Joseph Bolton: The soldier, the shawl and the trickster animals

From combat engineer to creative conjurer, discover how Joseph Bolton merges magic, ancestry and the northern lights in his new-found love for writing folklore and fantasy.

Joseph joined the US Army straight out of high school, and in his 25 years of service graduated from West Point and Ranger School and worked as a combat engineer (a role that involved building bridges and blowing things up), an infantry officer, and even a space operations officer. 

After the passing of his younger brother from ALS in 2013, Joseph felt a profound need to reflect on the value of time and growing older. This led him first to an expressive blog and eventually to the highly unusual creative project that would define his next chapter.

The Old Grandmother’s Tree collection of stories began life as a charming French Canadian folktale about farm animals (who surprisingly 'smoke cigars and drink wine'), and soon became a series of highly illustrated tales rooted in Joseph's ancestry and featuring magic, ghosts, and trickster animal characters – a magic shawl with the colour of the northern lights was a feature of the first short story and later became the genesis for the entire series. 

Joseph is a highly visual writer who sees stories unfold 'as a movie within my mind', and collaborates with artists Masami Kiyono and Natasha Pelley-Smith to create this unique hybrid format – a series so heavily illustrated it features close to 700 images across its first three volumes, blurring the line between a traditional novel and a graphic novel.

This episode offers a compelling look at how creativity can emerge in unexpected moments and how personal loss can spark artistic expression. It's a must-listen for anyone interested in family history, creative late-blooming, and the surprising ways our life experiences shape our storytelling.

Find the Old Grandmother's Tree books here

creativityfound.co.uk

Researched, edited and produced by Claire Waite Brown
Music: Day Trips by Ketsa Undercover / Ketsa Creative Commons License Free Music Archive - Ketsa - Day Trips

Affordably advertise on this podcast by emailing claire@creativityfound.co.uk, or book a call here.

I would love some financial support to help me to keep making this podcast. Visit buymeacoffee.com/creativityfound

Chapters

• 2:24 Introducing Joseph Bolton
• 5:51 Childhood creativity
• 7:19 Joining the US Army
• 10:38 Retiring from the army: what next?
• 12:16 Cathartic nature of writing
• 14:24 Folklore and ancestry
• 17:23 Visual storytelling
• 21:30 The wider benefits of a creative pursuit
• 22:57 The Old Grandmother's Tree series
• 26:34 Connect with Joseph Bolton

Transcript

Joseph Bolton: 0:37

As a teenager in high school, I was very, very rough and rugged. I was a wrestler, I was a football player, I wasn't afraid of being tough. I liked physical competition, and so the army was a natural fit. I had been out of the army for a few years, and then after you know my brother's passing away, ALS is what he died of, which was a terrible disease to have. And I really felt that need to reflect about time and about the value of time and about growing older. The stories just hit me, and I didn't expect to do it. I wasn't necessarily even looking for it. It's just that it came to me. And then when it's there, it's like a damn burst. But I think internally, it's helped me feel like I have a place. I know my place within the world. I know where I came from. I know how I connect back to that world of the past.

Claire Waite Brown: 1:34

Hi, I'm Claire. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or refound their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the art, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuit. And how their creative lives enrich their practical, necessary, everyday lives. Hi Joseph, how are you?

Joseph Bolton: 2:13

Oh, hello, Claire. I'm doing very well. How are you?

Claire Waite Brown: 2:16

I'm very good, thank you. Start by telling me about the creative activity that you came to in adulthood.

Joseph Bolton: 2:24

Well, I was a uh I was a longtime Army officer. I retired in 2007, and I really didn't start writing until a few years after I retired from the Army. I started right after the death of my younger brother, who died in 2013 of ALS. And it left me with a sense of grief and longing. And so I began a blog and I would muse on science, religion, philosophy, mathematics, whatever came to my mind. I didn't care if anybody even read it. It was just something for me. And uh towards the end of that project, I started to write a creative little story and put it into the blog. And it was a charming little French-Canadian folk tale of farm animals in Quebec, the turn of the 20th century, waking up under the moonlight and taking a toboggan and sliding down the hill outside the barn to be caught by the farm wife, who instead of scolding them, decides to toboggan down with them. It was a cute little story, and I worked with an artist and I created it, and I even actually published it just as a single little short story. I realized, though, that I enjoyed that. It was kind of a strange book in some ways. The animals did things like smoke cigars and drink wine. And around that same time, I also was researching my own French-Canadian ancestors on my mother's side. My mother's grandparents were all born in Quebec. So I discovered them. And I also discovered an Algonquin woman was one of my ancestors who lived in the 17th century. And she had a very remarkable story. And just by some coincidence, the farm woman who was actually based on my great-grandmother, Delia Mernier, she is a descendant of this Algonquin woman. And of course, I am as well through her. And so immediately there was like a potential for a connection of this story. So I said, I'm going to write a backstory. And the interesting thing about the creative process is sometimes you do things when you write or you illustrate. I think subconsciously we put something in the story that we're not aware of at a conscious level, but it'll pop up in significance later on as you continue to write. And the same thing with this story, and that was a magic shawl who had the color of the northern lights. That was in the first story with Delia Mernier, the farm wife. And the backstory became that this shawl originally belonged to her Algonquin ancestor, Mitio Goku, again, real woman. And it was passed down generation to generation. And so that became the genesis of what I have now, two-volume set of stories. And there's like, oh, I guess about 12 stories right now, I think, with the third volume coming out here in just a couple of weeks. And fully illustrated. I think I'm going to be up to like about 700 illustrations, full illustrations in all three of these volumes. So it's a very exciting series, and it's very well received. And people who look at this book, they're like, what? I describe it to them. You're doing a folk tale on your real ancestors and their farm and talking animals, but it's based on a real story. And they're really confused until I hand them the book and they're like, Oh, I get it. This is really cool.

Claire Waite Brown: 5:40

Yeah. I can understand why people say that, but also because it seems very different from the the story of your life that you're going to tell me about now and the writing that you've done beforehand.

Joseph Bolton: 5:51

Yes.

Claire Waite Brown: 5:52

Let's go with when you were younger at school and at home. Were creative activities encouraged? Were they a part of your life in whatever form they may have taken?

Joseph Bolton: 6:04

Well, as a child, I was very imaginative. And I would like to create adventures with the other children in the neighborhood where I grew up. And in my mind, the way I presented it to them is that this was real. That we weren't pretending. We had real adventures and uh all kinds of things you can think of. And one most biggest one we did was that we all pretended we were soldiers fighting the British because the British were coming back. I was like eight, nine years old at the time. And so the kid, neighborhood kids, they all went along with it. But they all told me they all knew it was a bunch of baloney. And I'm like, okay, I guess so. But and then as I got older, I wrote poetry. You know, lovesick uh teenage boys would have a tendency to do. And I didn't continue that into college. But you know, in between that time period, I I really didn't write. But I think I was always a person of imagination, a person who saw possibilities and connectedness. And I think that became the basis for my creativity today.

Claire Waite Brown: 7:09

And when you were at school then, did you did you always want to go into the armed forces? Was that something you wanted to do when you grew up, or you didn't know what you wanted to do when you grew up?

Joseph Bolton: 7:20

First I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a little kid, and then I kind of backed off from that. But I had uncles that were in the army when I was a child, so one of them served in Vietnam. So I had that that kind of role model to look to. And so I wanted to be tough and I wanted to be in the army. And, you know, as a kid, as a teenager, high school, I was very, very rough and rugged. I was a wrestler, I was a football player, I wasn't afraid of being tough. I liked physical competition, and so the army was a natural fit. But in some ways, though, it was not a really good fit because my own personality was very different from the way a lot of other army, um, other army officers, I was an officer, I graduated from West Point, and I think it was a little different. It always created a little bit of a tension because I tension because I saw the world a little differently. But nevertheless, I did survive through. Interesting enough, though, none of my stories are really based on the army experience at all. Totally separate from that.

Claire Waite Brown: 8:18

An interesting escape, perhaps. What roles did you have in the Army?

Joseph Bolton: 8:23

Well, I enlisted right out of high school and I was 18 years old, left home, and I became a combat engineer. I remember going into the recruiter's office, and he asked me, I want to go to college someday. I said, Yes. And he said, Well, what do you want to do? I said, I want to be an engineer, like think a mechanical engineer. That was my first call. Well, I got the job for you. Combat engineer, he said it. And what a combat engineer turned out to be was somebody who built bridges and blew up stuff with demolitions. Very different. And then while I was there, the drill instructors asked for volunteers for airborne training, and so I volunteered for that because I was just 18 years old and didn't know any better. So at 18 years old, I was jumping out of planes and went to Fort Bragg. And then because I was, you know, I was a relatively smart kid and I had high test scores, they asked me if I was interested in applying to West Point from the enlisted ranks, and so I did. And West Point for so many enlisters is very is like kind of like the equivalent of Sandhurst, actually. Just a side note, when I was at West Point, one of my spring breaks, we had a club, a military club. Military club within a military college. But anyway, what we did was for spring break, we went to Sandhurst and spent the week up there with the cadets, which was a very interesting experience as well.

Claire Waite Brown: 9:38

Wow. So then what happens after West Point that gives you more opportunities?

Joseph Bolton: 9:44

Well, I became an infantry officer. I went to graduated from the U.S. Army's Rangers School, which is like a commando course, and I served for several jobs and assignments, and then I eventually became promoted to what I became a major. I became a space operations officer for the Army, and I served a year in Afghanistan. I was in a general staff headquarters, and uh I also worked with soldiers from various countries, including Canada and Great Britain, France, Germany, Poland, all there at the headquarters with us.

Claire Waite Brown: 10:19

And did you have a family?

Joseph Bolton: 10:20

Yes, I uh I married not too far long after I graduated from West Point. I have two daughters, both of them in their early 30s now.

Claire Waite Brown: 10:28

Okay, so how long did you stay in the army? And then I know that you retired. So then what happened? What did you do after that? Because that doesn't mean you're retiring and and retiring, retiring.

Joseph Bolton: 10:39

Well, today it does. Actually, I retired uh Monda um Tuesday was the last day. Oh wow. Yes. So anyway, when I gradu I I did a long time in the army, you know, from enlisted ranks when I was a private soldier through West Point, which is a military academy. You're in the army during the school, then graduated afterwards. I retired in 2007. So it was about 25 years, I think, total time that I was in the army. And initially when I got out, I didn't want to have anything to do with the military. I figured I've been doing the military my entire adult life. So let's see what else is out there. I tried another job, didn't really work. And so I ended up going back into government service as a civilian for the Department of Defense as a contractor. And so that's what I pretty much did from 2007 up until yesterday. And yesterday I started teaching at a small little Catholic school in Massachusetts, about 25 minutes from here, teaching uh religion, actually. Which I like. I like teaching, I like being with the kids.

Claire Waite Brown: 11:41

Yeah. You did some teaching as well, previous uh believe.

Joseph Bolton: 11:45

Yes, I actually did take some time off from being a contractor and I taught mathematics at the same school. But then I I had a job offer offer, and actually it worked out well because I needed money to finish my first two books, Old Grandmother's Tree. So while taking a break gave me time to write the stories, but doing the art and actually building of the books took money. I had to it took that job so I can get that funds to do it. So I actually did that for a while.

Claire Waite Brown: 12:17

Before we get to the Old Grandmother's Tree books, which are a very specific form of book, were you dabbling in writing before that, whether in the army when you were teaching, you know, was that anything that came in?

Joseph Bolton: 12:31

No, except for the blog, as I mentioned, that I started after my brother's uh death, I started writing, and that was just something for myself was just kind of amusing. Some of the articles I wrote actually did go national, uh national recognition and uh play, but I really haven't written in that in a long time. I think after if you're blogging, um you come to a point where you've kind of said you feel like you said everything you wanted to say. And at that point you kind of arrive at a fork. You know, you're gonna go politics one way or the other, or you're gonna go down some kind of rabbit hole. And I just didn't want to do that. I kind of felt I had said it and I did. And so the blog is pretty much at hiatus, but that's pretty much what I was doing before I started writing Old Grandmother's Tree.

Claire Waite Brown: 13:19

And was it cathartic doing that writing?

Joseph Bolton: 13:22

For my brother, yeah, absolutely it was. You know, I I had been out of the army for a few years, and then after, you know, my brother's passing away, ALS is what what he died of, which is a terrible disease to have. And I really felt that need to reflect about time and about the value of time and about growing older. I was 49 when he passed away. So you you get into that, I was getting to the age where, you know, I'm not young anymore, and things are starting to change in my own life. And so it was very cathartic because it really gave me a time to really gather my thoughts. And I think also it really kind of brought forth that creative instinct or spark within myself that I really didn't really address before when I was in the army. There was no time for that in the army, and there really wasn't the the means to really do it anyway. I was so focused and on that at the time. But it really gave me a time to kind of reset, reflect, and practice those skills of communication.

Claire Waite Brown: 14:24

Yeah. And then that can expand into what comes next. So tell me about how you became interested in folklore, in your ancestry. Tell me about how that then becomes the new series.

Joseph Bolton: 14:40

Well, as a child, I was always fascinated with folklore and folktales, regardless of the culture. But I've always read folk tales from all over the world and whatever culture from European cultures, Asian cultures, and even Native American cultures, and that all gave me a sense of what a folk tale is. And I realized, especially as I began these book series, that there's a language to folktales. So that's one part. The other part is I was always curious about my family, my mother's family, especially up in Quebec. And growing up, we only knew maybe up to our great-great-grandparents, but beyond that, there was kind of a veil. And this is back in the 70s and the 80s. We didn't have the tools that we have, not research or family. But once I had those tools, the internet, Ancestry.com, Genie.com, those ancestry websites. I gave my mother and her siblings a DNA test, which was very interesting. Growing up, we always were told, you know, we're 100% French. And the truth is the DNA test told a very interesting but different story, that they were mostly French, but they were also mixed with things like English, which I thought was very interesting. I didn't know where they came from, but also Native American ancestors from Quebec. And that led me to the discovery of this one ancestor whose life was very well documented by the Jesuit priests up in Quebec and her remarkable story. So I here am, I have my love of folk tales. I have a connection to my ancestors now that I understand who they are. And then I have this one ancestor in particular, this woman, who's had a very remarkable life, an adventurous life, and then it all kind of came together and to tell the story. And when people have notable ancestors, it's very common for people to say, I'm going to write a novel about, you know, I'm descended from somebody really famous, and they write them about it and they write a historical fiction. So it's not unknown. But I did a little differently. I took the basic story, the basic facts, but I kind of really immersed it in this whole world of magic and folk tales and Native American trickster characters. And I did that because I wanted to tell a deeper story. I wanted to really bring out the feelings and the emotions and the living as a human being what that meant at that time period. And so the folk folk tale and the folklore style and like stories is a language that I'm using to tell the story.

Claire Waite Brown: 17:24

Yeah, that allows you to do it in this way. Tell me about the illustration. You were very keen to combine this writing with visuals of it.

Joseph Bolton: 17:38

Yes.

Claire Waite Brown: 17:38

Why was that, and how did you get together with your illustrators?

Joseph Bolton: 17:43

Well, first I think it was because as a writer, I'm very visual. I mean, people have different ways they create their stories and develop them. My way was I would see the stories unfold as a movie within my mind and my imagination first. I wouldn't know the words, but I would see the action. Then I would write it down. So it's very visual. These stories were meant right from the beginning to be illustrated. So I was very fortunate to stumble on two wonderful talented artists that I teamed up with to actually create the illustrations of the book. The first one was a young woman named Masami Kiyono lived in Manhattan, and uh she is a storyboard artist, and she does storyboards for commercials and for other movies. We work together, we go through the story, and we decide where illustrations are going to go, putting in a rough sketch of what that illustration will contain. Just a rough sketch. Next, after I've gone through all that with a story, I take it to my final artist, and that's Natasha Pelley-Smith, another talented artist. She is from Toronto and she was trained in Paris. And um she takes those rough sketches and works with me, and we develop and we flesh out that story. She does more than just like fill in, you know, color within the lines. She adds her own techniques and her own understandings, and sometimes she tweaks the scene a little bit based on how she feels and interprets the story so well. So this is a very large project from an illustrative point of view, and it's what makes this book so different. There's a lot more illustrations than a normal book like this would have. This has an illustration almost in every page. It's very close to being a graphic novel, but it isn't. So it's really a hybrid, and it's another way that makes this book very unique.

Claire Waite Brown: 19:41

It sounds really, really interesting. I like when you say about the storyboard. It seems to me that's how you would think anyway, in storyboard form. So it's great to have that collaboration. I'm assuming from what you said that you're probably not one of these writers that is very scheduled. How do your words come out and get onto the page?

Joseph Bolton: 20:04

You know, it really comes in spurts. I belong to a writer's group at my local library, and everyone there has different techniques. Many of them are like, you've got to write like a thousand words a day. And I can't work like that. I don't schedule my writing. I don't sit down. If some you set me in front of a keyboard and threatened me and said, you've got to write a story, and you're going to do it in like the next five hours, or else, you know, you're going to be in real trouble. I couldn't do it. The story has to come to me, and it comes to me very slowly. It comes to me as images that kind of come in. And every time the story kind of flows through my mind, image by image by image, it gets more and more refined, and other images get added onto it. And in fact, I have a new story that I'm going to write in part of the same world as Old Grandmother's Tree. And it's all visual. It's going to be more of like a traditional graphic novel. It's going to be a short story. Working with Masami, and we're going to develop the story together, basically, through the images, and it's going to have very little text with it. So that's how it works. It the stories just hit me. And I didn't expect to do it. I wasn't necessarily even looking for it. It's just that it came to me. And then when it's there, it's like a damn burst. I have to sit in front of the computer and I have to either type it out or work with the artist and sketch it out. And so that's the way it is. I can't work by a schedule.

Claire Waite Brown: 21:31

Yeah, I can see that about you. That's the way we've spoken today. How do you feel on a wider scale that this writing, this collaboration, the whole creative process, how does this that really enrich other aspects of your life?

Joseph Bolton: 21:50

I think it's enriched my life because it's brought me in contact with other people. For example, Mitte Ogoko, she's not only my ancestor, but she's the ancestor of thousands of other people in the United States and Canada and probably other places in the world too. And so making these using these books as a means of connection, I've actually been able to reach out to these people, these people have reached out to me. That's my personality. I love making connections. I love how things connect and how patterns develop. That's one way. Um, I've also made contact with the Algonquin community up in Pembroke, Ontario and Canada. And I'll be going to visit them next month and doing a presentation on the book. So that way is very much enriched enriched my life. That connected is externally. But I think internally, it's helped me feel like I have a place. I know my place within the world. I know where I came from, I know how I connect back to that world of the past. And so there's a lot of satisfaction from that, from that sense of connection.

Claire Waite Brown: 22:57

That's lovely. Tell me about the series. So, what have we got that's already out? What have you got in your mind, or maybe on the page for the future in this particular series?

Joseph Bolton: 23:09

Originally it was going to be one book, but then I realized it was too big for Amazon. Believe it or not, you can actually make a book that is too large that Amazon says you can't do it. It's one book.

Claire Waite Brown: 23:19

Ah, okay.

Joseph Bolton: 23:20

This is volume one, and this is volume two. This book is like uh, I don't know, it's over about 300 pages, I think. Wow. So it's 300 pages. It's absolutely full of illustrations.

Claire Waite Brown: 23:35

Yeah.

Joseph Bolton: 23:36

So anyway, these two books primarily focusing on Mitio Goku, her wedding. It starts off with how she met her second husband, Pierre Cauch, and uh then on my the life of my great-grandmother and her mother and her family in Quebec before she and her husband moved to Rhode Island in the United States. And so these stories are very much a mix of that story of the family life in Quebec from the 17th century to the early 20th century, but it's also mixed in with magic. For example, within the first two stories, I have the trickster animal uh uh showing up and uh talking with Mittyogoku's grandfather and actually propelling him into the future for a short period of time before he gets yanked back. There's the appearance of a ghost when Mitio Goku's first husband appears to her on her wedding night, and that's all in the first two stories. So I'm always willing to take, you know, try to be innovative with my stories and take my stories and try different things. So that's the first two stories. The third book that I'm working on now is called The Dance of Creation, and that's gonna be coming out here in just a couple of weeks. And that story is actually a prequel and a sequel. It starts off a hundred years in the future, actually, in out in Ontario, and as a call out to the Algonquins out there that I made a friendship with, the main character is an Algonquin grandfather telling the story of the creation of the world to his grandchildren around a campfire. One hundred years from now, but most of the story goes back to the very beginning of the world when the creator, as the story says, creator danced the world into existence, and it shows where all those trickster animal characters did in the other two books, where they came from and why they exist. So it circles back. So I like jumping around at time. I said, you know, I realize even though it's a folk tale, and I'm dealing with a lot of people in the past, I said, I don't have to be restrained by that. So that's the third book. The fourth book I'm working on right now is going to talk about the last couple of days of Mitio Goku's life. And that'll have a more serious tone because it'll talk about the attack that occurred when her first husband was killed and her two children were kidnapped, and how she felt about that, and how she recovered from that and married again. That story is going to be full of a lot of cultural tension between rebirth and recovery from tragedy. A lot of emotion in that. And that story is actually written. I have all the storyboards done. It kind of circles around, and I like the idea of talking about the future, moving the story past our present time because I want readers to feel immersed in the story, to understand that the story is around them. In fact, even reading the books is actually part of the story and part of the adventure of Old Grandmother's Tree.

Claire Waite Brown: 26:35

That's fascinating. I love the um breaking of the rules, so to speak, and not being restricted in any way. How can people connect with you?

Joseph Bolton: 26:46

You can connect with me on the Old Grandmother's Tree website or my email address. You want to reach me directly, is boltonje364 at gmail.com. And you can find the books on Amazon. Just research either my name, Joseph Bolton, or Old Grandmother's Tree.

Claire Waite Brown: 27:06

Brilliant. Thank you so much. It's been a really lovely chat.

Joseph Bolton: 27:10

All right. Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure to be to be here with you, and I hope that we can visit again.

Claire Waite Brown: 27:17

I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, perhaps you'd like to financially contribute to future episodes at buymeacoffee.com slash creativityfound. There's a link in the show notes. If you are listening on a value-for-value enabled app, such as Fountain, TrueFans, or Podcast Guru, feel free to send a few stats my way. And if you have no idea of what I'm talking about, you can find out more by listening to my sister podcast called Podcasting 2.0 in practice.