A Big Sur Podcast

Travel writer, guidebook author, former Big Sur ranger, and old friend, Stuart Thornton, returns to Big Sur—at least in spirit—to reflect on a career spent encouraging people to visit the very places he sometimes wishes they would leave alone. 

We talk about discovering California's coast, writing guidebooks, the challenge of over tourism, and whether AI will help travelers find deeper experiences or simply send more people to the same beautiful places. Along the way, Stuart shares stories from Big Sur, the road, and a lifetime of chasing the next hidden corner of the map.

Stuart traces his path from a Richmond, Virginia upbringing to a campsite at Andrew Molera, a ranger job that came with a phone book and a dorm bed, years living in the old naval housing at Point Sur, and a writing career that runs from the Monterey County Weekly to National Geographic to a shelf of Moon guidebooks. 

Along the way: a condor egg airlifted from the backcountry, an interview with James Cameron fresh from the Mariana Trench, a settlement after Anthropic ingested four of his books, and the contradiction he's lived with for years — a man who spends his days off chasing empty beaches while writing the books that fill them. 

Plus monks and silence at New Camaldoli, Gary Clark Jr. winning over the Monterey Jazz crowd, and a novel about "Billy the Brewer."

• Stuart Thornton — personal site · Moon author page
• Joe Burnett / Ventana Wildlife Society — condor biologist who got Stuart access to the egg story
• Gary Clark Jr at Albert Hall
• James Cameron — record Mariana Trench dive (National Geographic)
• Pico Iyer — author; wrote on New Camaldoli and on Henry Miller
• William T. Vollmann — The Atlas — Stuart's early influence
• Ryan Masters — Monterey County Weekly writer; band Suborbitals
• Eric Johnson — longtime Monterey County Weekly editor
• Kem Nunn — "surf noir" novelist (Tapping the Source, The Dogs of Winter, John from Cincinnati)
• Martin Gurri — The Revolt of the Public — Magnus's earlier guest
• Hipólito Bouchard — Argentine raid on Monterey, 1818
• Kayla Anderson — Moon Northern California Road Trips (co-author)
• "Billy the Brewer" — California's first beer brewer; subject of Stuart's novel-in-progress

Places

• Henry Miller Memorial Library
• New Camaldoli Hermitage
• Andrew Molera State Park (and Pico Blanco above the Big Sur River)
• Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park / Big Sur Station
• Point Sur State Historic Park & Lighthouse — site of the former naval housing
• Partington Cove (Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park)
• Monterey State Historic Park — Custom House, Casa Serrano, California's First Theatre
• "Shipwrecks: Every Broken Piece Tells a Story" — Casa Gutiérrez exhibit (opened June 12; the Natalia, wrecked 1834)
• Monterey Bay Aquarium — Stuart's tip: Tue–Thu, 2–6 pm
• Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park (albino redwoods)
• The Dyerville Giant — Humboldt Redwoods State Park

Music & events

• Monterey Jazz Festival
• Folk Yeah! (Britt Govea)
• Pixies — played the Henry Miller Library
• Bonnie "Prince" Billy / Will Oldham — the first Folk Yeah show at Fernwood
• Gary Clark Jr. — Stuart wrote an early national profile
• Relix Magazine
• Taj Mahal — Magnus's Fiji/Stockholm anecdote

Books, publishers & other

• Moon Travel Guides (incl. Moon California Road Trip, IPPY Gold Medal 2016)
• Monterey County Weekly / Monterey County NOW
• National Geographic Education
• John Steinbeck — The Pastures of Heaven · Sweet Thursday · East of Eden — Netflix series, fall 2026
• The Anthropic copyright settlement ($1.5B; Bartz v. Anthropic)

All comments much welcomed!

Support the show

_________________________________________________


This podcast is a production of the Henry Miller Memorial Library with support from The Arts Council for Monterey County!

Let us know what you think!
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[email protected]

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In this episode Magnus has a conversation with Carol Olson, Executive Director of the Ventana Wilderness Alliance, about wilderness, responsibility, and the increasingly difficult art of protecting a place people love.

GOOD LINKS:

Big Sur Wilderness and Conservation Act

• Full text — Congress.gov
• Public Law details — GovInfo
• Summary — Ventana Wilderness Alliance

Ventana Wilderness Alliance

• Official website
• Wikipedia

Big Sur LUP Download

• Big Sur LCP Defense Committee — download page
• County of Monterey — LUP Tables & Figures
• Big Sur Coast LUP Update project page

Adler Ranch / Esselen Land Transfer

• KQED — California Tribe Regains Ancestral Lands
• Western Rivers Conservancy
• Esselen Tribe official news

The Wilderness Act / Definition of Wilderness

• The Wilderness Society
• U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
• Full text PDF — USDA

Land Back Movement

• LANDBACK.org — the movement's own site
• NPR overview (2024)
• Sierra Club feature
• Yale Environment 360
• It's time to rethink the idea of the "Indigenous"

Shelley Alden Brooks

• Monterey County Weekly profile
• Book — UC Press
• Book — Amazon

All comments much welcomed!

Support the show

_________________________________________________


This podcast is a production of the Henry Miller Memorial Library with support from The Arts Council for Monterey County!

Let us know what you think!
SEND US AN EMAIL!  😊
[email protected]

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In this episode of A Big Sur Podcast, I speak with the writer and journalist Matti Friedman about his remarkable book Out of the Sky — a work that begins with four words from the Bible, “Out of the sky,” and unfolds into a meditation on fear, memory, survival, aviation, mythology, Jewish history, and the strange psychological atmosphere that has surrounded Israel since October 7, 2023.

We carry Matti Friedman's books at the Henry Miller Library.

Important links:

Matti Friedman's Website

Matti Friedman with Dan Senor

Nicholas Kristof in NYT

Magnus Substack about some of this.

All comments much welcomed!

Support the show

_________________________________________________


This podcast is a production of the Henry Miller Memorial Library with support from The Arts Council for Monterey County!

Let us know what you think!
SEND US AN EMAIL!  😊
[email protected]

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A conversation with artist Katie Holten about life and art, climate and action, walking and inaction!

Katie's website

Announcement for her new book!

All comments much welcomed!

Support the show

_________________________________________________


This podcast is a production of the Henry Miller Memorial Library with support from The Arts Council for Monterey County!

Let us know what you think!
SEND US AN EMAIL!  😊
[email protected]

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"At intervals the condor passed, huge as an ocean liner.”
Henry Miller in Big Sur and the Oranges

Besides marveling at the exceptional beauty and almost mysterious power of these amazing birds Joe Burnett and I discuss work in Big Sur and Monterey. 

We talk about the rebuilding of the Ventana Wildlife Sanctuary after the 2020 Dolan Fire, how the sanctuary supports releasing, feeding, monitoring and recapturing condors to test for lead poisoning—the leading mortality threat—using radio and GPS transmitters to track a flock of 113 birds, including wild-born untagged chicks. 

VWS outreach now centers on getting ranchers and hunters to switch to non-lead ammunition, which the program helps by providing free ammo, though non-lead .22 availability is a major hurdle. 

Joe describes vaccinating about 90% of the population against highly pathogenic avian influenza, ongoing disease and blood-lead testing, wildfire impacts, public engagement while tracking birds, and resources and documentaries available through the organization’s website.

Thanks for listening!

Magnus 

Ventana Wildlife Society

The beautiful documentary Condor Canyon

All comments much welcomed!

Support the show

_________________________________________________


This podcast is a production of the Henry Miller Memorial Library with support from The Arts Council for Monterey County!

Let us know what you think!
SEND US AN EMAIL!  😊
[email protected]

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a New Heyday Book

The Mysterious World of the Bull Kelp Website

I sit down with artist, photographer, and author Josie Iselin, and what begins as a conversation about kelp opens into an exploration of the intricate world in the waters just off our coast.

Josie traces her own path into that world—from artist to something closer to a naturalist of the shoreline—guided by curiosity, attention, and a willingness to look closely at what most of us walk past. Kelp, in her telling, is not just seaweed but a kind of language: a way of reading the ocean’s health, its rhythms, and its disturbances.

We talk about the fragile balance of the kelp forests—about urchin barrens and restoration efforts, including diver-led removal and the promise (and limits) of lab-grown kelp. We touch on kelp’s often overstated role as a carbon sink, I learned the meaning of the “wrack line” as a living archive of the sea, and the ongoing tensions around sea otter reintroduction.

Threaded through it all is Josie’s project Above Below: The Mysterious World of Bull Kelp, created with illustrator Ellen Litwiller—first as a digital exploration, now as a beautifully realized book available where books are sold and at the Henry Miller Library.

It’s a conversation about paying attention and what the edge of the ocean might still teach us if we take the time to walk down to the shoreline and slow down long enough to see it.

/Magnus

All comments much welcomed!

Support the show

_________________________________________________


This podcast is a production of the Henry Miller Memorial Library with support from The Arts Council for Monterey County!

Let us know what you think!
SEND US AN EMAIL!  😊
[email protected]

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Alison van Diggelen – Journalist, interviewer, and author of The Love Project: A Journey of Intimate Conversations.

Photo is of Alison and her Mom.
Alison's website.
Buy "The Love Project" at your local bookstore.
May we suggest the Henry Miller Library.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Topics in This Episode

• The origins of The Love Project
• Love across generations
• The power of listening
• Storytelling as connection
• Love as a verb (and noun)

A Quote from the Episode

Final Thought

We often speak about love as if it were a feeling that descends upon us like weather, it does, but there's more...

Perhaps love encompasses much more—
 a choice, repeated in small acts, day after day.

All comments much welcomed!

Support the show

_________________________________________________


This podcast is a production of the Henry Miller Memorial Library with support from The Arts Council for Monterey County!

Let us know what you think!
SEND US AN EMAIL!  😊
[email protected]

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Shamergence

The skeptic asks, “Is it real?”
 The shaman asks, “Did it help?”

COME MEET ROB SOMERS ON SATURDAY, MARCH 21

>>>>>>>>>>

Carlos Castaneda

Joseph Campbell

The Samples

Ozymandias

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Shaman, Skeptic, and the Voice in the Belly

All comments much welcomed!

Support the show

_________________________________________________


This podcast is a production of the Henry Miller Memorial Library with support from The Arts Council for Monterey County!

Let us know what you think!
SEND US AN EMAIL!  😊
[email protected]

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In this episode of A Big Sur Podcast, I sit down with Brita Ostrom — longtime Esalen resident and author of Steeped: A Big Sur Elixir of Sulfur and Sage.

Brita’s life bridges several revolutions at once: the islands of the Pacific Northwest, the Haight-Ashbury explosion of 1966–67, the psychedelic and political turbulence of the Summer of Love, and the early, formative years of the Esalen Institute.

We talk about Haight Street — the overwhelming beauty of it all: the posters, the music, the saturated colors. And later, how the fog began to settle in. About sidewalks so crowded you could barely move, and children who quietly went missing. About free love and jealousy, about massage tables and incense, about the uneasy dance between material success and spiritual seeking.

Brita describes arriving at Esalen for the first time — the candlelit baths, the shock of nakedness, the silkiness of sulfur water against cold skin. She reflects on figures like Fritz Perls, Storm, and Lars — and on what it meant to come of age inside a cultural experiment that promised liberation but carried its own tensions and blind spots.

This is not nostalgia. It is a reckoning.

What does it mean to “drop out”? What does it cost? What does it give?
What remains when the fog clears?

Brita’s memoir is a meditation on community, intimacy, ritual, and the long arc of a life shaped by Big Sur’s muse-like pull.

As she writes in her dedication:

I hope you’ll enjoy this thoughtful, tender, and at times unsparing conversation.

— Magnus

• Esalen Institute
• Haight-Ashbury
• Golden Gate Park
• Henry Miller Memorial Library

People Mentioned

• Fritz Perls
• Alan Watts
• Ebba Malmborg
• Carlos Castaneda
• Cesar Chavez
• Ken Kesey
• Dennis Murphy
• Selig Morgenrath

Bands of the Era (Referenced in the Conversation)

• Grateful Dead
• Jefferson Airplane
• Moby Grape
• Quicksilver Messenger Service
• The Charlatans

All comments much welcomed!

Support the show

_________________________________________________


This podcast is a production of the Henry Miller Memorial Library with support from The Arts Council for Monterey County!

Let us know what you think!
SEND US AN EMAIL!  😊
[email protected]

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Andrew Munn in conversation!

Deep Listening, Between Cage and Wagner, from Silence to Parsifal. Listening for the unheard, where sound becomes ceremony.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Links to more on what we spoke of:

ANDREW MUNN

Short video from the HMML performance.

Peter Mattei

John Cage

Pauline Oliveros

Deep Listening

Rami Sarieddeine

Shanghai Concert Hall

Tanglewood

Parsifal

Magic Flute

Elektra

All comments much welcomed!

Support the show

_________________________________________________


This podcast is a production of the Henry Miller Memorial Library with support from The Arts Council for Monterey County!

Let us know what you think!
SEND US AN EMAIL!  😊
[email protected]

FaceBook
Instagram