Nothing is ever certain but the winter season can test our faith about the future in this inauguration year, when we are recovering from hurricanes and fighting fires. It lends urgency to laying plans for fruition in the summer and fall. Here in the audio garden we plan to keep growing the network that is us, the mycelial strands that writers weave which transmit signals across continents, shedding a collective light on the fear that lurks wherever it finds harbor.

Kellie Richardson is a writer, artist, and educator exploring themes of love, loss and longing, and her book, The Art of Naming my Pain, is now in its second edition, published by Blue Cactus Press. It looks like, and is, a field guide for daily living. Tony Robles talks about banning books in high schools,  and Martha Cinader about people abandoning Facebook and other places, and reminds us that we are the network, the collective conscious and unconscious, the cooperative sculptors of living archetypes.

Martha also digs up some radio roots, a live reading from Watermark,  a landmark anthology of Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose that was published in 1998. One of the writers and co-editors who came to the WBAI studios to read from the book was Monique Truong. The 25th Anniversary Edition of the anthology was published by Texas Tech University Press, in 2023. (Next week we will listen to her co-editor Barbara Tran read from the book.) Monique has a children’s book called Mai’s Áo Dài coming out soon, and Barbara has a recently published book of poetry called Precedented Parroting.

There are 21 truckloads of oak chips, pine chips and mixed chips that have been dumped at Martha’s Kitchen Garden since Hurricane Helene. Martha talks about what she’s doing with them, what you might consider doing with your fallen trees, and what the expert, Doug Tallamy, has spent his writing career talking about how your yard can be part of environmental solutions. Doug also publishes the website homegrownnationalpark.org, where you can learn how to make your lawn or garden part of a national park that sponsors our native bugs, birds, beasts, berries and our best hope for a future without fires, famine or fear for tomorrow.

Next week we will welcome Jan Smith to the audio garden. She is a writer and Executive Director of SOMOS, a bookstore and so much more in Taos, New Mexico.

Do you want to be heard in the garden? Please consider contributing your audio content. We grow together when we nurture our network. Click here for more information.