Meg, now you go.
I mean, I think you summed it up. No, from our perspective, our friend Steph Willen approached us about wanting to do a documentary. And Steph, we're so close to Steph. And apparently she had... withheld approaching us for a year. She'd had this idea for a very long time and didn't know how we would respond.
I have no idea why she thought she didn't know if we'd be upset or offended or just not want that kind of attention. But her partner convinced her. She was like, no, just ask. It's a good idea. And she brought it to our attention. And like you all, I think it took about 30 seconds for us to think, do we want to do this?
Do we want to invite cameras into our homes, into doctor's offices with us, into hospitals? all of these ups and downs of moments that we were experiencing mostly alone. And it was such a clear yes so quickly, I think for a few reasons. I think we'd already done two years of cancer treatment just as us. So that so far hadn't been working.
I mean, it worked for us emotionally, but why not add another element? And the other thing was that it was so important to us during that time. There's this quote, don't waste the suffering. We wanted to not waste the suffering. We wanted to be making a gift or a lesson or learning of this time for ourselves and
And the introduction of the camera and knowing that we would be in an active process of turning this into art just felt like such a natural yes for us. And so they gave us a list of directors and Ryan White and Jess Hargrave were on that list. We had months earlier watched Pamela, A Love Story, which was their documentary about Pamela Anderson, which is one of those films where
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Chapter 6: How did Megan and Andrea react to the documentary idea?
Yeah. It was just an awkward, you know, sort of an awkward silence. We were having dinner with our friend Steph and what they actually ended up capturing that night ends up being in the film. It's one of the funniest scenes in the film, but it quickly pivots to tears and sadness.
I think that their team was in no way expecting that we would immediately go as like vulnerable, real, deep, exposed as we did the first day. And so maybe there's something about approaching poets who are
more predisposed I guess to vulnerability that made us good subjects in this way there wasn't pretense we weren't rehearsing what we were going to say it's all incredibly authentic and Brandon our cinematographer our director of photography who we absolutely fell in love with he was so, it never felt like there was this big camera in our face.
He just, he was always doing something handheld and he was just like close and intimate. He said in an interview that he wanted the camera to feel like a fourth dog, which was so brilliant. But there was just such an ease around them. I mean, I think the first night Andrea invited them into the sauna and Andrea was like weightlifting with no shirt in the sauna.
Like there was just instant vulnerability. And I think that you can feel that through the film.
I think it's important for the folks that are listening. One of the things that not only shocked me because, you know, you and Andrea are like rock stars in the poetry community and you're beacons of the queer community. Like we look to you. And what I found so fascinating about this film is was that there was so much around this cancer diagnosis, around this story.
It was just like a beautiful example, an elegant and classy example of like how when given difficult news and over and over again throughout this film at times, how love was the center of you all.
And yeah, fear can creep in at times, but I just felt so incredibly awed by how normal you two felt and how aspirational, like you're abnormal in the aspiration of dealing with something like this cancer diagnosis and letting folks into your home, but how real and true you showed up on screen that even if you are a frat bro, you will find yourself in Andrea. Because this is like, I don't know.
I don't know how else to say it, but it was, to me, it was just like this beautiful documentary of us all watching ourselves in certain ways and in moments. And I know you guys are not us and you're different than everybody, but I just felt like it was so universal and so gorgeous. And I'm so grateful that you said yes. I have retroactive fear that like, what if this never happened, you know?
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Chapter 7: What makes Megan and Andrea's story so compelling?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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