Matt Fidler

Joe Wills served as spokesman for Chico State University as director of Public Affairs from 1997 until he retired in 2016.

He now is a licensed marriage and family therapist, and has written a story collection.

“Fables That Found Me: Tales of Torment and Healing from Soul (or Some Other Place)” is a collection of stories that blends magical realism with the experiences of obsession, loss, and renewal.

We examine the complex series of fault ruptures and earthquakes that struck near Ridgecrest in Southern California over the July 4 weekend of 2019. A 6.4 magnitude temblor on the evening of July 4 was followed by in even bigger magnitude 7.1 event just over 24 hours later that may have been triggered in a process called cross faulting during the earlier quake.

Alpine and Steppe plants are uniquely interesting individuals and communities of plants that thrive in extreme conditions of high elevations and dry locations around the globe.

This week on Cultivating Place, we head to high ground with Mike Kintgen, Curator of Alpine Plants at the Denver Botanic Gardens in Denver CO and member of the American Penstemon Society to learn more about these charismatic plant communities. Join us!

We head up the road this week in search of cool once again. To the mountains this time—lonely Lassen Volcanic National Park, fully accessible only in summer and early fall.

But do cultivate a better sense of direction than the park’s namesake, Danish immigrant Peter Lassen. According to a journal entry by his friend, Gen. John Bidwell, Lassen “was a singular man, very industrious, very ingenious, and very fond of pioneering—in fact, of the latter, very stubbornly so. He had great confidence in his own power as a woodsman, but, strangely enough, he always got lost.” This almost led to his lynching on at least one occasion, when he confused Lassen and Shasta peaks while guiding a party of immigrants westward, taking them more than 200 miles out of their way. Oops.

Prolific photographer-writer Douglas Keister more typically photographs and writes about cemeteries, but has also written novels, and now a memoir. 

In Heart-Land: Growing Up in the Middle of Everything, Keister looks back at his childhood growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, as the middle child, in the middle of the century, in the middle of the country.

Also featured in this show, another Nebraska native, “Gorgeous George”, is the subject of a commentary by Richard Parker. 

In this episode Dave visits with Stockton Rush, founder and CEO of OceanGate in Everett, Washington. The company is working on an ambitious plan to make the deep ocean accessible to paying customers as well as scientists starting with a set of expeditions next year to visit the most famous of all shipwrecks -- RMS Titanic.

Rush seems like a character right out of an adventure novel, getting a commercial jet pilot's license at 19 years old and working as a flight test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base before turning his attention to engineer submarines and submersibles to explore the biggest volume of our planet -- the sea beneath the waves. 

On Cultivating Place this week, we speak with two Landscape Architects who came together to create and offer out to the gardening world beautiful, functional gardens that are inspired, interesting, innovative and accessible to all. 

Meg Herndon and Sandra Nam Cioffi share more about the concept behind their Plant Me a Rainbow, based on this garden life as a crucible in which your own values become clear, these two women created a plan to help more people create richly flowering gardens. 

We head up the road this week in search of natural air conditioning, along the California coast again. The Lost Coast, this time, that unruly stretch between Fort Bragg and Eureka that made even road builders give up—which is why Highway 1 and 101 angle inland in these parts. 

Locals, of course, snort at the very idea that this splendid area was ever lost. It’s always been here, albeit shrouded in fog most of the summer and inundated with rain otherwise. California’s isolated “Lost Coast,” virtually uninhabited and more remote than any other stretch of coastline in the Lower 48, has since been found by folks looking to get away from all those other folks.

Shelli Renée Joye received a degree in Electrical Engineering, then pursued a contemplative practice with a Buddhist meditation master.

She moved to Shingletown from San Francisco to live in a quiet natural setting and write a dissertation.  

Among the seven books that she has published is a new book, Developing Supersensible Perception.   

It’s August, hot and sure to get hotter. We head up the road this week in search of natural air conditioning, starting with the coast. The redwood coast, to get specific, one of the most unique environments on earth—moist, mild-mannered forest where old-growth coast redwood communities are making their last stand. Again. 

Once millions strong, California’s native population of coast redwoods has been whittled down through logging and agriculture. Only isolated groves survive, along a strip of foggy coast now reaching from Big Sur up into southern Oregon. Ancestors of these Sequoia sempervirens, or ever-living sequoia trees—quite different from the Sierra big trees honored at Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks—were well established here, and throughout the Northern Hemisphere, when dinosaurs roamed the earth.