Good Seedlets #26

Watch to nurture…….

• Art Should Be Brave and Potentially Embarrassing— This short film from Someone on Film series is the kind of thing you watch and immediately want to send to every creative person you know. It features Lisa Hanawalt,  the artist behind Tuca & Bertie and BoJack Horseman,  in her studio, talking about her work, her horse, and what it means to make art that takes real risks. The title alone is a mantra worth keeping.

Follow to grow………….

• Alice Evnas- The Great Gender Divide. If you've ever wanted an academic but genuinely readable lens on what's happening between men and women across the world right now, this is it. Evans writes about the global divergence in values between young men and women; one of the most underreported social shifts of our time, with the rigor of a researcher and the accessibility of someone who actually wants you to understand.

•  The Herbalist's Diary: Sarah Donoghue is a clinical herbalist writing from the Cornish countryside, and this Substack is exactly the kind of slow, grounded resource that feels like an antidote to the internet. She shares home medicine-making tutorials, folk plant traditions, and herbal folklore;  the kind of knowledge that gets passed down in stories, not textbooks. If you're in herbalism school or just starting to feel called toward plant medicine, this is one to follow.

 Read to root……. 

•  Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden: I don't think I've ever read something that so perfectly captures what it feels like when the life you trusted just... disappears. After twenty years of marriage and no warning whatsoever, Burden's husband walked out. What follows isn't just a divorce story; it's a woman discovering, one gutting-and-beautiful chapter at a time, that she is so much braver than she ever let herself be. I couldn't put it down. 

•  Theo of Golden by Allen Levi: If you haven't heard of this one yet, you will. It's the quiet word-of-mouth phenomenon that somehow climbed to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list; self-published by a first-time author, an attorney and beekeeper in rural Georgia, who just had something true to say. An elderly man named Theo arrives in a small Southern town and starts buying up pencil portraits of the locals, gifting each one back to its subject in exchange for their story. It is gentle and generous and quietly devastating. The kind of book that makes you want to slow down and actually look at the people around you.

• Why I Won't Touch My Face by Lola Kirke: She starts this essay with a story about getting laser hair removal at sixteen to Paul McCartney, and somehow ends up making one of the most compelling cases I've read for why cosmetic procedures are a crisis for art and storytelling. Her argument is deceptively simple: that when performers erase the evidence of their humanity from their faces, they lose their ability to tell true stories, and that the real damage isn't aesthetic, it's cultural. She's funny and sharp and completely sincere, and there's a line near the end that I keep thinking about. Go read it.

Listen to expand……

• Appalachia by Emily Scott Robinson: This album came out earlier this year, and I have not stopped thinking about it. Robinson recorded it in a 130-year-old church in the Catskills, and you can feel every stone wall in it. It's a tribute to western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, a love letter to place, community, and what holds people together when everything falls apart. Sorrowful and uplifting in equal measure. One of the best albums of this year. 

• A Wonder is What It Is: Nick Offerman  (Youtube Link)  WNYC's All Of It released this audio series for National Poetry Month, and it is just what it sounds like: Nick Offerman reading Wendell Berry's poems slowly, one per episode, and then thinking out loud about them. Also slowly. Berry is a farmer-poet and environmental activist who writes about land, community, and our relationship to the natural world. Offerman has been a devoted reader of his work for decades, and that love comes through in every line.

Support if you can…. 

• All One One All Farm Local farms are the way to go! I mean that with my whole heart. I've recommended this one before and I'll keep doing it, because they deserve it. All One One All is a farm I know personally, and I love their land, their mission, and their deep commitment to education and community. If you're able to give, please do. And if you have a local farm you love, support them too. We need to put food and growing back in our own hands.