Tucson Festival of Books: Feels Like Home Interview w/ Linda Ronstadt

The Director of the University of Arizona's PBS Student Reporting Labs, Nancy Montoya, met with long-time friend, musical artist, and author Linda Ronstadt to hear more about her book, "Feels Like Home." The entire Production Crew was made up of PBS Student Reporting Labs students. They set up, taped, lit, handled audio and edited the entire sit down interview.

In Feels Like Home, Grammy award-winning singer Linda Ronstadt effortlessly evokes the magical panorama of the high desert, a landscape etched by sunlight and carved by wind, offering a personal tour built around meals and memories of the place where she came of age. Growing up the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and a descendant of Spanish settlers near northern Sonora, Ronstadt’s intimate new memoir celebrates the marvelous flavors and indomitable people on both sides of what was once a porous border whose denizens were happy to exchange recipes and gather around campfires to sing the ballads that shaped Ronstadt’s musical heritage. Following her bestselling musical memoir, Simple Dreams, this book seamlessly braids Ronstadt’s recollections of people and their passions in a region little understood in the rest of the United States. This road trip through the desert, written in collaboration with former New York Times writer Lawrence Downes and illustrated throughout with beautiful photographs by Bill Steen, features recipes for traditional Sonoran dishes and a bevy of revelations for Ronstadt’s admirers. If this book were a radio signal, you might pick it up on an Arizona highway, well south of Phoenix, in the glow of Ronstadt’s hometown of Tucson. It would be playing something old and Mexican from a time when the border was a place not of peril but of possibility.

Shot and Edited by:
Fausto Durazo
   / @faustodurazo