Ep 114: Fierce Love, Grief and Showing Up Anyway with Tricia Creason-Valencia

I'm honored to share this special Mother's Day episode with my friend Tricia Creason-Valencia, recorded live in the UnMuted Studio at PowerHouse, the creative event space Tricia co-founded in San Jose.

Tricia and I first came into each other's lives while collaborating on the Autism Storytelling Project. Then, she said yes to spending a full day together for a new offering I was piloting called Spark Your EPIC Life in a Day. On a Milestone Hike, during lunch and then coaching in my garden afterwards, Tricia reflected on what she was grieving in the aftermath of Covid, made commitments to herself that could pave a way forward, and named out loud big dreams to become a speaker and find a creative room of her own to pursue her artistic expression. Her bio today blends the powerful pieces of her past with the dreams she has now realized. She is an Emmy-nominated director, producer, and motivational speaker whose documentary films have won multiple awards and screened at film festivals and on public television nationally. She holds an MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State and a BA in Social Sciences from UC Berkeley, and has taught filmmaking at Santa Clara University, UC Santa Cruz, San Francisco State, and high schools. She co-founded PowerHouse, a podcast and media production studio and event space for women+ creatives in San Jose. And she is the 2026 Creative Ambassador for the City of San José, currently producing a city-wide multimedia project called "I am/We Are: Our Stories Connect Us." 

As a loving daughter and the mother of two children who came to her through adoption, she has lived through some of the hardest chapters that mothering and caregiving can bring. The day we recorded, Tricia almost canceled. She was carrying a profound anticipatory grief because her mother, Barbara, who had dementia, was in hospice. But we decided together to show up anyway and be with whatever came into the room. Her mom has since passed away, and in a voice note she sent me recently, Tricia said of our coming together that it was "A testimony to all the things that we have on our hearts and on our minds as mamas who are being pulled by our babies and our families and our mothers, and yet we show up, and we stay in conversation with each other. If this podcast is a testimony to staying in it, then I am proud of us."

I am proud of us too. When we recorded the conversation, I had been going through some hard things in my own parenting journey that were asking the same of me. And what Tricia shared in this conversation gave me language and perspectives I needed that day... radical acceptance, slow hope, and fierce love. That last one she traces all the way back to her mom, and it's woven through everything she does. Topics Discussed in this Episode:

• The full circle moment of recording inside Powerhouse, the "room of her own" Tricia first named in her Spark Your EPIC Life day before the space even existed

• Navigating motherhood when your children's reality doesn't match the one you imagined

• Radical acceptance as the practice of stopping the push against what is, without saying it's okay

• Slow hope, borrowed from the climate movement, and the friends who text you to point out how far you've come

• The concept of "other mothering" and how it shows up in Tricia's teaching and community work

• Using art as a tool for mental health for yourself and for others

• What it took to invest in PowerHouse, and why she stopped saying "paid fa