Author and Musician Jo Jukes Releases New Book and New Album

Transcript

00:00 [Music]

00:18 Well, I mean, it's been a really exciting couple of years.

00:21 So the first book was all about the hill forts of Shropshire and journeying throughout the county

00:25 and writing songs about connection to land.

00:28 And I followed it up with this book, Finding Beauty, A Year of Nature Outside Your Door.

00:33 And it really just started from looking out of my window at what I can see in the garden.

00:38 The trees, the houses, the rooftops where the rookery is.

00:42 And I was also doing a monthly nature article in the Wenlock Herald about the old cemetery here.

00:47 And it was the act of visiting something every month with an intention to get to know a place

00:52 that really got me thinking about how to structure that into a book.

00:56 So it kind of works by a month-by-month approach.

01:01 And every chapter has a photograph, colour photograph, a little verse.

01:07 And it also ends with a poem.

01:09 Because the poems for me were the things that were how I recorded my initial feelings about when I was out on the landscape.

01:17 And the poems then became songs, a lot of them.

01:20 Or they became other writings.

01:23 I've got a bit of herbal medicine in here as well because my grandma was a real wise woman

01:29 who knew the plants and knew the cures.

01:33 She had to, she was poor, she was a miner and a mining family.

01:37 And that's what a lot of the songs are about.

01:39 They're about our ancestral journey, where we come from, how we ended up being moved off the land

01:46 and into that industrial heartland in the north, which is where my family ended up.

01:51 Although they're not actually from the north, I found out from the song that one of them was from Suffolk,

01:56 a great-great-great-grandad, and another one was from Berkshire.

01:59 So tracing your family tree, looking at where you're from, and how do you feel about the landscape.

02:05 So everything that I do really has a nature connection.

02:09 It always brings me back to what do I get from nature and what does nature do for me.

02:15 I'm an animal, I'm a mammal, and so I need the seasons and I need the light and the sun and the plants and the birdsong.

02:21 And it's part of a healing process for a lot of people and the workshops that I teach as well.

02:26 So that's a little bit about them.

02:28 [Music]