Ars Botanica -the book
Tim Taranto is a writer, visual artist, and poet from New York. His work has been featured in Buzzfeed, FSG's Works in Progress, Harper's, The Iowa Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and The Saint Ann's Review. Tim is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
“Ars Botanica is a gorgeous hybrid: a memoir in letters to a phantom addressee, an introduction to life on this planet, a primer for how to live, a meditation on family. It also winds up being a beautiful and highly personal field guide to the natural world. It's one of the most wrenching and honest accounts of falling in and out of love, of moving through a season of grief, that I've ever read.”
-Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia
Show Notes:
0:40 Becca’s Episode
Tim’s Book- Ars Botanica
1:43 Tim’s introduction
2:25 “That’s the highest praise for a piece of art… the desire to share it… art move us to emulation…”
3:25 “...if that book doesn’t exist you have to write it”
Instagram @timltaranto
7:31 Pearl analogy- “something very beautiful that’s created from something uncomfortable” “birthed out of something painful”
8:50 “I made art out of abortion to process the experience”
9:44 “There’s a certain amount of insincerity in the conversation that doesn’t serve anybody on any side… art is a place where you can have sincere difficult conversations”
“I thought everyone would hate this book”
11:08 “This is one of those book that doesn’t find lot of people but when it does, it hits them like meteor”
12:17 I call it a baby, I did end it’s life… it’s all the things
12:54 “We know that if you tell someone that it’s nothing… then you don’t allow them to process and mourn”
13:54 “I had to write myself on to the page to show myself how to get through it”
14:51 “There was a life and I was capable of ending it”
15:33 “Men didn’t want to talk about it, but there was an understanding…”
16:12 “Something about the community we’ve created does not really support the individuals who are at the crux of it”
18:50 “Art becomes a repository for certain emotions that we maybe aren’t meant to carry around with us the whole time”
We need places for thoughts and feelings to land
21:41 “It was better than carrying it with me as trauma”
22:04 I’m happily married now and I’m a good husband because I found a way to accommodate some difficult baggage I had…”
Women & Children First Chicago BookStore
In all of our programming our fear of men’s voices makes sense
26:03 “Political tribalism hasn’t helped anyone at all”
I can be an amazing mother AND choose to abort my child
@timtaranto
