A lot of time every day in the garden means that I spend a lot of time with the headphones in, whiling away the hours weeding and watering and mulching and innumerable other garden chores. That time adds up when I can listen to an engrossing story or learn a little bit about something or just listen to interesting people talk. I thought it might be fun to share some of the podcasts/audiobooks/playlists that I spend the most time with - I love a list of recommendations, maybe you will too!
I’m adding links to every title so you can just click on the name and be taken right to it if you’re interested.
Podcasts:
Desert Oracle Radio: Ken Layne keeps it weird, thank god. Over the course of the pandemic I listened to every half-hour episode of this radio show that broadcasts live on the airwaves of the Mojave Desert on Friday nights at 10pm local time and I still haven’t missed one. Part desert flora and fauna appreciation, part curmudgeonly observations about tourists, part information on various UFO and X Files creature sightings, sometimes a deep dive into Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious….it’s a really wide variety and I love pretty much all of it. I have never been to the Mojave Desert but maybe someday! You can subscribe or buy Ken’s book at https://www.desertoracle.com
Normal Gossip: One thing you should know about me if you don’t already is that I am both a Libra sun and Libra rising and one of the Libra stereotypes that is extremely true for me is that I fucking love gossip. This podcast takes anonymous morsels of listener-submitted goss and tells the tale over the course of an hour. The topics range from orchid-growing scams to the political dynamics of a water aerobics to farmers’ market intrigue - it’s fucking great, Kelsey McKinney and co should be honored their service to the world.
Fall of Civilizations: Ancient history is basically just gossip on a massive scale, right? This sporadically released podcast does a deep dive (we are talking in the 2-to-3+ hour range per episode) on civilizations that have achieved some level of complexity and size and then have collapsed, for a variety of reasons. Some of the civilizations he’s discussed were known to me beforehand, like the Aztec, the Sumerians, and the Greenland Vikings, but he tells the tale of the rise and fall with an incredible amount of detail. Other civilizations he covers are some that I knew absolutely nothing about, like the Nabataeans, who built the famous city of Petra in what is now Jordan. The show is deeply researched, and he seems to go to great lengths to find scholars who can read the ancient texts of the civilization being discussed in the original language, wherever those texts exist, which I especially appreciate.
Common Shapes: Marlee Grace is my quilting teacher through whomst I learned improvisational quilting last year (and if you know me in real life you know I never shut up about it now) but whose books, weekly newsletter, and other classes I have thoroughly loved and grown from. Now they have a podcast about creative attention and putting those projects into the world! It is wonderful!
You Made it Weird; “We Made it Weird” editions: The podcast of Pete Holmes who is a comedian I love very very much. I saw him perform in Chicago a few months ago and he pointed at my friend Colin and said “That motherfucker looks like he should be on top of a piano somewhere” and it was THE BEST. His podcast alternates between interviews, often with comedians and actors but also sometimes with folks like Marianne Williamson and Mirabai Star, and recordings of he and his wife Val talking to each other for an hour. I’ve listened to a couple of the interviews but I listen to every single conversation between him and Val that comes out. Partially I think sometimes I’m just in the mood to feel like I’m eavesdropping on people talking, but they also talk a lot about how their spiritual practices intersect with all the mundane shit of life and it pretty much always feels encouraging.
Maintenance Phase: This show is about “debunking wellness culture” by Aubrey Gordon (of @yrfatfriend and multiple books) and Michael Hobbes (of the podcast You’re Wrong About) and I have learned so so so many things. Here’s an MP-inspired rant: the BMI is a garbage measure that in no way indicates a person’s health when used in isolation! It’s used by insurance companies to overcharge people! I will never step on a scale at a doctor’s office again! Ask me about how many vegetables I eat in a day, you cowards! Don’t get me started. It’s also very funny.
Fair Folk Almanac: Episodes are released for this show on a monthly basis and Danica Boyce covers some European pagan and folk traditions for that month, interspersing related music (there’s also an accompanying playlist!). There is always something that piques my interest and that I scurry to the search engine to research some more. It’s fun, it’s timely, it’s interesting to hear about what some of the folks I’m related to going way back might have been doing and eating and singing about this time of year.
Out of the Pods: I don’t know if I necessarily “recommend” this podcast but it would feel like a lie to not put it up here in favor of something that looks smarter or cooler that I don’t listen to as religiously. If you are a fan of the reality TV show Love is Blind and you just can’t get enough - season 2’s Natalie and Deepti are doing episode recaps and interviewing cast members and you better believe I am absolutely rapt and following along (also they’re about to start recapping The Ultimatum: Queer Love episodes - yes please!).
Books:
Okay so, I guess pretty much every book has an audiobook version now, but the audiobook app that I have access to through my local library does not have a lot of them. This is actually a good thing for me, I think, because it forces me to try things I might not necessarily have started if I had every other option available to me, and I’ve gotten to read some of the writers who have become forever favorites this way. Here are just a couple of them.
Louise Erdrich: So far I’ve listened to The Round House and The Night Watchman and both were absolutely incredible. Part coming-of-age, part mystery, part American Indian history - these books are devastating and exquisite. Now I want to read everything that Erdrich has written.
The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson: Interwoven stories of Black women throughout history from ancient Alexandria to the cane fields of San Domingue to poetry world of Charles Baudelaire, the throughline is a playful, pleasure-loving disembodied spirit who finds a home in each of the women at different times, which has profound effects on their lives. This book is difficult and also incredibly gorgeous.
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier: One thing that’s really great about having not watched a lot of movies and having a terrible memory for plot (truly, you can spoil any show for me and I will immediately forget and be completely shocked by the surprise twist ending you already told me about) is that many stories that are well-known in general are brand-new to me. So when I started listening to Rebecca I had not seen the famous Hitchcock adaptation and I listened with complete, intense focus for the duration. I wished it was longer then and I wish I could go back in time and read it for the first time again. I don’t know how many people have been born in shipping containers like I have - maybe this recommendation is actually for being better at forgetting – but it’s worth it even if you know how it ends.
Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman: This should be required reading for everyone, especially as more and more of our socializing happens online. Schulman advocates for directly talking to the people in our lives - friends, coworkers, partners, and so on - when we have difficulties with them. She notes an increasing trend of cutting people out of our lives for problems that could be solved (and if need be, a relationship ended) with a direct conversation. The connection between this inability or refusal to de-escalate and move through conflict means that more often the carceral solutions of the state are relied upon. This book had a huge impact on me and really shifted the way that I think about conflict in the communities that I’m a part of.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories, Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman: This book is an incredible, vivid rendering of the untold histories of Black women living in Philly and New York around the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the arguments that Hartman makes in her study is that often white women who had unconventional relationships and who lived outside of the strictures of marriage and respectability of the time were considered modern - avant garde, even - while Black women in similar situations were considered a social crisis. The specificity, depth and (can I say this?) love in her research and telling is compelling and revealing and relevant.
Fun Bonus! The audiobook I recommend the LEAST is War & Peace! What the fuck was I thinking?? It takes approximately 9,000 hours to read this book out loud, there are about 40,000 characters with mostly Russian names - I got four hours into it while on a marathon quilting spree over the winter before I exceeded my capacity to keep track. Sorry Tolstoy!
Music:
Roll the Dice: When I worked on a farm and was in the packing shed processing the harvest sometimes we would take turns ‘rolling the dice’ on the bluetooth speaker by just hitting play on one person’s Spotify “Liked Songs” playlist. The songs themselves can be funny (for example if you have a secret love for Nickelback there is nowhere to hide) but even funnier are the head-snapping tonal shifts between genres and decades. I miss having coworkers but I still roll the dice on my own “Liked Songs” and get to be like Dang somebody with really incredible taste made this playlist for me!
Viryavakay - Oh Mother, Protectress of the Forest. Songs and Melodies of the Mordva by the Women’s Folklore Ensemble of Staraya Terizmorga: These are traditional songs of the Mordva people, who hail from part of the Volga river valley. I don’t know what it is but these songs really make me both experience intense feelings of sadness and joy simultaneously, and really makes the work go by.
Fetch the Bolt Cutters album by Fiona Apple: This album came out during my second year of farming and living in the Midwest and I listened to it over and over again and uncountable number of times while washing plastic tubs or planting trees. That one song at the end still makes me cry every time. I’m realizing that maybe not everyone enjoys being compelled to ugly cry while they harvest spinach but sometimes I really, really do. Those feelings need a little exorcism and Fiona is the woman for the job.
An Offering
Did you know: my work and my calling is designing gardens for people! I design gardens to fit people’s actual lives and available time, budgets, and space. I want to help people create and grow the gardens that are theirs to tend. I am deeply invested in helping to shift people’s yards and balconies of every size towards ecologically sound practices, through a wide variety of food-producing and native plants that are both beneficial for the local pollinators and beautiful to look at, tailored to the site requirements, and using as little water and outside store-bought amendments as possible.
The results have been amazing to see - one client has taken what was an unkempt and overgrown space and turned it into a fertile home garden using my design for perennial fruit bushes, a plot for cannabis, raised beds full of vegetables and kitchen herbs, vining perennials with gorgeous flowers that will screen out the neighbors - and it’s just the first year. My design proposal came with an hour-long presentation and a resource guide with information on installation, plant sourcing and care, tools, maintenance, and helpful local resources.
I am offering a free 30-minute consultation to anyone who subscribes to this newsletter. We can talk about anything you like - brainstorming about adding more native plants to your space, water and/or soil management issues, what vegetables grow well in containers (hint: a lot more than you might think!). Just respond to this email with the topics, questions, or concerns you want to go over and some general times for availability and we will work out a time to meet over Zoom.
Thanks for being here. See ya next time.
These are the bessssst! Thank you for this lil treasure trove. Now I need a podcast on making more hours in the day to listen to all this magic 😍🤩