- 3 months ago
Today on The Cameron Journal Podcast we're joined by Joseph Bolton who has written a series of books called, "Old Grandmother's Tree." It explores the stories of French Canadians and Algonquin first nation peoples. This is a great conversation and a truly different perspective. The books are fully illustrated just like the background in the video! It's a mult-sensory feast!
Learn more at oldgrandmotherstree.com
Learn more at oldgrandmotherstree.com
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CreativityTranscript
00:00Thank you very much.
00:30Today on the Cameron Journal podcast, we are joined by Joseph Bolton.
00:33He is the author of Old Grandmother's Tree, Volumes 1 and 2.
00:38This is all about, based on French-Canadian culture in New England.
00:43He has family that is French-Canadian, and so this is a lot of their stories and lore and all this type of thing, neatly packaged in a book for you to read.
00:53And so he's a veteran and has a very interesting past in history and doing all of that and keeping the country safe and whatnot.
01:02And today we're going to learn all about these wonderful folklore stories.
01:06I love a good folklore.
01:08We're going to learn more about this folklore that he's put together for us.
01:10So welcome, Joseph, to the Cameron Journal podcast.
01:13Oh, thank you.
01:14I think I'm very glad to be here today and share with you this exciting new book series, Old Grandmother's Tree.
01:20Yes.
01:20Well, I don't want to start from the very beginning.
01:21Why don't you tell us a little about yourself and your book?
01:24Okay.
01:24Well, I am a 25-year Army veteran.
01:28I graduated West Point.
01:31I served in the infantry.
01:32I was a space operations officer in the Army.
01:34I did a year in Afghanistan.
01:36Retired in 2007.
01:38And right now I've been working as a project manager as a civilian for the Air Force out here in Massachusetts.
01:44And on the side, on top of all the other things I'm doing, I have been, the last couple of years, been writing this book series, brand new, called Old Grandmother's Tree.
01:55And as you mentioned, it does tie into my family's history.
02:00On my mother's side, I am mostly French-Canadian.
02:04My mother's, all her, four of her grandparents are born in Quebec.
02:08And so what I did was, in this book series, I took my actual French-Canadian ancestors and my Algonquin ancestors in Quebec, and I retold their story in the language of folklore.
02:26So, in other words, we have Quebec in the 17th and the early 20th centuries, except it's a magical Quebec with Native American-inspired trickster animal characters and a little bit of magic.
02:41And it's in the language of the folktale.
02:44So you have some of the stories in the books are a little poignant and very thought-provoking.
02:50Others are rather farcical, to be quite honest, because that's kind of like the language of the folktale.
02:57And I chose folktales because folktales are a universal language in the world.
03:02Every culture has folktales.
03:05And if you read enough of them, you'll see that they all have a kind of a commonality, especially how they talk about the human condition and living and what it means to be a human being living in the world.
03:16Well, so I guess the first question really is, what inspired you to do this?
03:25What got you motivated to put these stories together?
03:28Well, I kind of came to it gradually.
03:30I wrote the first story based on my great-great-grandmother in Quebec, and I was taking French lessons at the time.
03:39And I thought, well, I'd write this funny little French story, you know, story in French for my class.
03:48And it was my great-great-grandmother's farm in Quebec.
03:53And at midnight, the animals sneak out of the barn, grab a toboggan, and go sliding down the hill in the middle of the winter.
04:00So it's very Quebec style.
04:02You have a toboggan, you have snow, you have sliding.
04:05And, you know, it was a great story.
04:09And it was fun.
04:10It was fun to write.
04:10And so I decided to write another one.
04:12And so what I realized is that early on is that the story of my great-great-grandmother also ties into the story of my Algonquin ninth great-grandmother, Mityo Goku.
04:26And the more I learned about her life and how inspiring it was and how she overcome adverse in your life, that really inspired me to go to kind of shift the story a little bit to her and retell that story in the language of a folktale.
04:44But to bring that life and that time into existence.
04:49The other thing that makes the story kind of unique is that it is heavily illustrated.
04:54There is 450, at least 450, full-color illustrations over the two volumes that we have.
05:05And it's almost one full-color illustration per page.
05:10In a sense, it's very much approaching almost like a graphic novel, but it isn't.
05:16So it's this very large book.
05:18There's 40,000 words in these two volumes, 450 illustrations.
05:23So that's the only thing that kind of makes it kind of unique.
05:26It's very illustrated, but it's very large.
05:28It's much larger than a typical illustrated book.
05:32And so why did I kind of shift focus to this young woman named Mityo Goku?
05:41Well, it turns out her life in mid-1600s in Quebec was very well documented by the Jesuits who lived in the Trois-RiviĂšres in Quebec.
05:51And when she was about 22 years old, she was married to another Algonquin named Asibavish.
05:59They had two small children.
06:01And their village was attacked by Mohawks from the south in New York.
06:07And during the attack, her husband was killed and her two children were kidnapped and taken away by the Mohawks.
06:14She never saw them again, never even knew what happened to them.
06:16And so here she is at 22.
06:20She lost everything.
06:21She lost her husband.
06:22She lost her children.
06:24And but, you know, five years later, she married again a French citizen named Pierre Kauk.
06:30They became my ancestors.
06:32And she lived this, you know, life within this community.
06:35And she rebuilt her life.
06:36And she made something beautiful out of it.
06:38And at the very end of her life, when she died, right after she died, the priest in her village wrote of her.
06:48And he said, Michio Goku lived a full life with dignity, respect and love.
06:57A courageous and loving Algonquin woman.
07:00And, you know, I read that.
07:03I said, that's one of one of the most beautiful two line eulogies that a person could write.
07:09How many of us at the end of our life would say we've done very well if if someone could say that person lived a life of dignity, respect, love and courage.
07:19And so for her to start off losing everything at 22, living a life at the very end, for this priest to write that about her, about living a life of dignity, respect, courage and love.
07:33I said she had to have a remarkable life and a major impact on the people around her.
07:38So she was really the inspiring.
07:40So I really wanted to tell her story and honor her through storytelling.
07:45Yeah. So how how I mean, coming from a more military background, how did you get into to to writing, you know, at all and deciding to take on this creative project?
07:59Well, I think I really started writing the first time I wrote was back in 2013.
08:04I had just lost my one of my younger brothers to ALS at the time.
08:09And I started kind of a blog and it was really not a fictional blog.
08:16I wrote a little bit on philosophy, history, religion, science, whatever was on my mind.
08:22It was kind of therapeutic for me at the time.
08:25And that's really when I started to to write was during that time period.
08:30It's kind of therapy for myself after the loss of my brother.
08:32But, you know, as even as a young child, I was always very imaginative, even though I was very, you know, and love stories.
08:42And I've always loved mythology and I loved, you know, how things connect, really studying about how we connect into the world around us.
08:52How do we connect in with our family, extended families?
08:55How do we connect in with our ancestors?
08:58I always wanted I always asked lots of questions of my grandparents and my great aunts and uncles about where we came from in Quebec.
09:08So I was always fascinated by that.
09:10So, you know, a few years ago, maybe about three or four years ago is when I actually started writing that first story is when that love of storytelling and that desire for connection with my own family's history kind of merged together and created these this series of books.
09:28And it's only the beginning.
09:30I've got a volume three that's being worked on right now.
09:34It's already written and the illustrations are going to be starting to be finalized starting in just a couple of weeks.
09:42And we should have that out by the end of the summer.
09:44And then I have a volume four in the same series, which will be coming.
09:50It's already written and that'll probably be coming out early next year.
09:55Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about the illustration process, because some people are very nervous about that.
10:03How is what this walk us through the process of how the illustrations come together?
10:09OK, well, I actually work with two authors, two illustrators.
10:13Excuse me.
10:13One was one of the illustrators is the storyboard, a storyboard artist.
10:19And her job is that we work together.
10:22We go through the story and she does these rough sketches about where we want an illustration to go.
10:27What do we kind of want that what illustration to show in that in there at that point in the story?
10:34And so she kind of she's like the pioneer.
10:37She goes to a story and she marks all the places where the final illustrations will go.
10:43And Masami, Keona is her name, and she lurks in Manhattan and she's a storyboard artist.
10:48She does for commercials.
10:50In fact, one of her commercials was in the I think it was for Doritos in the Super Bowl a couple of years ago that she helped design that way.
10:57So that's the first part of the process.
11:00The second part is the finalization of the rough sketches and putting them into the final color palette that we have.
11:11And for that, I'm working with a Toronto-based artist named Natasha Pelley-Smith.
11:17And she's a wonderful artist.
11:20She was trained in Paris, actually, as an artist for her college work in art.
11:29And so she takes those rough sketches and she kind of adds her own layer on it.
11:34She doesn't just fill in the line with color, but she adds her own depth and three-dimensionality, her own touches to the characters within the stories.
11:42And, of course, we talk through every single illustration and carefully design them.
11:47And the illustrations themselves are designed to be half of the storytelling process in the books.
11:54So they are really two halves of that process so that you need the text and the illustrations to see the whole story.
12:04No, that's really cool.
12:07A lot of people are very nervous about those processes, so it's always nice to hear them.
12:13And how did you guys settle on an art style?
12:15Well, I think a lot of the basic art style, it really comes from Masami Kiyono.
12:22You know, she's the one who did a lot of the initial character designs herself.
12:27And, you know, we kind of, we as a team, Masami and Natasha, worked through and designed these characters.
12:36And we also did a lot of research, especially researching how Native people in Canada lived in the 17th century.
12:45You know, the style of clothing that they lived, the kind of homes they lived in themselves, how they had their hair.
12:52Very much a lot of research went into that design as well.
12:55And that also includes also the French-Canadian settlers of that time period.
12:59What kind of clothing were people wearing?
13:01What kind of, what did their homes look like?
13:03So there was a lot of research that also went into the design of the illustrations.
13:08And, you know, you talk about people being nervous about it.
13:11Well, in a sense, you have to keep in mind that if you're going to do a large illustrative book, that it's very labor intensive.
13:19The illustrated portion takes thousands of hours of work.
13:25And it's, you know, if you're doing a small book, it's probably a lot easier.
13:29But if you're going to do a large book, it can be a challenging process to do.
13:33And it took us a couple of years to actually get through just the illustrations themselves.
13:41No, I mean, that's why, I mean, yes, it is such a big lift and it's such a big process.
13:47I am coordinating a children's book for the first time and the illustration process is its own separate thing.
13:58It's its own thing that we have to manage.
14:01So I definitely understand that.
14:03Let's get back into the writing, though.
14:05Tell us a little bit about your writing process.
14:07How do you come up with these stories, develop them, write them?
14:11Are you an outline or does it just flow?
14:13How does that work?
14:14Well, I'm definitely more of I write based on the inspiration.
14:19I would say the stories kind of percolate within myself and the very back of my subconscious.
14:26And when they're ready, I'll suddenly feel that sense of creativity.
14:31And I will go downstairs, go to the computer right away, and I'll knock out a rough draft within two days of 4,000, 5,000 words for each of those stories.
14:41So I never do an outline.
14:45I'm very much a visual in my imagination when it comes to creating the stories.
14:52I put the characters in a situation, and then I kind of just watch what the characters do.
14:58And then I just kind of type that out.
15:01I've never worked.
15:02I know that some people start with an outline, but I've never done that myself.
15:06I kind of write when I have the inspiration.
15:10And before then, there's a lot of replaying the stories in my mind, almost like a movie, before I put them down on the page, so to say, into the computer itself and create the story.
15:25And, of course, you know, even though as writers we always like to think that our first draft is 100% perfect, well, it always benefits from feedback from trusted friends you may have that will give you honest, you know will give you honest feedback.
15:43I've been working with an editor slash writer's coach out of Montreal, and so she's been providing a lot of feedback for that as well.
15:51And then, you know, I still also get feedback from, you know, Natasha and Masami as they create the illustrations.
15:59Sometimes we have ideas in the illustrations that says, you know, we want to tell us, this helps us tell the story a different way.
16:08And so we'll change the text to kind of complement the illustrations instead of the illustrations just complementing the text.
16:16So, in some ways, I think the writing process is the easiest part for me.
16:23I think matching them up with the illustration probably takes the most time.
16:29But I think everyone has their own different styles.
16:33I belong to a writer's group at my local library.
16:37And some of the writers there, they're very much, they map out the whole story ahead of time.
16:41They'll do this outline, and then they'll go back and start filling it in.
16:46That style has never worked for me.
16:48It's very much, you know, like that.
16:50And I also find that a lot of the story process, as I link these various stories all together, and there's like 10 stories total in these two volumes,
17:00that there are details in those stories that I'm not aware of at a conscious level, but they do link into other stories I haven't even written yet,
17:12and the way they all kind of tie in together.
17:15So there really is a subconscious process to creativity when you're writing that I think happens below the surface of your mind.
17:25And I think that if you're in tune with that, and you let that flow, I think you can really create,
17:32it really helps you with your world building if you're writing a fictional story.
17:37And it helps, you know, create, tie your stories in together if you listen to that part of your imagination that occurs below the surface.
17:45No, no, that's, that's, I always, if it makes you feel any better, the, the proportion of people who don't outline to outline on this show is easily 10 to 1.
17:58Like, when someone is an outliner, I celebrate, because I also outline, I always celebrate them, because there's so, apparently so few of us,
18:08everyone else is just out here, you know, cranking it out sort of thing, while we're plotting and planning over in the corner.
18:16So you're in good company with almost everyone else who's been on this show.
18:20So that's, that's very, that's very good.
18:24Now, it's kind of an odd thing.
18:26Is this book for adults, for children?
18:30Who's the target audience here?
18:33Everyone, everyone I'd say.
18:34I, you know, I wrote, you know, early on, I remember when I first started writing the story.
18:40And the very first story I wrote had the farm animals on top of the hill smoking cigars and drinking wine.
18:48And the editor, one of the assistants of the editor, looking at the story, says, how can you write this story for children?
18:55You have animals that are, that are drinking wine and smoking cigars.
18:59I said, look, I'm just writing a good story.
19:02So it really, it really is meant for everyone.
19:05And I really didn't have a target audience in mind.
19:08Because I think if I did, it would have really constrained the creative process for me.
19:14So my first goal is to write a story that let, you know, the story that everyone could enjoy.
19:22And I would say what has come out of this process is a book that adults will enjoy reading because there are some parts of it, again, very, you know, very thoughtful, thought-provoking.
19:34There are parts that adults will enjoy reading with their children and their grandchildren because there's some very, some stories are kind of silly and farcical, especially with the trickster animals and their antics that they do.
19:47So it's really, I would say it's meant for adults and it's also especially meant for adults reading to younger children.
19:55And it's really good also for children, I would say, from 10, 10, 10 years old and up to read because it's about that reading level.
20:04I would say, you know, a chapter book, lots of illustrations, but it's not, but there's a lot of text on there as well.
20:12So I think that's the way, that's the way it is.
20:15It's for everybody.
20:16And that, and that's made it kind of a challenge for me when it came to marketing the book, because it's, especially if you try to put the book on Amazon, Amazon really wants you to put your book in a category.
20:26And I think that this book really doesn't really match very well in all those categories that Amazon had.
20:33So that part has been a challenge for me, but I really believe that the first priority as a writer and teaming up with my artists between the three of us, our first priority was let's create a great book and just see where it lands.
20:50And that's how, that was the approach that we took.
20:52Let's just make sure what we're doing is, is building is of good quality.
20:58And then we'll just see where that comes out.
21:01And we believe that a good book will be read based on the quality of itself and not really worry about the categories that it fit in.
21:09Yeah, that's when it comes to the marketing and not necessarily wanting to fit into a strict, you know, into a strict category that, I mean, how, how has the marketing and sales been?
21:24Because as someone who works at a publishing company, I kind of recoil in horror to be kind of like, no, no, you really, it has to fit somewhere.
21:32You've got to find some way to make it fit somewhere.
21:35Otherwise you don't come up and search with all these logistical marketing issues.
21:37So what, what have you been doing from, from, for the marketing?
21:40How has it been?
21:41Well, it's, it's been slow, but steady.
21:44I think the chat, part of the challenges for marketing, especially if you, you know, you self-write and you self, you put that together.
21:51It, you're, you're one of a million, literally if books everywhere throughout the market.
21:57So how do you get known?
21:58Well, I've, I've been visiting bookstores in the local area in New England, where I live libraries, and I've got the books for sale.
22:07And I also actually have the book for sale in Quebec at one place.
22:23It's the St. Catery Shrine at the Mohawk Reservation, just south of Montreal.
22:28And, uh, I've also teamed up with, uh, the Algonquin community in Ontario, and they're kind of helping me promote the book up there.
22:38And I teamed up with them because of course, Mitio Goku comes for, is an Algonquin woman herself from the stories.
22:45So I would say my advice to anyone else is that if you really want the book to be known, you have to kind of put the effort in to market it yourself.
22:57You can't just put the book out on Amazon and expect that all these sales are going to happen.
23:03You actually have to get the book in hands of people.
23:06And, you know, back to, you know, the whole thing, how to categorize it.
23:11When I've described this book, for example, to, you know, booksellers, and I'll say, I don't have, I'm just describing it verbally.
23:18A lot of them are very confused or like, you're telling me you wrote a story about something in the 17th century in Quebec and it's kind of folklore and stuff.
23:28And how does that even work?
23:29People are kind of fusing, like they want to put it in a category, but I would say that once someone gets a hand, is handed a copy of this book and it is actually in their hands and they start thumbing through the pages, people love the book.
23:45People love the book once they get in.
23:47So that's part of the key.
23:49You've got to get the book in the hands of readers, whatever way you can do that.
23:55Even if it is just giving it away initially, but that's your, that is your best, your best strategy for marketing a book.
24:03I think is you first, you make sure what you're, what you have is of good quality and then you just get it into people's hands, whatever way you can.
24:13No, no.
24:13I mean, that's, that's very good.
24:15And I'm glad that you're running a robust local library situation.
24:19I think a lot of authors underestimate the power of that.
24:23Um, in, in, when I'm on the soup side of my life as director of publications and anthologies at something other publishing, um, that's the, our bookstore program is a very important thing, but we encourage our authors to go out and find one or two of their own in their own local area to, cause I agree with you.
24:41But it is a wonderful way to kind of get that initial, um, you know, that initial kind of interest going and started, um, which is very, very difficult to, very difficult to do.
24:53So it's, uh, yeah.
24:56And it sounds like you're kind of tearing through the third one's already planned and you're working on illustrations and all this sort of thing.
25:02So, oh yeah, it's, uh, yeah, we've got, like I said, two, two more books are written and they've just started putting the illustrations.
25:12I've got another idea for a book after that.
25:15So that would be five volumes if it gets, if it gets to that point, but I got two that are definitely being, or definitely getting ready to be completed one in a few months and the one early next year.
25:26And, um, yeah, I, I really have, you know, high hopes for this book.
25:32I think that is, as I really feel that people look at this book, they say, one of the comments I hear is this would have made a, this would make a great animated series.
25:42And I'm like, well, yeah, it would be, it would be, it's, it's ready made for that because the illustrations are, are quality, are high quality.
25:50The stories are good. And if it was going to be changed, uh, you know, transcribed into an animated series, all the storyboard for that, for that series is all done because I have all the illustrations in those books.
26:04So if you're an animator, you could look at this and go, oh yeah, we can just go to fill it based on these illustrations.
26:11We can kind of create an animated series. It's already mapped out for us.
26:15So I, I definitely believe, I really do believe in my heart that eventually we're going to see it as an animated series.
26:23How that's going to happen yet. I don't know, but I really do believe that.
26:27And I have confidence in that because I do believe that what we have is, is that good.
26:34And the feedback we get from people who read the book is very positive.
26:39No, that's, um, that, that's fantastic. So we've reached the part of the show where we do plugs. This has all been very interesting.
26:49Um, so why don't you let us know where we can keep up with you online and where we can buy the book?
26:55Okay. Well, um, I have a website, a very robust website. It's called old grandmothers tree.com.
27:03So it's old grandmothers tree.com written as one word. And, uh, on that website, I have, um, my biography, the biography of Natasha, uh, as the illustrator.
27:16I have links where you can order the books, uh, from Amazon. And also the book is available in French because it was written as a French Canadian folktale.
27:25So you can order French copies of it also on Amazon. Um, there's a sample, uh, mosaic.
27:31We have this beautiful mosaic of just a very small portion of the illustrations. Um, so you can get a sense of what, of what kind of stories are inside these books.
27:42And there's also a Wikipedia because if you're doing a great, you know, world, world building and you have so many characters, it's great to have a place where you can kind of keep, keep that straight and you can refer to.
27:54So we have a Wikipedia of the old grandmother's tree universe with, uh, all the locations.
28:01The stories have taken place, all the characters. And if you read it carefully is actually, um, characters in there that have not yet appeared in the stories, but will appear in future stories.
28:13So that's, that's, no, that's, that's amazing. This is a, this is such an established world already. So that's, that's wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming on the Cameron Journal podcast.
28:23Thank you. I've really enjoyed my time here.
28:38That's all for this episode of the Cameron Journal podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Visit us online at CameronJournal.com. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
28:50And I love to talk to my followers and listeners. So please feel free to get us on social media at Cameron Cowan on Twitter.
28:58And we'll see you next time on the Cameron Journal podcast.
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