Matt Fidler

January and mid-winter indeed feels poetic in its spareness, and while many poets come to mind, for me Emily Dickinson stands out for seasonality and abundance in spareness.

In 2004 writer and gardener Marta McDowell published Emily Dickinson’s Gardens – a celebration of a poet and a gardener; Following up on new research and her own experience as Gardener-In Residence at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Marta updated her original work with Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life – The Plants and Places that Inspired the Iconic Poet, which was published in 2019. 

We’ve been dipping into books for the winter reading season—books that help us appreciate this unique place, what we’re seeing when we set out to enjoy it.

But what about travel in the larger sense, world travel? Should Americans even be traveling abroad these days?

It is a packed hour this week at Nancy’s Bookshelf. Kicking things off is the author of the international award-winning VanOps thriller series, Avanti Centrae. Our second guest, author Howard Levine provides us with details about his fast-paced thriller, “Last Gasp.”

It's shaping up to be a big news year for Washington DC, so this week Cultivating Place heads to the capital, but we’re there to check in with the gardeners of the region.

Kathy Jentz, AKA The Washington Gardener, is an avid plantswoman, and founder and editor of Washington Gardener magazine, serving Mid-Atlantic gardeners, celebrating 15 years of publication in 2020. Listen in!

Author and coffee connoisseur Alec Binyon provides an in-depth look at how to operate a coffee business. His book, “How to Open a Coffeehouse in the Real World,” is a road map for your journey from employee to coffee entrepreneur.

Humorist Eric Miller reads his essay “Hanging Out with Old Attitudes” which was selected for inclusion in this year’s LiveWord performance at Chico’s Blue Room Theater on January 31 and February 1.  LiveWord is a collaboration between the North State Writers group and the Blue Room Theater.

Dave visits with some very special friends! Amy Bean, Tracy Cernan, and Gwen Griffin all grew up inside the Apollo Moon program during the late 1960s and early 70s. Amy and Tracy's Dad's were among the 12 men who are the only ones to have ever walked on another world -- The Moon. 

As we ring in the New Year of this New Decade with the power of 2020 ours for the making, this week we are welcoming gardener, naturalist, educator, husband, and lily-lover Joe Joe Clark.

Born and raised Vallejo, California to a garden-loving mother, Joe Joe is a naturalist working on interpretation, public engagement and education, and nearly equal amounts of paperwork for the Napa County Open Space district taking him to both state and county parks in coastal Northern California.

Book reviewer Dan Barnett's column "Biblio File" appears in the Chico Enterprise-Record. With more than 30-years of book reviewing experience, Barnett details the latest books that speak on the Camp Fire and it's aftermath. 

Also, we speak with Camp Fire survivor Bill Hartley, owner of Joy Lyn’s Candies. 

Blue Dot looks back at 51 years of the Apollo program with a look at the very first mission to the Moon -- Apollo 8. Considered by most space historians as the most dramatic and bold mission of the entire lunar program, astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders became the first human beings to leave ride the powerful Saturn V rocket, leave Earth's gravitational well and see the backside of the Moon with their own eyes.

From anecdotal and personal experiences, we know that many gardeners in the world are born of early childhood experiences, while I can’t get every child outside, I can conjure the magic of it things almost as powerfully - I can metaphorically feed children, sing to them, and take them on a field trip through the power of reading to them of all of these wonders and their immeasurable value complexity and beauty… this week on Cultivating Place, we explore the Growing Power of Children’s literature to prepare our seedlings of today for their actions of tomorrow. Listen in!