Mountain Words Literary Festival: Vastness of space - a panel of 4 scientists/journalists (female) discuss the concept of the uncanny, life, and how to get back to Earth

Imagine a dandelion seed, hanging in the air and floating across your vision, is like a ship made to transport a being of origin. 

Is there life out there? What does it look like? What is life?

We look for ourselves in space because we can't look for what we can't imagine.

The anthropological question is why are we making these leaps about possible extraterrestrial visitors? Do we want them to: save us with their experience, save us from ourselves, offer a higher power (the human need to seek a technological god?), or will their destruction erase human agency and fault? Why do we want to be visited? 

Think about how the Concept of the Uncanny - seeing something like us but just off - relates to the iconic alien image. When we see our self but cannot know if it is an alien or not, as in the classic movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

This science panel of 4 women scientists discusses what-ifs and imagined situations and possible ethic-challenging scenarios regarding nuclear power, extraterrestrial searches, astronomical origin stories, and travel to Mars.  As such, fiction they say can realistically present these science questions to the public through excellent novels such as The Sparrow, Arrival, and Contact. For example, Laura Krantz's podcast Wild Thing brings narrative into the communication of science through long-form stories. 

An aside: I notice in their conversations that, like myself, these women will test the public acceptance of their revolutionary concepts against the hypothetical "my dad" reasoner. 

I learn that without the Moon's historical influence on the Earth's development (gravity, tides, tectonic plates, light and darkness), the Earth would experience differently things such as rock strain, solar tides, destabalized tilt of access, and even subliming icecaps. In fact, history on Earth for humans can be divided into before and after the capture of the Apollo 8 Earthrise image. A gibbous shape, lumpy not round, of the earth. One of the big questions for space travelers is how will humans react psychologically once they cannot see Earth anymore?

• Laura Krantz is a journalist, editor and producer, in both radio and print, and co-founder of Foxtopus Ink. Her podcast, Wild Thing has received critical acclaim from Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic, which named it one of the best 50 podcasts in 2018 and 2020. 

• As a journalist, Rebecca Boyle has reported from particle accelerators, genetic sequencing labs, bat caves, the middle of a lake, the tops of mountains, and the retractable domes of some of Earth’s largest telescopes. Her first book, OUR MOON: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are (Random House, 2024) is a new history of humanity’s relationship with the Moon, which Rebecca has not yet visited on assignment.

• As a Colorado-based science journalist, Sarah Scoles serves as a contributing editor at Scientific American and holds the position of senior contributor at Undark.

• Heather Swenson is an Aerospace Engineer with a multidisciplinary background in satellite operations, mission design, human factors, and trajectory analysis. Projects include reusable space transportation systems, lunar and interplanetary cubesat missions and human space flight systems including the Orion Program and lunar Human Landing System

These dynamic presenters are clear about their ultimate goal: to get us back to here, all one, all together, with all that we need, on Earth. This goal is pushed into the public by women scientists and women writers, and is a view not generally accepted by all scientists. Even as we can look to space for knowledge and resources and the unknown, we must realize that we are built to live here, we have everything we need to live here, and we need to preserve Earth.

Last question: what is the one subject that you would like to see more focused study of right now?

• space telescopes
• animal communication (see Lawrence Doyle in The Atlantic)
• matter and atoms can't yet be replicated with our equations!
• dark matter and energy - WTF?

Mountain Words Literary Festival: Premise in writing process

If one concept stands out as a thread to connect so many of the brilliant writers and presenters I've experienced this past long weekend at the Mountain Words Literary Festival in Crested Butte, Co, it is the guiding idea of a "premise" for the writing project, the essay, the book.

1. Friday morning I started off the festival weekend with a workshop on writing a play in two hours led by Steven Cole Hughes, a Visiting Professor of Theatre at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, CO. A dynamic and authentic teacher, he brought us back to Aristotle's three elements of a story: beginning, middle, and end. To which Steve added possibly the most important 4th element: premise. According to Steve, "You mean something and you are trying to affect your reader in some way. Be aware of why you said something." 

Aristotle names 6 elements of theater:

• plot
• character
• theme (premise)
• music
• diction
• spectacle

A premise is "a statement that is provable by the events of the story." I am a lover of sentences, and so Steven spoke to my own process of writing when he focused his teaching on "the way the story is told, word for word, the drama of the sentence." What is the story you are setting out to tell? Keep this statement in mind as you write in any genre that involves storytelling.

2. My next spectacular workshop, titled "Poems for which we are grateful," was led by Aaron A Abeyta. I fell in love with his writing two years ago in the first Mountain Words festival. In this workshop, Aaron drew from the teachings of W.H. Auden for certain essential questions he asks himself of the poem and the subject as he is writing. Aaron spoke about how he finds the poems he is most grateful for seem to ask some essential questions, personal as well as philosophical:

• why am i writing this? 
• whose poem is this?
• what is the universal question I am asking here that has been asked a thousand times already?
• what parts of me are emerging here? 
• What place is emerging? 

For Aaron, poems ask questions that perform as the guiding premise for the writing of that poem. If you are getting stuck in a certain draft, go back to these questions and see what question must be asked next. Szymborska wrote, "Whatever inspiration is, it is born from the continuous question, "I don't know." I thought that Abeyta, as a teacher, bravely and with humility held high standards for us writers in the room, and asked for everything of his students. He asked us to ask  ourselves, what is our guiding question in our life? 

3. Laura Pritchet PhD directs the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. Her workshop approached storytelling through flash and fragments, experimental forms that provide fresh methods to write about challenging subject matter. Climate change, racism, society division, despair, can be illuminated through lists that subvert the standard "10 Rules of..." offerings online. Snippets unrelated through causality with large leaps between the fragments. The epistolary form can bring in voices and perspectives of others. And her favorite, the hermit crab essay/poem/piece of writing finds just the right container to crawl into and take over as its form. You must find just the right form for what you want to write about. 

For all of these experiments, the writer must also be aware of the theme or underlying meaning. Laura told us to say something that matters to you so that your writing can become an act of connection between you and the reader. She read a beautiful example of using these short fragmented forms from her latest book, Playing with (wild)Fire, that consisted of four paragraphs, each one a different character's third person description of that moment in time. Her characters were human as well as mammal and bird.