Episode 561 - Joesph Bolton - Old Grandmother’s Tree - Celebrating Cultures and History through Folktales

About the Author

Joseph Bolton was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island during the twilight of the golden age of French-Canadian culture in New England. Growing up emersed in his mother’s French-Canadian family, Joseph enjoyed hearing the stories told by his grandparents and great aunts of a mysterious and magical place called Québec, otherwise known as “the place we came from.”

After high school, Joseph’s adventurous nature led him to enlist in the U.S. Army and he served in the Army’s airborne forces as a paratrooper jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, much to the worry of his mother.

Since he retired from the Army, Joseph has worked in various project manager roles as a civilian contractor for the U.S. Air Force. While writing Old Grandmother’s Tree, Joseph took a sabbatical from the U.S. Air Force and taught mathematics to young students for a semester at Holy Family Academy in Gardner Massachusetts.

Bolton is of French-Canadian, Native American, Spanish, English, and Irish descent, and is profoundly inspired by the stories of his heritage. He lives with his wife in Massachusetts, and, in his free time, enjoys hiking and skiing through Québec and New England landscapes. His favorite places to go for outdoor adventure are the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts and Mont-Orford in Québec. When he is not writing, hiking, or skiing, Joseph enjoys reading about science, history, philosophy, mathematics, and worldwide mythologies. Old Grandmother’s Tree is his first book.

Meet the Illustrator

About Natasha Pelley-Smith

Natasha Pelley-Smith, born in Toronto, is a seasoned professional artist who graduated from the prestigious Écohlcité fine arts academy in France, in 2017—now integrated into Émile Chol of Lyon. Equipped with a diverse skill set that spans from crafting murals of all sizes to illustrating books and creating canvas paintings in oils, acrylics, and mixed media, Natasha’s professional journey is a continual creative adventure.

Her artistic focal point revolves around expressive portraiture, wherein she delves into the realms of self-identity exploration and cultural influences. Natasha is known to embody her Native American, Jamaican, and Newfoundland roots, as well as other cultural threads from her life. Her work serves as an invitation for others to embrace their multifaceted layers, both culturally and emotionally, promoting messages of unity and self-love.

Natasha’s private clientele is also noteworthy, where her artwork has garnered recognition, including four fully illustrated published books, leading to her collaboration with U.S. author Joseph Bolton on her most extensive project to date. This book intricately dives into French-Canadian folklore, character self-growth, and prominently explores Joseph’s heritage and Native American roots from the Algonquin tribes while also embracing the unified connection to Natasha’s roots from the Ojibwe and Cree tribes, featured subtly throughout the book.

https://oldgrandmotherstree.com/

https://welcome.natashapsartwork.ca/

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Episode 560 - Barret Baumgart - Yuck - turning your Joshua Tree vacation into a terrifying revelation

Barret Baumgart is an essayist, screenwriter, and the author of the nonfiction books China Lake and YUCK. His essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Vice, LitHub, The Seneca Review, and The Literary Review, among others. He lives in Los Angeles.

Book: Yuck: The Birth & Death of the Weird & Wondrous Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia

Are you headed to Joshua Tree this summer? Get ready to hate your life. It's not the heat that will wilt your spirit, nor the choke of traffic waiting to trample the park, but the enduring grotesquerie of its cherished namesake, the Joshua Tree.

"One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant... A landscape filled with Joshua Trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal." -Joseph Smeaton Chase, 1919

Similarly, few terms exist that do not fit Barret Baumgart's appalling YUCK. Part prose poem, pamphlet, collage, history, essay, memoir, and fiction, YUCK is a grotesque malformation beset with uncanny connections, jarring juxtaposition, and a buried true history that will have you asking yourself the big questions, particularly... Why am I here?

Who knows, but here you are... in the weird and wondrous world of YUCK, a brief and searing ode to the world's hottest desert, the Mojave, its divine and dying mascot, Yucca brevifolia, and the magical land that killed it all, Los Angeles.

From the publisher:

YUCK presents an unsettling new history of one of the most loathed and beloved objects on the planet, the Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia. It primarily focuses on the discovery, naming, and attempted eradication of the Joshua Tree beginning in the late 1870s in Southern California. The Joshua Tree was universally reviled as the most grotesque object on earth following its discovery by white Europeans in the 1840s. Numerous schemes arose to extirpate it from the planet, the most promising among them an attempt to turn the tree into paper, "California Cactus Paper" [YUCK is, of course, printed on faux CA Cactus Paper]. The book excavates this unknown, buried history against the ironic backdrop of the Joshua Tree today becoming the ultra-hip signifier of some kind of cultural authenticity, and its national park the most photographed and fastest growing in the nation #JoshuaTree. This current popularity boom, in a further irony, is occurring just as scientists warn that the tree will likely vanish due to climate change by the end of the century.

https://www.barretbaumgart.com/

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Episode 393 - Adam Nimoy - The Most Human, Reconciling with My Father, Leonard Nimoy

Adam was born during the Eisenhower administration to Leonard and Sandra Zoberblatt Nimoy. He attended the University Elementary School, a “lab school” run by UCLA, where he was subjected to numerous psychological experiments. The experimentation continued at UC Berkeley in the form of mind-altering substances from which he may, or may not, have fully recovered. In a state of absolute certainty, Adam attended Loyola Law School. He was wrong.

After seven years of practicing entertainment law and one moment of clarity, Adam left his life as an attorney to follow his passion of making films. After directing forty-five hours of network television, some of it sublime, some of it eminently unwatchable, Adam’s career plummeted due in large part to drug and alcohol addiction. On January 1, 2004, Adam entered 12-Step recovery hoping to achieve an attitude adjustment. This was a New Year’s resolution he knew he had to keep. For 8 years, he taught writing, directing and acting at the New York Film Academy and taught filmmaking at Beit T’Shuvah, an addiction treatment center where the residents kept him on the straight and narrow.

Book: The Most Human: Reconciling with My Father, Leonard Nimoy

"Engaging and immensely relatable, while at the same time offering deeply profound insights into Adam Nimoy's personal relationships, particularly with his famous father." — Eugene Roddenberry Jr., CEO Roddenberry Entertainment

Living with Dad was like living with a stranger— as a kid I often had trouble connecting and relating to him. But I was always proud of him. Even before Star Trek I'd see him popping up in bit roles on some of my favorite TV shows like Get Smart, Sea Hunt, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. And then one night he brought home Polaroids of himself in makeup and wardrobe for a pilot he was working on.

It was December 1964 and nobody had heard of Star Trek. Still, the eight-year-old me had watched enough Outer Limits and My Favorite Martian to understand exactly what I was looking at. Spock's popularity happened quickly, and soon the fan magazines were writing about dad's personal life, characterizing us as a "close family." But the awkwardness that defined our early relationship blossomed into conflict, sometimes smoldering, sometimes open and intense. There were occasional flashes of warmth between the arguments and hurt feelings— even something akin to love— especially when we were celebrating my father's many successes. The rest of the time, things between us were often strained.

My resentment towards my father kept building through the years. I wasn't blameless, I know that now, but my bitterness blinded me to any thought of my own contribution to the problem. I wanted things to be different for my children. I wanted to be the father I never had, so I coached Maddy's soccer, drove Jonah to music lessons, helped them with their homework— all the things dads are supposed to do. All the things I wanted to do. So what if my Dad and I had been estranged for years? I was living one day at a time. And then I got his letter.

Amazon link: https://amzn.to/3KvTi1s

https://adamnimoy.com/

original pub date - Wednesday, July 17, 2024

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