Episode 564 - Sally McQuillen - Reaching for Beautiful - A Memoir of Loving and Losing a Wild Child

Sally McQuillen, LCSW, CADC
Certified Grief Educator 

Sally McQuillen, LCSW, CADC, is a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in addiction, grief, and trauma recovery. 

She provides ongoing support for addiction recovery, as well as support for those recovering from the impact of a loved one’s addiction. She sees adults seeking relief from mood symptoms, helps them navigate their personal and professional relationships and lead more fulfilling lives. She works with clients to find peace and healing from trauma and loss. Her goal is to bring light into the lives of her clients intuitively pulling from different therapeutic models and resources to support their specific needs.

Book: Reaching for Beautiful - A Memoir of Loving and Losing a Wild Child

A luminous story of how love triumphs over pain, love transcends fear, and love never dies; this debut memoir from a mother grieving her young-adult son’s death is a must-read for any parent who has lost a child, is raising a child from the edge of their seat, or whose family struggles with addiction.

When Sally’s twenty-one-year-old son died in a boat accident, her greatest fear is realized. Christopher was often drawn to risk and struggled with addiction. In this riveting memoir, Sally captures the wild ride of his jam-packed life and her deep love for him while reflecting on her own childhood and family’s legacy of alcoholism. 

Sally shares insights about what it’s like to experience the emotional aftershocks of acute grief, filtered through the lens of her personal experience as a mother and her professional vantage point as a psychotherapist. Even if they have not been touched by loss in this way, readers may see themselves in Sally’s bittersweet illusion of trying to keep her son safe, in how she is challenged to let go of her fear, guilt, and regret in order to forgive herself, and in the ways grief teaches her about the power of love.

https://www.sallymcquillen.com/

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Episode 563 - Judith Valente - From Journalism to Author of The Italian Soul - Add the Italian Good Life into your home

Judith Valente is an awarding-winning author, print and broadcast journalist, poet and essayist.

She is a sought-after speaker and retreat leader on such subjects as living a more contemplative life, discovering inner wisdom through poetry, and finding meaning in your work. She is a lay associate of the Benedictine monastery Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas, which is the subject of her 2013 memoir, Atchison Blue: A Search for Silence, a Spiritual Home and a Living Faith, which was chosen by Religion Newswriters Association as one of the three best spirituality books of that year.

Her book, The Art Of Pausing: Meditations For The Overworked And Overwhelmed won a Best Book Award from the Catholic Press Association.

More recently, she wrote How to Live: What The Rule of St. Benedict Teaches Us About Happiness, Meaning, and Community, which was followed in 2021 by How to Be: A Monk and a Journalist Reflect on Living & Dying, Purpose & Prayer, Forgiveness & Friendship.

Judith and Associated Press President, Will Stevenson.

She began her work in journalism at the age of 21 as a staff reporter for The Washington Post. She later joined the staff of The Wall Street Journal, reporting from that paper’s Chicago and London bureaus. She was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, first in the public service category as part of a team of reporters at The Dallas Times Herald investigating airline safety. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer in the feature writing category for her front page article in The Wall Street Journal chronicling the story of a religiously conservative father caring for his son dying of AIDS.

Judith was a regular contributor to the national PBS TV news program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. She won numerous broadcast awards for her work on the show. Her work also appeared on The PBS News Hour. She previously covered religion, interviewed poets and authors, and served as a guest essayist on National Public Radio and Chicago Public Radio, and was a senior correspondent at WGLT radio, an NPR affiliate in central Illinois.

Book - The Italian Soul offers practical guidance into how we can transport a taste of the Italian “good life” into our own homes. Additionally, it explores the contemplative practices and attitudes that seem to come naturally to a people who have made an art of living and working joyfully. It is both a travel dispatch and a spirituality guide for seekers who eschew traditional religious practices but are yearning for ways to bring more balance, sanity, and a greater sense of the transcendent into their daily lives.

https://www.judithvalente.com/

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Episode 562 - Kate Maruyama - The Collective and The Alterations - Hollywood History, Horror and Family Dynamics

Kate Maruyama is the author of Harrowgate, Bleak Houses, and The Collective and her novella Family Solstice was named Best Fiction Book of 2021 by Rue Morgue Magazine. Her short work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and she is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of the Uncharted Short Story Prize. She served on the working Board for Women Who Submit, and the Board for the Shirley Jackson Awards. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles.

https://www.katemaruyama.com/

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Episode 561 - Joesph Bolton - Old Grandmother’s Tree - Celebrating Cultures and History through Folktales

About the Author

Joseph Bolton was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island during the twilight of the golden age of French-Canadian culture in New England. Growing up emersed in his mother’s French-Canadian family, Joseph enjoyed hearing the stories told by his grandparents and great aunts of a mysterious and magical place called Québec, otherwise known as “the place we came from.”

After high school, Joseph’s adventurous nature led him to enlist in the U.S. Army and he served in the Army’s airborne forces as a paratrooper jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, much to the worry of his mother.

Since he retired from the Army, Joseph has worked in various project manager roles as a civilian contractor for the U.S. Air Force. While writing Old Grandmother’s Tree, Joseph took a sabbatical from the U.S. Air Force and taught mathematics to young students for a semester at Holy Family Academy in Gardner Massachusetts.

Bolton is of French-Canadian, Native American, Spanish, English, and Irish descent, and is profoundly inspired by the stories of his heritage. He lives with his wife in Massachusetts, and, in his free time, enjoys hiking and skiing through Québec and New England landscapes. His favorite places to go for outdoor adventure are the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts and Mont-Orford in Québec. When he is not writing, hiking, or skiing, Joseph enjoys reading about science, history, philosophy, mathematics, and worldwide mythologies. Old Grandmother’s Tree is his first book.

Meet the Illustrator

About Natasha Pelley-Smith

Natasha Pelley-Smith, born in Toronto, is a seasoned professional artist who graduated from the prestigious Écohlcité fine arts academy in France, in 2017—now integrated into Émile Chol of Lyon. Equipped with a diverse skill set that spans from crafting murals of all sizes to illustrating books and creating canvas paintings in oils, acrylics, and mixed media, Natasha’s professional journey is a continual creative adventure.

Her artistic focal point revolves around expressive portraiture, wherein she delves into the realms of self-identity exploration and cultural influences. Natasha is known to embody her Native American, Jamaican, and Newfoundland roots, as well as other cultural threads from her life. Her work serves as an invitation for others to embrace their multifaceted layers, both culturally and emotionally, promoting messages of unity and self-love.

Natasha’s private clientele is also noteworthy, where her artwork has garnered recognition, including four fully illustrated published books, leading to her collaboration with U.S. author Joseph Bolton on her most extensive project to date. This book intricately dives into French-Canadian folklore, character self-growth, and prominently explores Joseph’s heritage and Native American roots from the Algonquin tribes while also embracing the unified connection to Natasha’s roots from the Ojibwe and Cree tribes, featured subtly throughout the book. 

https://oldgrandmotherstree.com/

https://welcome.natashapsartwork.ca/

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Episode 560 - Barret Baumgart - Yuck - turning your Joshua Tree vacation into a terrifying revelation

Barret Baumgart is an essayist, screenwriter, and the author of the nonfiction books China Lake and YUCK. His essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Vice, LitHub, The Seneca Review, and The Literary Review, among others. He lives in Los Angeles.

Book: Yuck: The Birth & Death of the Weird & Wondrous Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia

Are you headed to Joshua Tree this summer? Get ready to hate your life. It's not the heat that will wilt your spirit, nor the choke of traffic waiting to trample the park, but the enduring grotesquerie of its cherished namesake, the Joshua Tree.

"One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant... A landscape filled with Joshua Trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal." -Joseph Smeaton Chase, 1919

Similarly, few terms exist that do not fit Barret Baumgart's appalling YUCK. Part prose poem, pamphlet, collage, history, essay, memoir, and fiction, YUCK is a grotesque malformation beset with uncanny connections, jarring juxtaposition, and a buried true history that will have you asking yourself the big questions, particularly... Why am I here?

Who knows, but here you are... in the weird and wondrous world of YUCK, a brief and searing ode to the world's hottest desert, the Mojave, its divine and dying mascot, Yucca brevifolia, and the magical land that killed it all, Los Angeles.

From the publisher:

YUCK presents an unsettling new history of one of the most loathed and beloved objects on the planet, the Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia. It primarily focuses on the discovery, naming, and attempted eradication of the Joshua Tree beginning in the late 1870s in Southern California. The Joshua Tree was universally reviled as the most grotesque object on earth following its discovery by white Europeans in the 1840s. Numerous schemes arose to extirpate it from the planet, the most promising among them an attempt to turn the tree into paper, "California Cactus Paper" [YUCK is, of course, printed on faux CA Cactus Paper]. The book excavates this unknown, buried history against the ironic backdrop of the Joshua Tree today becoming the ultra-hip signifier of some kind of cultural authenticity, and its national park the most photographed and fastest growing in the nation #JoshuaTree. This current popularity boom, in a further irony, is occurring just as scientists warn that the tree will likely vanish due to climate change by the end of the century.

https://www.barretbaumgart.com/

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Episode 559 - Laura Munson - Uncovering The Wild Why, We Get Stumped and We Overcome Our Inner Critter

“I’m so glad you are here. Thank you. You are a very large part of why I write —why I sit at the intersection of heart and mind and craft that is the writing life.” 

Laura Munson
New York Times Best Selling Author

You complete the trajectory that begins at my writing desk and longs to land in your hands as you spend an hour in bed reading in the wee hours, or on your commute, or in a quiet corner on a Sunday afternoon. It’s you who I want to reach, and it’s you who makes my work whole. Writing is a solitary act, and I believe that we write first to bridge to ourselves SO THAT we can bridge to our collective human community. I deeply love that something I write in a small room in Montana can cross oceans, mountains, transcend social groups, age, religion, difference. Heart language is heart language. And I have learned in my thirty years of living the contemplative life that writing is one thing if it is anything: truth. We writers disrupt. We question. We examine. We wonder. And most of all, we hold up the mirror to truth.

https://lauramunson.com/haven-writing-programs/

Helping Authors:

Find Their Voice, Find Their Narrative​, Find Their Motion

The Book: The Wild Why - Stories and Teachings to Uncover Your Wonder

For fans of Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, this illuminating self-help tool is the perfect book for anyone who yearns to rekindle their own voice.

What is wonder?

Wonder is curiosity and awe put together. We are born with our wonder intact. Why? What? How? Wow! Look at that rainbow! What makes a rainbow? Wonder is what we need to survive and thrive, not just as individuals but also as a civilization. It’s what’s lauded and honored by our society in young children. Until it isn’t.

The Wild Why calls for an illuminating end to this endemic crisis of self, and a return to what we know at birth and need to reclaim. This is a book of teaching, and teaching-spirited stories, all centered on how to find our true self-expression and the wonder that spawns it.

https://lauramunson.com/

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EPISODE 558 - Edward R Rosick - Where The Grass Don't Grow and Vultures Sing, 12 Tales of speculative fiction

Edward R. Rosick is a writer and physician living in the urban wilds of central Michigan. His diverse works of speculative fiction, from the sublime to surreal, have appeared in numerous award-winning magazines and anthologies including Pulphouse, The Half That You See, and Monstrous Tales Vol. 2 & 3. Dr. Rosick is also an accomplished nonfiction writer, having authored hundreds of articles on nutrition, health, and wellness for publications including Life Extension, Oxygen, and Ultimate Athlete. When he's not reading, writing, or working, Dr. Rosick enjoys spending time exercising, doing martial arts, and being outdoors with his family, friends, and canine companion.

Edward R. Rosick is a writer and physician living in the urban wilds of central Michigan. His diverse works of speculative fiction, from the sublime to surreal, have appeared in numerous award-winning magazines and anthologies, including Pulphouse, Sick Cruising, and The Half That You See.

Spring has sprung here in Michigan! Although intermittent days of cold and—dare I say it, snow—continue on, crocuses and daffodils are giving the landscape a kaleidoscope of welcome color.

On the publishing front, the big news is that my short story collection, WHERE THE GRASS DON'T GROW AND VULTURES SING , has been published! I’m quite proud of the 12 tales of speculative fiction—some sublime, all surreal—that grace the pages of the book published by Baynam Books Press. Go to Amazon to get your copy today. For a sample of one of the stories, entitled Leshii, in the collection, head over the free stories section for a peek!

Book mentioned: The Portable MFA in Creative Writing - Get the core knowledge of a prestigious MFA education without the tuition. Have you always wanted to get an MFA, but couldn't because of the cost, time commitment, or admission requirements? Well now you can fulfill that dream without having to devote tons of money or time. 

The Portable MFA gives you all of the essential information you would learn in the MFA program in one book. Covering fiction, memoirs, personal essays, magazine articles, poetry, and playwriting, this book provides you with:    
• Inspiration and tips on revision, stamina, and productivity    
• Clear instruction on the craft behind the art    
• Detailed reading lists to expand your literary horizons    
• Exercises to improve your writing endeavors 

By heeding the advice in The Portable MFA, you will gain the wisdom and experience of some of today's greatest teachers, all for just the price of a book.

https://www.edrosick.net/

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EPISODE 557 - Ronald Okuaki Lieber - The Long Journey Out - from the place where I now am, the diary of that journey

Author's Bio
I am of Japanese and Jewish lineage, born in Tokyo, a late post WWII baby. I grew up moving every year until the age of 14 when my parents settled in Petersburg, VA. I graduated with a BS in Biology from the College of William and Mary, then served two years as a Peace Corp volunteer in the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. I returned to live in NYC and eventually graduated from the MFA Program at Columbia University. I later began psychoanalytic training at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. After graduation, I became the Director of the institute and editor of its journal, Modern Psychoanalysis. I have been in private practice since 2001 as a licensed psychoanalyst and recently completed a plant medicine guide training program at the Center for Medicine Work in Philadelphia.

My entrance into poetry begins with these lines from “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798” by William Wordsworth:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Those lines form the basis of my book The Long Journey Out. I was a sophomore in college, adrift in the back of the room in a second semester composition class when the professor read those lines. They woke me from my stupor. There, in those lines, I heard a kindred voice that spoke to an experience I had, an LSD trip, that was, to borrow a cliché, awash in the ineffable, a boundless sense of oneness where any distinction between self and other sundered. That voice joined with another, “An unexamined life is life not worth living,” from which a path emerged, unknown to me at the time--and forgive if what follows sounds pretentious--that took me to Jung, the Peace Corps and Costa Rica, Gurdjieff, poetry, eastern doctrine through The I Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, the TS Eliot of The Four Quartets, Heidegger’s Being and Time, the gospels of the New Testament, and too many other books to enumerate, and an abiding curiosity about the unconscious, thus the study and practice of Freud and psychoanalysis, meditation, making do in the East Village of the early 80s, Ashtanga yoga, domestity and two wives and two children, dabbling along the way into neuroscience, windsurfing, and cosmology.

The book The Long Journey Out is, from the place where I now am, the diary of that journey.

https://www.ronaldokuakilieber.com/

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EPISODE 556 - Jaime Townzen - Absorbed, A transformative coming-of-age story taking readers back to 1996

Jaime Townzen is a Southern California-based writer and professional artist whose watercolor paintings have earned international recognition. Her essays and microfiction have been published in Light magazine and Fairfield Scribes. Jaime’s debut novel, Absorbed was released in early 2025. When Jaime’s not in her studio, she can be found at the beach with her family and their dogs or listening to live music.

Absorbed
A transformative coming-of-age story confronting issues of teenage sexual consent and women’s reproductive rights, Absorbed traces alt-rock-loving lifeguard Stacey Chapman’s unraveling over the summer of 1996.  After she is pressured into sex and experiments with drugs and alcohol, Stacey begins redefining herself through her love of music and art. But with her future in limbo while awaiting results from Planned Parenthood, Stacey’s resilience is put to the test as a pool rescue turns tragic.

https://jaimetownzen.com/

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Episode 555 - Karl Hörnell - Singularity Minus Twelve - sci-fi at its finest—bold, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent

Karl Hörnell is a cartoonist and a game developer with a degree in engineering and a PhD in applied mathematics. He grew up in a quiet suburb north of Uppsala, Sweden, where he spent way too much time doing creative things for no good reason. Thankfully, he has been able to continue on that track for most of his adult life.

Book: Singularity Minus Twelve

In a near future where artificial general intelligence has been achieved, AIs that develop self-awareness are becoming a problem. Difficult to contain, they are often hunted and destroyed, but a team of exceptional ones has been spared to take down the most dangerous rogue AI of all time.Singularity Minus Twelve is a sci-fi thriller that delves into the near-term philosophical and societal implications of artificial intelligence, while having some fun playing with characters inspired by popular fictional AIs.

"I love a thoughtful, well-executed narrative and Singularity Minus Twelve by Karl Hörnell was an absolute treat for me. This is one of those rare books that grips you with its sharp intelligence.

Set against the haunting backdrop of a future shaped—and perhaps doomed—by runaway artificial intelligence, Singularity Minus Twelve beautifully blends fast-paced action with deeply philosophical questions about agency, consciousness, and the terrifying, blurry line between human and machine. From the nerve-wracking opening scene of a doll-like rogue robot outsmarting a tactical team, to the subtle but chilling political undercurrents about global AI arms races, author Hörnell builds a disturbingly plausible world.

The characters, especially Blake, are written with emotional depth and nuance. His struggles with memory loss and identity ground the bigger tech-driven narrative in something heartbreakingly human. I loved how even amid the breakneck plot, the novel kept circling back to one core question: What happens when we create minds we don't understand—and can't control?

The pacing was relentless but never at the cost of intelligent storytelling. If I had to nitpick, I'd say a few sections could have been tightened just a bit, but honestly, that's just me wishing the story could have flowed even smoother because I was so invested.

If you love hard science fiction with heart, danger, and razor-sharp insight into where humanity might be heading, you cannot miss Singularity Minus Twelve. This is sci-fi at its finest—bold, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent." Heena Rathore Rathore-Pardeshi on Goodreads

https://www.linkedin.com/in/karl-h%C3%B6rnell-20aa5/

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