177: How to See Beauty in Small Things

Andrea Askowitz  0:15  
I'm Andrea Askowitz.

Allison Langer  0:16  
I'm Alison Langer. And this Writing Class Radio, you'll hear true personal stories and learn how to write your own stories. Together, we produce this podcast which is equal parts heart and art. By heart, we mean the truth in a story. By art, we mean the craft of writing, no matter what's going on in our lives. Writing class is where we tell the truth. It's what we workout are sh**. There's no place in the world like writing class, and we want to bring you in. 

Andrea Askowitz  0:41  
Today on our show, we bring you a story by Jasmine Annenberg that was originally performed on stage at the Flagstaff festival of science in October 2023. Like Episode 174, and 175, or like we talked about, on Episode 174, and 175. This was a collaboration with ecos, the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University, and story collider, a podcast that airs true science stories. We talked about this in those past two episodes, and we'll talk about it again, whenever we bring up a science story from this event. But we want to tell you that it was an amazing, so much fun collaboration that started with Dr. Jane Marks and Dr. Bruce Hungate, who have been students of ours for the last few years. And they had this great idea. What they wanted to do was get their students to personalize their science stories, so that they could better reach non scientists and just everybody and scientists and the world. 

Allison Langer  1:53  
Ya it started with them. Actually, they wanted to personalize their own stories, because they were feeling like they wanted a bigger reach more people to understand what they were doing in a bigger way, so that you know how they're saving the Earth needs to happen with more people understanding what's going on and how to fix it. 

Andrea Askowitz  2:11  
I just feel super, super, super honored to be part of this process, to be part of this process of helping people personalize their science stories and getting them out to the world in a bigger way so that we can save the Earth.

Allison Langer  2:22  
 Yeah, big time. 

Andrea Askowitz  2:24  
I love this gig. 

Allison Langer  2:26  
You're gonna hear one of them today BY Jasmine Annenberg, who's a PhD student over there at NAU. Her story is about connecting the dots. It's also about slowing down the moment both in writing and in delivery. So the narrowed your will show us how so just listen in listen to her story and learn from the master. B ack with Jasmine story after the break.

Andrea Askowitz  2:52  
We're back this is Andrea ASCO and you're listening to Writing Class Radio. Up next is Jasmine Annenberg telling her story for church.

Jasmine Annenberg  3:07  
I'm in Montana. When you think about Montana, what do you see? Maybe some bald eagles flying overhead, Grizzlies romping through the forest rivers rushing. This is a majestic landscape. And when I tell people that I do science in Montana, they get excited. But what does that really look like? I'm a soil restoration scientist. That's a double whammy for unglamorous work. I look at uncharismatic and unhealthy dirt. When I'm at my field site, I'm on my knees and I'm hunched over in the most uncomfortable position. And I'm trying to see these tiny, dusty dried up mosses that are on top of the soil. They're so small that they're almost invisible. And my my nose is pressed so closely that it's in the dirt. I'm sweating so profusely that I feel like I should probably note it on the datasheet just in case. And my allergies are getting so bad from all of the plants around me that I start sneezing uncontrollably, and then bleeding out of both of my nostrils. I'm sore everywhere. And I start to worry that I'm gonna get early arthritis. Sounds miserable, right? But the truth is, I would rather be there so much more than on campus. On campus, the stress of needing to sound smart and driven and be good at data analysis is exhausting. I feel so alien here sometimes and I never really thought of myself as an academic. And I definitely never thought I would find myself in a Ph. D program. But out in the field, I can forget about all of this. I'm back at my plot, and it's getting late in the day. So I pick up my phone to check the time. And I'm surprised to see a missed call from a friend back home. It's not someone who usually calls and then a voicemail pops up. And then I start to see this flood of text messages and more calls, and I'm trying to unlock my phone, but my hands are so dirty that I can't do it. And I'm panicking. Finally, I get my phone open. And I see the first text. It reads, I have some bad news. Adrian overdosed he's dead. I start to scream. The sun is coming down on me harshly and I look up at the sun for some sort of answer, but I'm blinded and all the color drains from the landscape. The beautiful birds that I was hearing only moments ago, are gone now and they're replaced by the incessant buzzing of mosquitoes. Let me tell you about Adrian. Adrian and I bonded over grunge rock and getting high behind dumpsters. If there wasn't much else to do when you're 14 in the suburbs of San Jose, all through high school, I would go to his house to watch him paint. I always praised him but I was secretly so jealous of his natural talent. He has his way of seeing these ordinary details and making them beautiful somehow.  Adrian rolled the most perfect joints you've ever seen in your life. He painted portraits of me. He made me feel seen. Sometimes he would show up to parties and he would dramatically unzip his jacket and open it in a pile of meats would fall out that he had shoplifted from the grocery store. And we would grill them for all of our friends. Once in our mid 20s. I was too hungover to move from the couch, and I watched him make me a single fried egg. I watched as this enormous Filipino man in pinstripes train conductor overalls, and the stupid hipster tortoise shell glasses, towering over this tiny onion and sculpting it into perfect slivers. He would throw it into the pan and I started smelling spices I couldn't really pick out when he brought the plate out to me. The onions were placed so intentionally and carefully over the egg that it looks like fine art. Eggs aren't special to me. I eat them every day. But this was the best egg I've ever had. I resent him for dying. He saw the world in a way I thought I never would. His dreams were so much bigger than mine. He had so much to contribute. This could have easily happened to me, and sometimes I wish that it had. But I chose to abandon home and do this weird science. So here I am. Back at my field site at my plot. I'm the only person in this huge field. And once again, I'm hunched over and I'm trying to see these extremely small and dried up shriveled mosses, my nose is in the dirt and my butt is up in the air and I can't help but laugh at how insane I must look.

I forgot my line...

I can't help but laugh at how insane I must look. I must be the only person in history who has ever looked at this one piece of moss. They're such strange and seemingly inconsequential organisms. And then I remember Adrian and the egg. And I realize I wasn't jealous of his talent and his intellect and his technique. It was his ability to see beauty in the mundane. And suddenly, I realize I see this way to most people walk by these mosses without even noticing them. But to me these mosses are like our elders. They're some of the oldest organisms on Earth. They're certainly older than most of the plants around us. The fact that they're still alive and haven't gone extinct, is a testament to their resilience. These mosses perform miracles during drought periods, they can dry down completely and be dormant for months to even years. And then when the rain finally does come, they wake up immediately with this greenness and get right to work. That's a superpower that most plants do not have. I'm realizing now that my attention to these mosses makes them beautiful. This is the greatest gift anyone has e ver given me. Adrian taught me to see the ordinary focus on the ordinary, to make it beautiful. And I see it right here in the dirt.

Thank you.

Allison Langer  10:58  
 Wow, you know, what's funny is that I've heard this a couple times. I've heard it out loud. I've heard it in practice. And I know I say this about all the stories but like, now, when I was listening, I was kind of taking notes. And I was finding like, where's this going? What's the story gonna be like, how she gonna bring it back together? And stuff like that. And it was so cool when she gets to the end. And we see that she finds purpose through in her pain, like with seeing the beauty in the dirt and how he saw the beauty in the egg. And he saw the beauty in this. But also there's something I realized, I don't know, did you see this that when she was describing the moss, I felt like she was describing herself that she's resilient. She can perform miracles, and she can lay dormant for months or years and still survive. Not only is she seeing the beauty in it, but she's seeing herself in the moss.

Andrea Askowitz  11:51  
I didn't hear it that way. But it's such a cool, cool way to hear it. I love that. So I feel like what she did was she drove home the point that what she really learned from Adrian is how to see the beauty in the mundane. But I think you're right like an every story is like this. There are so many like little nuggets that could become like the main nugget. And I don't think she was aiming at herself being resilient the way these mosses are. But she could have written this whole story that that way. 

Allison Langer  12:28  
Because you're right. I just don't even think she's thinking of it like that. I think it's just there might be like a subliminal way of attaching herself to this plant this organism?

Andrea Askowitz  12:41  
And maybe that's why she's attracted to it. 

Allison Langer  12:43  
Yeah. I wonder. 

Andrea Askowitz  12:45  
Because we're all attracted to ourselves.

Allison Langer  12:47  
I think we're always trying to figure ourselves out. 

Andrea Askowitz  12:49  
Yeah. 

Allison Langer  12:50  
And maybe she's like, why didn't I go the way of Adrian because she kind of did say like, that could have been me. And I mean, really, that could be any of us, because life is fucking hard. So many times it gets us low. What causes us to come back or see around the corner or like, and I feel like this person this narrator is she seeing it? She's like going through a lot of shit. But somehow she found her strength in this moss.

Andrea Askowitz  13:19  
One thing I noticed this time when I was listening is the voice of the narrator and her performance voice, which I thought was so frickin cool. And I think it's worth noting that from the beginning, she was speaking right to the audience. Like she's like, well, let me tell you about Adrian. And she did that, which is sort of like she sort of broke form.

Allison Langer  13:41  
 I resent him for dying, she says... 

Andrea Askowitz  13:44  
But that's different than telling us the audience.

Allison Langer  14:07  
Oh, right. Using that, like, let me just explain to you. Yeah, that's true.

Andrea Askowitz  13:53  
Oh, she did at the very beginning. Okay, I'm in Montana. What do you see when you think of Montana? So she's talking to us, there was a place where she did it. And then she did it again. Let me tell you about Adrian. She landed a few of her lines. So well. It's a little bit inappropriate for me to mention this line in this way. But we're talking about the stories as art and this story as a performance because our narrator told this story without reading. And here when she said, Ad rian overdosed he's dead. 

Allison Langer  14:26  
Yeah, I wrote that too. Yeah. 

Andrea Askowitz  14:28  
Nothing. Nothing came after that line for like, a few beats. And I felt it so hard. Like she let it land. I felt it. And then she said, I start to scream. And that was just a gorgeous delivery. I mean, I feel like she was just really, really in the story, which is what we tell our storytellers to try to do as best as as they can. 

Allison Langer  13:53  
Right at that same moment. She sort of steps out and slows down by talking about what's going on around in the mosquitoes. And she gives us a second to let it settle. That is the art of storytelling right there.

Andrea Askowitz  15:14  
That's both the pacing, and the writing. And in that in that moment, she nailed both God, I was so impressed. 

Allison Langer  15:23  
And then right after that, she does exactly what I love in a story. And I always say that we get a little bit of backstory about Adrian, like, we want to hear about them. Right, then we get like, what their relationship was like their friendship, we get all that stuff about them stealing the meat, the painting the portraits, I just thought that was so good. We see like these people in action. I mean, she's not painting him as this great positive, like, perfect guy. She's saying, like, this guy was fucked up. And we loved him. Like he, we were all fucked up. And we loved it. And then she says, once, once in my mid 20s, she drops us into a scene with the egg and how he made it and how he cut everything and how he was so artistic. So there was like, this contrast to stealing meat, you know, it was so good. And then she says, I resent him for dying.

Andrea Askowitz  16:13  
I thought that in that backstory section, what she was doing was she was seeing the beauty in the ordinary. Like, she was giving us such specific details like this ordinary egg, that he turned into fine art. Like she was she was showing us how she started to see the way he saw.

Allison Langer  16:41  
Yeah, and maybe even setting up the story that she's learning from him that he taught her. 

Andrea Askowitz  16:46  
Right. That's what I thought she was doing really artfully. Wow. I thought also. So she said, Can we all heard it? "I forgot my line" Yeah. Yeah. Remember, when remember, during the show, like it or in rehearsal, people would like look to me, like, I'm supposed to remember their line.

Allison Langer  17:10  
There was a moment in the show, you forgot your line, too. And it was the best part. Like when people do that, like you forget where you're going. It's like, sometimes that happens to me when I'm telling a story to a friend like somebody calls or something jogs my brain and then I'm like, wait, where was I? So it made it so much better tip for me that she could just keep going. She didn't panic. She's kind of like, alright, where was I?  Alright, and that you could know, tell she practice. So she kind of got her brain back in order. And I thought that was so good.

Andrea Askowitz  17:36  
Yep. Yep, she handled it. Yeah. And I think that when it happened to me, and I was the first storyteller, I was first split second completely panicked. And then I was just like, Oh, all right.

Allison Langer  17:54  
Whoopsie, nobody cares. 

Andrea Askowitz  17:56  
 No, but what you said to me after and what we're seeing with, with this narrator is that it is just like a human human moment. And so everybody in the audience is I just loved her right now. I loved her in the show. And and then she just she just gathered herself and then said, I must be the only person in history who's ever looked at these mosses. 

Allison Langer  18:19  
Maybe? Is she? 

Andrea Askowitz  18:21  
I mean, it seems like it yeah, maybe. And she landed it, Adrian taught me to see it right here in the dirt. See beauty in the dirt perfect landing.

Allison Langer  18:31  
And so I care about moss and the dirt now. And I care what happens to it. And I care because I care now about the scientists behind the dirt, and the moss. So by telling her story, her very personal story, we see her as a person, a human being really trying to help the planet and a passion for exactly that. And almost like it's a salvation and now I don't want to hurt the earth because I don't want to hurt these scientists either. 

Andrea Askowitz  19:02  
Like you don't want to trample all over her mosses because you want to keep them nice for her. Yeah, I want to know more about mosses like I want to know what what like the so this is story one now tell me more about like, what is she seeing? What is she looking at? What are they doing? How tell me about the resilience? Like what does that mean? What does that mean for for our lives?

Allison Langer  19:25  
I'm in. So good. So good. Damn girl. I'm glad she's there at NAU. That's a great place. Anytime somebody tells me they're thinking even remotely about science. I'm like, Oh my God. They have this great program that people are great. Like, I just love them so much. So I feel lucky to be involved. Even just a little bit Jasmine Annenberg as a PhD student in the Bouckaert lab at NAU, so I guess they have different labs based on what you're into, right? 

Andrea Askowitz  19:57  
I guess. 

Allison Langer  19:58  
Soil water Climate change I don't know. This labs main job is to learn about and restore soil function to areas that have been denigrated by preventing erosion stimulating nutrient cycling and productivity. So here we're going to learn a little bit more manipulating water infiltration. Jesus Christ, that's a lot. 

Andrea Askowitz  20:18  
Wow.

Allison Langer  20:18  
Okay, she, God, just the word crust. She works specifically with biological soil crusts, otherwise know n as bio crusts. That's funny, which is a community of many different organisms living on or within the top. Where was I in science? How did I never learn about any of this stuff? I think I could have been interested.

Andrea Askowitz  20:37  
No, but I definitely see Montana the way she described me seeing it. 

Allison Langer  20:42  
 Right. What anyway, I think all this happened on MPG Ranch, which is near Florence, Montana in the Bitterroot Valley. Well, I hope she can restore them and these bio crusts, so go, girl, thank you for listening. And thank you Jasmine Annenberg for sharing your story. Thank you ecos and a US story collider and Bruce Hungate and Jane Marks for bringing science to the mainstream, and thank you for including us.

Andrea Askowitz  21:18  
Writing class radio is hosted by me Andrea Askowitz.

Allison Langer  21:21  
and me Alison Langer.

Andrea Askowitz  21:24  
Audio production by Matt Cundill, Evans Surminski, Chloe Imani Elaine, and Aiden Glassy at the Sound Off Media Company. The music is by Justina Shandler. There's more writing class on our website, including stories we study editing resources, video classes, writing retreats, and live online classes. If you want to write with us every week, or if you're a business owner or community activist, a group that needs healing entrepreneur, scientist, and you want to help your team write better check out all the classes we offer on our website, writingclassradio.com. Join the community that comes together for instruction and excuse to write and the support from other writers. To learn more, go to our website or patreon.com/writingclassradio. A new episode will drop every other Wednesday.

Allison Langer  22:19  
There's no better way to understand ourselves and each other. And by writing and sharing our stories. Everyone has a story, what's yours?

Tara Sands 22:29  
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