Inspired by jet engine silences, the Dyson Hushjet Purify powerfully purifies the entire room, quietly. Capturing pollen, allergens and pet dander, removing odours and harmful gases such as NO2, day and night. Hushjet, powerful, compact purification, that's quiet. Music Hey everybody, you're listening to the Late Show Pod Show with Stephen Colbert. Hi Stephen. I'm doing good, how are you doing Becca? I'm doing great, I'm happy to be here, it's break, we're having a nice time. We are on break, what are you doing? You got any plans? I'm going to Asbury Park, New Jersey for the Memorial Day weekend. Okay, you're gonna be there. Never been there before. You're gonna see Bruce? Oh, is Bruce, oh, I don't know. Welcome to Asbury Park, that album. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm actually going hiking over this. Hiking? My wife Evie, you may be familiar with her work, my wife Evie has been kind of warning me, but also informing me that we're gonna be hiking in the future. That as we now are in our 60s, there's gonna be a lot of hiking. Yeah. Because it's fairly low impact but strenuous and she's so much healthier than I am. Okay. She's mentally, spiritually, physically, cardiovascularly, probably endocrine on every level. She's like elite and I try to keep up with her. And so, this is, I've taken, I'm dipping my toes into our new hiking lifestyle. Now we're gonna go hiking in Switzerland. Oh, in Switzerland. Yeah, we have a wedding, a friend's daughter is getting married in the French Alps. Cool. And so, we're gonna go over to Switzerland and do some hiking. Okay, because I was gonna ask, when people are like, how do we feel about hiking when going on a trip somewhere? People say, how do we feel about hiking? Yeah, and the question is, what kind of hiking are we talking about? Are we talking about, there's a backpack on and you're maybe camping while on the hike? Are we talking about going a beautiful nature walk that involves some terrain but it's not? We are, I think, we're doing a combo platter here. I think we're doing a day of like, hey, let's go out and walk this beautiful valley and maybe get into some heights, get up in those pine trees over there. But then at the end of the day, it's like 400 thread count sheets. Yeah, yeah, that's the ideal. That is exactly ideal. And I would be a pilgrim in the Middle Ages, walking into Santiago de Capistelo if I could have those 400 thread count sheets, just like Jesus did. And then I think the second hike we're doing is going to be a serious one. We're hiking into Italy. Whoa. So that's going to be backpacks and stuff like that. You got boots you're breaking into? I already broke them in. We did some, we did some, we did, we did, we hiked Sedona last year. Oh, wow. It was a lot of fun. Okay, this is going to be beautiful. It's going to be fantastic. I think it's going to destroy me, but other than that. Yeah, but you're a loo. I mean, it's nice. It's a good actually really. I know, on our honeymoon, we went hiking. We hiked in the Waimea Canyon. Cool. I had to stop coming out of Waimea Canyon and I thought, she is going to divorce me. She could ask for an annulment right now because I can't even get out of this damn canyon. How am I going to like pick up grandkids? Yeah, man. I mean, walking, sometimes it was the end of the road. Sometimes it was the end of the road you got to sit down, but you do any good hiking snacks, any good hike snacks? Gorp, man. Gorp. Gorp core. Yeah. Gorp core. Is that a musical genre I don't know about? Yeah, something like that. Something like Gore-Tex. Yeah, I like it. Give me a good old cliff bar. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I'll take a cliff. I'll take trail mix as long as I'm on trail. Nice. It's one of the few times I drink water. Yeah, you got to stay hydrated. You got to stay hydrated when you're doing the big walks. Okay, well, beautiful, beautiful hiking time. And this is a nice podcast to listen to on a hike. Yeah. This is a friend of the show, dear friend of the show, first time on the show. But knows you very well, knows members of the band extremely well, was just on, she's a lovely, she just put out a book called The Book of Alchemy. Oh, so you like it, Joie? Yes. Sure. Lovely. Yes, this is like a, so wonderful, such a lovely interview. Wanted to put it on the pod. Perfect. Do you do any journaling? That was something I wanted to ask. I journaled over Lent this year. Oh, nice. I've tried to journal many times. Like when I travel, I sometimes journal. Yeah. Like when I was a kid, I'm a kid, my ending like in my 20s, and I'd hike around Europe. I'd journaled. Cool. I filled a whole journal that summer. Yeah. And that's the last time I seriously journaled, and I'm 61 now. Yeah. I was probably 24, 25 then. And I started journaling again over Lent, and I really enjoyed it. And I put the lowest possible pressure on myself because I journaled in a, someone had given me a beautiful leather bound calendar, old fashioned like analog calendar. Cool. And I went, well, every day's got entries that just go all across both pages, like the butterfly of both pages. Yeah. And I went, okay, I'll just fill just that one day. And you couldn't get in more than like five or six sentences. Oh, that's really nice. And I went, I'll just say, what was the highlight of the day? What the day mean to me? And then think about Lent. Yeah. And I forgot it when we went on our last break. And so there was a whole week missing. And then I went, that hell with it. Yeah. And I stopped, but I got a couple of weeks in there. Yeah. No, that's really nice. I feel the value, I swear I feel the value of it. I envy people who have, like David Sedaris, he's been journaling since he was a child, like every day for his entire life. That's great. You can look back. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm the same way. If I can get in a group, that's great. But yeah, as soon as there's blank pages, I feel like, well, I already messed up. I have blood. It's done. I completely blew it. Yes. But the more you do that's like a bullet point. Mindy Kaling gave me a journal, beautiful leather bound journal, like gold embossing everything when I got this gig. Yeah. And it is, my journey to the late show, given to Stephen Colbert by Mindy Kaling is what it says on the cover. She's very important for her to like be part of the story. Yes. When we first started the show, I journaled. Oh, that's nice. I journaled for a while. Cool. Yeah. I've gone back to read it. No great pearls of wisdom. Yeah. That's the danger of journaling. You go back and go like, ooh, what was I, now in perspective, I can see what there was like, what was I taking from the day? Yeah. Almost nothing. Yeah, totally. Oh, I found an old high school diary over the last break. So hard to read. So hard to read. My mom passed. I took her diary. Oh, nice. And she'd diary late in her life. And it's beautiful. It's mostly about us kids. Yeah. On the street once in New York, when we used to live on 86th Street, I was walking to the subway and there was a pile of books just on the side of the road. Like I think they might have been like meant for the trash can, but the trash can was full. So somebody just put a pile of books next to the trash can. And there were old books where I looked through them. There was nothing much that interested me, but the top book was this beautiful green leather book, like a daily diary. And on the front of it, it had this symbol, this golden bird, stylized bird on the front, which I realized is the symbol of the bird's eye frozen food corporation. And it was a diary of a man who worked for bird's eye frozen food, like in the early 50s. Yeah. And he knew. Like frozen food was this new technology, because you had to have frozen shipping containers and stuff like that, or like truckers and stuff like that. You had a continuous chain of freezing the entire way. And it's this guy. He was some, I don't know, I can't tell whether it was in sales or some sort of administration or accountancy or something within the bird's eye corporation. And it's his life in like 1952 New York. And I picked it up right before we left the city and moved out to New Jersey. And he had friends in the journal who lived on our street in New Jersey. And I've always wanted to, I've never taken the time to go, okay, I wonder if I could find this family. Do they still live out there? But it's talking about like trying to, it's all about trying to convince people, like it's his daily diary about just his life and everything, but also like the challenges of getting people to buy into the new frozen food world. That's so interesting. It's something we take for granted. Yeah. And then one day, one journal entry is like, stop by the Havershams for drinks with Barbara, great night or whatever like that. And then it's all him walking home from his office in midtown to their Upper East Side place. And then the next day it says, went to the dentist, seven teeth to be pulled. Oh, gosh. Lower than a snake. Meaning like his emotion. Like, you know what? Oh, my God. It's great. And this is this guy's life. And I've thought like, I wonder if I could create like a theater piece out of this. I just have this man's life from 1952. Wow. That's really special. Yeah. And I still have it. It's still, I think it's actually presently on my bedside table. I always, I don't know why there are certain things that I always just like, I just keep nearby. Yeah. Like I keep 100 selected poems by EE Cummings nearby. Yeah. I keep like either Franny or Zo or Ray's High the Roof, Peeing Carpenters and Seymour in an introduction or nine stories nearby. Yeah. You know, I keep a copy of the New Testament Proverbs and Psalms. I keep it nearby. It's just always kind of there. One of my favorite sci-fi books in case for my childhood, in case I need to read it, read it to calm myself down. Because certain books are just Xanax for me. And Evie's always complaining like, what are you going to do with that pile of books? I'm like, it's not a pile of books. That's a life raft. Yeah. Yeah. I have lashed those books together. So in the middle of the night when I wake up, I can grab any one of them and I know what they're giving me. And one of them is this guy's diary. Yeah. This would be, I wonder if there's a way that like the last 10 seconds of the Good Night Act, you could just like read a quick page. On this date. Yeah. On this date. Oh, that'd be funny. And then see if anyone like calls in with like, I know who this guy is. Do you know who this guy is? And then I read something. Just like a page. Like it's the last act before I say good night. Like, all right, let's go to this guy's diary. And I read something from 70 years ago. Yeah. I think that'd be really cool. All right, we'll try it. We'll try it. We'll try it. We'll talk to Tom. Great. I'll be ready. All right, great. All right. Well, speaking of journaling, this is Sulica Joad and this is the Lecho Pacho. And by the way, I'm just going to jump in here. I have known Sulica for 10 years. And I call her Sulica. And I, right before she came on, the band said, it's Sulica. I said, what? It's Sulica. I said, it's Sulica. No, it's Sulica. And I said, I've been calling her Sulica for 10 years. And they said, because she's married to John Batiste. She's famously married to John Batiste. And they go, that's what John calls her. I said, wait, what? So John calls her by the wrong name. And so later I apologized to her. She goes, it's fine. Both of them are fine. But I felt terrible. I'm not only a friend, but I'm a fan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. All right. Just ask your friends what their actual names are. By the way, it's Steve Buscemi. I thought it was Buscemi. It's Buscemi. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Yeah. Yes. Okay. This is the podcast show. Thanks, Steven. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Bye. Bye. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Lecho. Folks, my next guest is a best-selling author whose writing includes Between Two Kingdoms, Life Interrupted, and The Isolation Journals. Her new book is The Book of Alchemy. Please welcome to the Lecho Sulakajuad. It's so good to see you. The new book is here, as I said, The Book of Alchemy. Sulaka, what kind of alchemy are we talking about here? The alchemy I'm writing about in this book is creative alchemy, and it has become a kind of philosophy of life for me, which is how we can transmute a difficult passage in life through the vehicle of creative expression into something interesting and meaningful and maybe even beautiful. And is that an invitation to everyone, or do you have to be a lifelong artist to do this? Some of the opinion that creativity is a gift that we all have access to as kids, we have such an organic relationship to our creativity. We play make-believe, we tap into our imagination, and that starts to change as we get creative injuries and it gets knocked out of us as adults. And I can remember the moment that that happened for me in the eighth grade. I was a kid who had this kind of uninhibited freedom when it came to creative expression. I played the bass, I painted, and my first love, which was keeping the journal, was where I found a sense of refuge and belonging. And in the eighth grade, my English teacher invited our entire class to write a creative short story over spring break. And I was thrilled about this given my love of writing. And I spent that entire spring break filling up an entire 40-page yellow legal pad with a whole novella. Now I didn't have quite the same vault of life experiences to draw upon for inspiration, and I had been reading Nabokov's Lolita at the time. And so when I handed in this short story, which ended up being about 40 pages long, I was awaiting praise from my teacher. I was awaiting possibly a literary agent, maybe even widespread publication. But instead, everyone received their assignments back, everyone except me, and I was summoned to meet with a very different figure, the school psychologist. And I can laugh about this now, but I was so humiliated. And this beloved English teacher of mine never said a word to me about my short story, and it would take many, many years before I dared show my writing to anyone. And I still journaled relentlessly because there are parts of yourself that you just can't shut down, but that sense of uninhibited freedom of purity was gone for me. And I think that's the case for a lot of us as adults. Has your journaling always been for other people, or is it completely private? So this book is about the value of cultivating a daily creative practice, and the creative practice that to me feels the most successful has always been journaling, because journaling isn't beautiful writing, it's not even necessarily grammatical writing, there's no right or wrong way to do it. You show up as you are, you take a few minutes or however much time you can spare to write your way back to yourself. And so for me, journaling has been a touch point. It doesn't require fancy equipment. It doesn't require any technical prowess. You say it saved your life. It saved my life. How? So when I turned 22, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. And even though I had been journaling for my entire life, journaling went from being a sort of pastime and hobby to something that really felt like a lifeline. It was a first massive interruption for me, and I had so much sadness and so much anger, and I felt so deeply isolated, and I didn't know how to carry all of those feelings inside of me. And so the act of externalizing those emotions on paper was transformative, but what surprised me, I think more than anything, is that it allowed me to be in conversation with myself and in doing that, to be able to be in conversation with the people around me. And that to me is the power of a creative practice like journaling. It allows us to alchemize what may feel painful into something purposeful. Well, one of the people around you is our old friend, John Batiste, who is your husband. And on your book tour, it wasn't just you. John went out with you on the book tour and played piano while you actually read from your book. And it's not every book tour that also sees a double bass on stage. So that's you and John playing on stage. What was the vision for this? So John and I met at band camp when I was about 12 years old, and John was 13. And from the very beginning, this book is dedicated to him. He is, I think, my first teacher, in a sense, in this notion of creative alchemy. And we wanted to enact the idea of creative alchemy to show an audience what creativity can do in a communal space, how it can connect us to one another, how it can leave you feeling transformed. And John challenged me at the very beginning to practice what I'm preaching in this book, which is this idea of returning to that uninhibited sense of play and experimentation that we do as kids without worrying about if we're a good artist or a bad artist, and to dust my bass off for the first time in many, many years, which was terrifying for me and so joyous. I'm returning home from this tour wanting to take bass lessons, not for any reason other than that. It was so much fun. But it also, in a way, was a reenactment of this sort of creative alchemy that John first embodied for me, along with some of the members of this band. When I was 22, yeah, I still reached out out to the band. I found myself here in New York City in the hospital where I'd been for many, many weeks, and things were not going well for me cancer treatment-wise. None of the chemotherapy was working, and I was going into bone marrow failure. And the day that I received that news was the day that John learned that I was sick and stuck in the hospital and showed up. You guys were not a couple at the time. We were not a couple. We were just old friends from, you know. Band camp. Band camp. Showed up with the band unannounced at my hospital room door. And as the sound of John's melodica and Joe's tambourine and Abanda's tuba and Eddie's sax began to float out into the hallway, patients and doctors and nurses started to filter out of their rooms. And right there in the hospital corridors, everyone began to clap and dance and sing. And they alchemized what was one of the hardest, most frightening days of my life at that point into the most joyous of second lines. And I remember writing in my journal, the Saints marched in today, and they played that song too. Well, we got to get going here. Could you read, I'd love you could read a little bit of your journal from when you were 12 years old. Okay. This is the journalist who got shut down by the teacher who sent her to the therapist. Yes. Okay. So I wrote this entry this summer that I met John and it is titled Goals and Predictions. And these are my goals and predictions for the rest of my life. So number one, be first base in a high class orchestra. Number two, travel around writing philosophical and political messages on toilet seats under the name DeSuse. Number three, die and for a split second after realize what I thought was, isn't. I think I was just beginning my foray into existentialism that summer, feeling a lot of big feelings. And the last one, create a base suit by cutting eye and leg holes in my double base case. So. So much left to achieve. How, how are you feeling now? How are you feeling now? How is your leukemia now? Has it returned? So I learned a year ago that my leukemia was back. And when you learn for the third time that you have cancer, it's easy to feel like you have a sort of damocles hanging over you. It's easy to feel like you're drowning in an ocean of uncertainty. And when I expressed this to my doctor, he gave me the advice that a lot of people give you when you find yourself in a situation like mine. And he said, you have to live every day as if it's your last. And respectfully, I've come to believe that this is terrible advice. It is exhausting to try to make every family dinner as meaningful as possible and to carpet the crap out of every moment. And I think that if we were all living every day as if it were our last, our world would be chaos. We'd be cheating on our spouses and emptying our savings account and declaring bankruptcy. And so instead I've had to shift to a gentler mindset. And I'm trying to live every day as if it's my first. To wake up with that sense of pure, uninhibited, creative freedom, that sense of wonder and curiosity that a little kid might. And the way that I do that is through my own tiny acts of creative alchemy. Well, the book is the book of alchemy. It's your writing. It's John Baptiste's written in here. Gloria Snignum, Salman Rushdie, Lena Dunham, other contributors. It is out and available now. The book of alchemy, The Writer, So Like a Juarez. Thank you for listening to the Late Show Pod Show with Stephen Colbert. Just one more thing. If you want to see more of me, come to the Late Show YouTube channel for more clips and exclusives. When beloved family patriarch Gary Ferris went missing, his family looked everywhere on their property until they came across something horrifying. It's a homicide. Absolutely. The blame game in this family went round and round. This is Bloodest Thicker, The Ferris Wheel. I would don't see how anyone can look at this story and think they were happy. Binge the full series, Bloodest Thicker, The Ferris Wheel on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.
