The Fabulous 413

We’re suckers for unexpected love stories. Like the one between dinosaurs and local history. An unlikely pairing to be sure, but one you can discover this weekend at the Great Greenfield Dinofest . We chat with Tim Neuman from the  Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association and artist Christopher Janke about this ecclectic combination of the region’s paleontological and abolitionist histories, and how...

The ways in which the community comes together are some of the most beautiful things that happen in Western Mass. And come together we did this year after two unseasonable frosts decimated tree fruits and the floods of July and seemingly unending rains have left our farms and farmers limping into next year. In response, a vast array of remedies came to the fore to help the agriculture of western M...

As the year winds to a close, we start to review all we’ve been through over the past ~50 weeks. And in that way, our minds continuously harken back to the nigh catastrophic weather we had this year. From the frosts to the floods and the ongoing rains that have kept our end of the state sodden, it’s been a trying year for agriculture across the board. The public and private sector collaboration in...

It is a massively busy weekend here in Western Mass. Or perhaps just an extremely jam-packed Saturday, December 9th. That’s in no small part due to the largess of art going on in Northampton this weekend. We bring in Anne Thalheimer, an organizer behind the Lowbrow Craft Fair , one of the longer running makers markets in Noho, and one of four happening in that town on Dec. 9th. We get into the spe...

There’s plenty to illuminate here in the 413 this week. Including the holiday that is literally all about illumination and resilience. It’s the first day of Hannukah, so we check in with Rabbi Amy Wallk of Temple Beth El in Springfield about the weeklong celebration, including its origins, the nature of modern participation in the holiday, and its significance in light of the ongoing conflict in t...

‘Tis the season for caring. Actually every season is the season for caring, but we doubly feel it in the cold. So we’re bringing our donations to where the beats are plentiful and the rhymes don’t stop. Hip Hop for the Homeless X arrives in Massachusetts for the first time ever on Dec. 7th at Gateway City Arts in Holyoke. We chat with organizer Joey Batts and a couple of MCs you can see onstage at...

Part of this show has always been highlighting the cool places in our area and then wonderful things that they get up to. One of those places that we’ve repeatedly mentioned events has recently announced that they’re closing their doors to public events after Dec. 31st. Gateway City Arts in Holyoke was a game-changer for the local scene for a little over a decade, and we talk to owners and renovat...

We’re hungry over in these parts. So we head out for Pizza Quest volume VII. It’s been a minute since we last evaluated a pie, and so we head to Berkshire Mountain Pizza Cafe & Bakery in Pittsfield . The location comes with some major pedigree, including a recommendation from Mary Daire of Dare Bottleshop & Provisions . The cafe does not, however, come with indoor seating, so we’re forced...

The earth is in abundance on today’s show. And although that’s the case, we’re of the opinion that it is far too cold to be out in the forest to appreciate the beauty of the trees right now. Despite that, there’s a bounty of things we can harvest from them that aren’t the wood themselves. This is at the core of Forestopia’s products and practices. We sit with proprietor Gregory Mori to find out al...

Stages and performance have always been a hub of resistance. We see it in two Argentinean Maestros making their way across New England teaching their craft to the young old and everyone in-between. Cesar Lerner and Marcello Moguilevsky have been playing music together for over 40 years, during which their klezmer based sound has snowballed into so much more, bringing along with it the many influen...

Bring on the lorax, cause we’re headed for the trees! First a dairy farm of yore that now grows Christmas trees and agrotourism in Hancock. Ioka Valley Farm has been focused on all the trees can give us, from holiday delights to maple treats, and more. We speak with Missy Leab about keeping visitors at the farm year round, and how the concerns of agriculture are different when your crop is arborea...

It’s Giving Tuesday, and we’re giving attention to a couple of Hoop City natives coming back to make good. One of them returns to make good on a dream deferred: performing standup comedy at the high school talent show. Author/actor/ comedian /writer Bill Posley is bringing his comedy to the stage that never was and bringing some local flavor along for the ride with the show “Bill Does the Talent S...

As the end of the year approaches, we prepare ourselves for the bombardment of declarations. But one of the most fun of those is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year . Wordster supreme, our local dictionary’s editor-at-large, Peter Sokolowski joins us to explain the process by which that word is chosen, and some of the nuances of this year’s winner. And it wasn’t so much a declaration as a determina...

The March is over, but there’s quite a bit of ground we covered getting through those 43 miles. So we take a look back a a few more of our conversations that the road brought to our conversations about hunger and hear from State Senator Jo Comerford , Congressman Jim McGovern , and in a first ever appearance at the march from someone in their office: Governor Maura Healey. All that talk about hung...

The March for the Food Bank 14 nears its end, and over the course of two days, Monte and many other marchers are raising money for the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts , and awareness about hunger in our region in general. There’s so many walks of life that join in this endeavor so once again today we’ll hear from many of the people walking alongside Monte Belmonte as he’s dressed in the counter...

Monte Belmonte is walking 43 miles to raise awareness both about The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and hunger in our area in general. We here at NEPM have been highlighting stories on hunger over the past week as a lead up to The March for the Food Bank 14 , talking with those fighting through direct services, in the way of food pantries and kitchens, and those changing policy that affects fo...

A double dose of live music Friday, 7 tubas from Tubachristmas plus Holyoke's The Basement Cats . We also celebrate a local hero of love and justice who has been serving the Northampton area since 1989, The Reverend Peter Ive s. And Monte gets fitted for his Weird Barbie costume for the March For The Food Bank at Swanson's Fabrics .

The March for the Food Bank 14 begins this coming Monday, Nov 20th. One person who has been on nearly all of those marches is our weekly conduit to Capitol Hill: Rep. Jim McGovern . So this week, we’re talking frankly about hunger, how we combat it, and how that drives him to walk all 43 miles from Springfield to Greenfield to raise not just local, but national awareness to the issue of hunger. Be...

We’re seeing new life enter a lot of spaces currently. One of those is locally beloved venue The Iron Horse . Recently acquired by The Parlor Room Collective over the summer, they have just announced both their renovation ideas for the space and a capital campaign to cover the costs, since one of the major points is to tear down a wall on the first floor. We speak with executive director Chris Fre...

For Hunger Awareness Week, and to gear up for the March for The Food Bank, we sit down with some folx addressing hunger right here in Springfield: Shannon Ruddle of Martin Luther King Jr. Services and Liz O'Gilvie of Gardening the Community and Springfield Food Policy Council, plus we find out how to pivot from dairy to skin care with the goats of Joe and Stan McCoy at Sage Meadow Farm in Easthamp...

It’s Hunger Awareness Week here on NEPM . All week, we and the newsroom will be centering stories about how hunger affects our region. Although we’ve talked with many folx along the way who are more boots on the ground in terms of fighting hunger and its affects in our area, we haven’t had a chance to speak with many folx who are working on the policy end of this work. So we sit down with Franchez...

Next week is Hunger awareness week here at NEPM, but honestly we’re very much into feeding people everywhere, and especially across the four counties of western Massachusetts everyday. So we get a bit of a jump on the process by talking with Executive Chef/executive director of Stone Soup Cafe in Greenfield, Kirsten Levitt. She talks to us about their general mission of nourishing more than just t...

We love the opportunity to showcase what the region is really capable of. We talk compassion in our weekly chat with congressman Jim McGovern , who’s not just concerned about the deadly action happening in Gaza and its surrounding lands, but of the fight on Bay State soil against hunger as well. The latter may be because he’s gearing up for a 43 mile challenge in about a fortnight, and we’ve got h...

We reach wide today. And that’s active voice. You’ve almost certainly heard of it and its counterpoint: passive voice. But did you know there’s a voice that exists between those two? Our resident wordster, Emily Brewster , senior editor at Merriam-Webster in Springfield explains how to get your sentences within that liminal space. Speaking of Springfield, there will be dancing there this weekend....

We’re discovering things right under our noses. Or in our basement, in the case of the Berkshire Museum. They’ve just opened an exhibit called “One of a Kind Wonders” that gathers some of the oddities that have joined their collection over the years. Chief curator Jesse Kowalski shows us around cursed paintings, creepy dolls, and the delicate art of drawing together seemingly disparate articles. I...