The Earth Sea Love Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Welcome back to a very special episode of The Earth Sea Love Podcast. After four years of recording the podcast, with this nearly being our seventieth episode, we bring you our first LIVE face to face recorded conversation.

We are really excited to share a live face to face recording that took place during the wonderful Tremula Festival on Saturday 21 September 2024.

The Tremula Festival, the first of its kind, was a selections of talks,  production skills and workshops focusing on the connection between audio, the outdoors and the activism happening in those spaces. Your podcast host, Dr. Sheree Mack, was invited along to take part by the lovely Francesca Turauskis,Founder and Lead Producer of the Tremula Network.

And it was Fran who introduced Sheree to Alinah Azadeh, the guest of this special podcast. We are so pleased to share this episode with you as it was such a powerful conversation between the two creatives. 

The conversation covers:

* where the podcast is taking place in terms of situating themselves

* responding to the question, who you be?

* being radical/ creating radical situations within culture and the arts

* nature connection explored through art projects within community

* writing stories set in the future

* being the Seven Sisters' writer in residence and creating a writing community of the global majority

* creating a major audio walk in collaboration along the South Downs coastline - WE HEAR YOU NOW

* Alinah reading a section from her speculative fiction story based in 2053, WE HEAR YOU NOW

* You can read this story yourself at Alinah's substack, The Colour of Chalk 

* the two kinds of legacies which have been created through WE HEAR YOU NOW

* the criminal damage that has happened to this public artwork

* responses to the South Downs National Park Press Statement about the racialised attack against this walking trail  

* the trauma experienced of having our stories erased for centuries

* the power of the collective voice in pushing back against racism

* the difficulty of putting into practice black-led projects for everyone involved

* what does 'Landscape for All' translate into, in practice, or should mean

* progress in the use of language used to describe us by others, taking the lead from us

* Alinah's childhood and being brought up within nature

* more opportunities are welcomed to meander and wander and wonder with people within the landscape

* how the power of audio can be used to cross boundaries and borders

* followed by questions from the audience. 

Bio:

Alinah Azadeh is a writer, artist, performer and cultural activist of British Iranian heritage. She uses writing, audio, and live practices to create poetic narratives that activate spaces, amplifying untold or overlooked stories and future imaginings. Alongside a 30-year visual arts career, Azadeh has been published, most recently in Best British Short Stories 2023 (Salt) with The Beard, a feminist tale of power, hair and revolution. As first ever writer-in-residence at Seven Sisters Country Park and Sussex Heritage Coast 2020-23, for South Downs National Park, she led We See You Now, a decolonial landscape and literature programme exploring the coast through the lens of climate change & justice, loss, migration and belonging. This led to her podcast The Colour of Chalk and the co-writing and curation of We Hear You Now, an audio and performance series of poetry, speculative fiction and myth by women and non-binary writers of Black and global majority heritage, now installed on 14 Listening Posts across the coast and online, co-funded by Arts Council England. Alinah is working on numerous writing projects and commissions, including her artist memoir and is also Writing Our Legacy/ Changing Chalk Associate Artist for The National Trust.

Hello and welcome back to The Earth Sea Love Podcast. This is the last episode of the summer before we return in September with the special episodes created in collaboration identity on tyne and the Black Nature in Residence programme. 

In this episode, your host, Dr. Sheree Mack is talking to the lovely and knowledgeable Nadia Shaikh. Calling in from the Isle of Bute, they talk about:

* Situating themselves

* The Isle of Bute and Scotland

* Land Justice Activism

* What is the Right to Roam?

* Land ownership 

* Scotland's Right to Roam

* Colonialism upon British soil

* The Raven Network

* The Earth Sea Love Episodes exploring Racial Equity Network of the National Trust

* You don't have to know the names to have a relationship with nature

* Wild Service the book.

Bio is: Nadia Shaikh is a naturalist and ornithologist who has worked in nature conservation for over 14 years. She left the sector to focus on the links between our legacy of land ownership, limited access to nature and the link to biodiversity loss. She is co-director of the Right to Roam Campaign and is one of the authors of Wild Service. She founded The Raven Network, a group for people of colour who work in the nature conservation and environment sector, the network seeks to understand how to decolonizing the way we think about nature conservation.

Happy June

Soon the Summer Solstice will be amongst us, here in the Northern Hemisphere, so let us take this moment from The Earth Sea Love Podcast to wish you LIGHT!

And thank you for coming back for a listen to our next episode. 

We are so proud that we are continuing to bring you, our listeners, beautiful and thought-provoking episodes which we hope inspire and support your healing and creative journeys. 

This episode your host, Dr Sheree Mack is talking with Mindy Tsonas, a maker and creator of spaces where healing and radical change are welcome. 

In this episode the conversation explores:

* place in nature

* {BEING} is a changing thing

* the magic of seeds

* how we must put ourselves in the way of belonging

* how we all already belong

* dismantling the stories that we don't belong

* taking inspiration and wisdom from nature

* our interconnectedness

* self care is community care

* radicale and radical - the root of it all

* generative practices and systems

* creativity and nature

* co-creation and community

* giving indigenous practices and wisdom their proper respect and recognition. 

Bio: Mindy Tsonas is a maker, manyeo and cultural organizer who facilitates circles of creativity, collective belonging and care. She believes in using art and alchemy as mediums for generative connection, somatic healing and radical change. As a transracial, transnational adopted person from the South Korean diaspora, this deeply informs her embodied perspective on land and lineage throughout all of her work and organizing. Links:

Hey there! Hope you are well and welcome back to The Earth Sea Love Podcast. We’re so happy that you’ve decided to spend some time with us again. We’re so happy to welcome back to the podcast, Catherine Lucktaylor.

Catherine was a guest back in December 2020 in episode 20, when she talked about her ceramics practice, Raku ceramics and being inspired by the wild Cornish coast.

In this episode Catherine is talking with your host, Dr Sheree Mack about:

* Being inspired by the sea within our art practice * Appreciating nature and the wild Cornish landscape * The project that came out of the Developing Your Creative Practice grant * A new body of work - Mothers of the Moon* A local exhibition with grief ritual ceremony, Newlands Art Gallery * Ancestral Healing of the Self

* Claiming Space within the Landscape

* Adinkra symbols wisdom and energies * Becoming an Ancestral Practitioner * Listening to the ancestors and what that can mean and look like * Working within the community with the youth * Future Offerings from Catherine

Bio:

Catherine Lucktaylor is an artist and healer based in west Cornwall, UK. She has over 30 years’ experience in art and spiritual practices. She specialises in Raku fired ceramics and creates sacred spaces for ritual and healing. Catherine incorporates her Ghanaian/West African and British/Celtic heritage within her work, combined with her love of nature and connection with nature spirits.

Catherine is currently training as an Ancestral Healing Practitioner with Daniel Foor and Ancestral Medicine and will be offering Ancestral Healing sessions soon. You can sign up to the waitlist here: https://mailchi.mp/71177b699ffd/sankofaprintable

and receive a beautiful Adinkra Symbol colouring page as a welcome gift. 

Find out more about Catherine’s Raku ceramics on her website www.lucktaylorceramics.co.uk

Here's a link to Ancestral Medicine website:

https://ancestralmedicine.org

Here’s a link to Kesoberi CIC: https://www.kesobericic.org

www.lucktaylorceramics.co.uk

Facebook: @lucktaylorceramics

Instagram: @lucktaylorceramics

May is here and full of the joys of Spring.

Here at The Earth Sea Love Podcast, we're full of joy to bring you this conversation with the wonderful Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson. 

Lateisha is a Black queer feminist interdisciplinary artist and social-justice practitioner/community-healing organiser of Jamaican heritage based in London. 

Within this episode with your host Dr. Sheree Mack, Lateisha talks about:

* focusing on how we feel instead of what we want

* water connections and healings

* community land trusts 

* listening and asking questions

* who do you be instead of what do you do?

* creating healing spaces for community

* having the purpose of staying alive

* trauma living in the body 

* being in right relationship with ourselves and nature

* revolution and liberation = community

* rest and safety

* grieving and nature

* our ancestors' relationships to water and the land and recognising 

* making spaces for joy and play in nature

* how we repair and heal what colonialism has done and been doing

* bringing our words into the word takes time and creative fugitivity

* doing the work to unshame self

* burn out can teach us many things

* "we're gonna be alright!" x

Bio:

Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson is a Black queer feminist interdisciplinary artist and social-justice practitioner/community-healing organiser of Jamaican heritage based in London. Their writing, art-making, facilitation, consultancy and nature-work practices are tools to creatively embody knowledges that interrupt ongoing systems of colonial-imperial oppression(s), in order to activate spaces for deep healing. In their practice they meditate + dream upon what it means to be well?

To connect, belong and love freely. 

Their transformative lived experiences of gender, race, class, survivorship, neurodivergence and illness inform their offerings and approaches - being drawn to the revolutionary possibilities of sci-fi / eco-futurism, magic + ritual + ceremony and communal gathering-archiving as ancestral pathways and political strategies to reimagine resistance and remember revolutionary possibilities for the new world in creation. 

Lateisha is currently working on their debut poetry pamphlet, ~the heart is a holding~  supported by Rotterdam residences: International Collaborative Urban art projects  / Foundation B.a.d and published by Burning Eye Books Autumn 2023. They are also developing their interdisciplinary performance - installation work s/he breathe/s,  supported by Raze Collective, Stanley Arts and Arts Council England showing in Summer 2023. You can also visit their current work Meeting At The Altar Of Us, a collaborative text and sound work offering as part of Bloom Collective's contributions to Meera Shakti Osborne's department of Unruly histories archive and exhibition at Cubitt in spring 2023. 

Previous work includes An Offering // an installation of a world-building, to come- back to home…  weaving poetry-film, sound, documentary, text, and plant medicine portals. Commissioned residency and exhibition by Bethlem Gallery: An Ecology Of Mind (2022). Lateisha has written extensively through residencies and commissions, including  Camden Art Centre: The Botanical Mind, Wretched Of The Earth (BIPOC climate justice collective), [Performance space]: PSX 10, Live Art Development Agency, Artsadmin: Apocalypse Reading Room curated by Ama Josephine Budge, Chelsea Physic Garden: Queer Botany, Apples & Snakes, She Grrrowls, Dada Fest / Yewande 103 and is a Roundhouse and Hammer & Tongue Poetry Slam Finalist. 

Lateisha facilitates community-healing workshops and activity-based immersive installations across art, education and community spaces. Including, Queer Youth Art Collective, Healing Justice Ldn and Colours LGBTIQIA+ youth arts as well as institutions incl. Migration museum, Barbican and Autograph. They founded TO THE RITUAL KNOWLEDGE OF REMEMBERING - that took shape as an immersive 3 day coastal retreat supported by LADA, and online public-programme as part of 12o collective’s curator residency (2020-2021).

You can connect with Lateisha here @lateisha_davine or pop down to Hackney City Farm where they are training as a Beekeeper 🐝 ---

Welcome back to The Earth Sea Love Podcast. We're very happy to share with you our first conversation episode of 2023.

Your host, Dr. Sheree Mack is talking to Anatalia Vallez. Anatalia is  a writer, actor, and creative alchemist from California, United States with roots in Guerrero, Mexico. Addressing everything from migration, machismo and our relationship to nature, she seeks to find intimate truths and plant seeds through art.  

In this episode they talk about:

* Gratitude

* When Sheree and Anatalia first met

* Where Anatalia is calling in from

* What is Anatalia's relationship with nature

* What does Anatalia do? Who do she be?

* The art making process

* The Most Spectacular Mistake, Anatalia's writing

* What it was like to release a collection of poetry during a pandemic

*The benefits of listening

* Remembering our ancestors

* Belonging to nature

* Homies who submit - writing and publishing

Bio: Anatalia Vallez is a writer, actor, and creative alchemist from California, United States with roots in Guerrero, Mexico. Addressing everything from migration, machismo and our relationship to nature, she seeks to find intimate truths and plant seeds through art.   She is the author of the poetry collection: The Most Spectacular Mistake (FlowerSong Press, 2020) which has been featured in the LA Times, LibroMobile and KPFK Radio’s Nuestra Voz. Currently completing her MFA in Television, Film and Theatre at Cal State Los Angeles this Spring, she's also working on a second collection of poetry and curating a virtual BIPOC-centered community called Homies Who Submit. Subscribe to Anatalia's newsletter:  Substack newsletter Purchase a signed copy of The Most Spectacular Mistake Follow Homies Who Submit on Instagram and Twitter  Support Anatalia on Patreon or Ko-Fi 

March and another solo episode from your host of The Earth Sea Love Podcast, Dr. Sheree Mack.

Sheree continues to share her healing journey with you as she reflects on the time past already in 2023, and what to expect in the coming months with guest conversations on the podcast.

In this solo episode, Sheree talks about:

* Holding herself accountable and showing up

* One foot in Winter/ one foot in Spring

* Procrastination - and healing or not!

* Taking the time for consolidation of new learning

* Listening

* Recent outside gigs and commitments

* Unburying the MIxmoir

* Accepting was is her task and what is not her task

* The episodes to come for Spring

You have just joined another solo episode with the host of The Earth Sea Love Podcast, Dr. Sheree Mack as she takes the time and energy to share with you her healing journey of 2023, so far!

This episode starts with another quote from Alex Elle, which states,  

"We heal to make space, to redefine ourselves and our narratives. To expand and become better. To forgive, create new possibilities, and move forward. To build community and create bonds. We heal to release shame, manifest self-love, create autonomy, and begin again. We heal to redefine ourselves, face our fears, and develop self-trust. We heal to mend relationships and deepen connections with those around is. We heal to get free. "

Alex Elle, How We Heal: Uncover Your Power and Set Yourself Free ( 2022, p.12)

Following this quote, Sheree shares about her issue around considering herself 'enough' and then continues to share her 10 reasons for wanting to heal, taken from Elle's book.

Here are the sentence starters as mentioned in this episode which also appear in Alex Elle's book and can be used by you to think about what you need to heal also.

Ten Reasons Why I Heal ( p.18 of How We Heal)

I am healing because I want ...

I am healing because I need ...

I am healing because I deserve ...

I am healing because I feel ...

I am healing because I see ...

I am healing because I love ...

I am healing because I my ...

I am healing because I am ...

I am healing because I can ...

I am healing because I choose ...

You have just joined another solo episode with the host of The Earth Sea Love Podcast, Dr. Sheree Mack as she takes the time and energy to share with you her healing journey of 2023, so far!

This episode starts with a quote from Alex Elle, which states,    

" give yourself permission to mend slowly, and sweetly, and in due time. there's no need to rush your healing, there's no need to "get over it" today - or even tomorrow. let your process lead you. make space for your grief to teach you something."

Sheree follows up this quote from Alex Ella with a discussion around:

* We all need to heal

* Getting her fur fix on through dog sitting

* Sharing another practice of her healing process - oracle cards

* The Earthcraft Oracle by Juliet Diaz and Lorriane Anderson and illustrated by Danielle Boodoo-Fortune

* Pulling number 13 - Inner Healer card

* Choosing to take trauma and transforming it into medicine

* Shining light and confronting pain

Welcome back to another episode from your host Dr. Sheree Mack, where she is sharing her healing journey for 2023.

In this episode, Sheree starts with a poem. 'When George Met Anita, Bradford 1968.' Taken from Sheree's first full collection of poetry titled, Family Album, 2011, Flambard Press, Sheree shares this poem to shed light on the love she witnessed between her mum and dad while growing up.

Also in this episode, Sheree talks about:

* The love between soulmates

* The love of a good woman can save a life

* The story of her marriage breakdown

* The grieving to healing journey

* The expectations of marriage

* Committing to spending time alone to heal

* The power of love as a healing resource

* As a Blackwoman in white supremacy culture

* Listening to the podcast,  Soft Where? by Ayana Zaire Cotton

* To be in relationship with love and care

* Testing the healing process.

" We are all worthy go love, we are all worthy of care, we are all worthy of possibilities." Ayana Zaire Cotton