330: Cryptids w/ the Cryptonaturalist, Jarod K. Anderson!

Hey there friends and welcome to episode 330 of Just The Zoo of Us. This week I am joined by one of my absolute favorite creators, writer and poet Jared K. Anderson. You may have seen his posts online or listened to his podcast as The Crypto Naturalist. You may have seen his posts online or listened to his podcast as The Crypto Naturalist or, like me, you may have read one or two of his books and he has joined me to talk about the ways that nature and wildlife can inspire our creativity and shape our stories, particularly the enticently unknowable cryptids. We discuss being raised by a witch, the natural poetry and scientific facts about starfish, the value of enthusiasm, caked up mothman, and the tragic squonk getting emoted on by skunks, the surprisingly complicated history of dandelions, a vulture named Potato, and so much more. Just The Zoo of Us presents cryptids and ecology of the imagination with the Crypto Naturalist Jared K. Anderson. Hi there, everybody. It's Ellen Weatherford with Just The Zoo of Us, your favorite animal review podcast. I'm so excited. We have a brand new friend to talk to this week who is maybe a new voice for some of y'all, not a new voice for me. We were just talking a second ago about how I feel like I've been following you on social media. I've been reading your work for years and I feel like I have gotten to know you quite well through your works already. So I'm very excited to finally get to talk to you. This is Jared K. Anderson. Say hi, Jared. Hi, Ellen. Thanks so much for having me. Good to be here. Thank you so much. Jared, you are coming to us from the world of poetry and fantasy and I feel like a world that I have been spending a lot of time in over the last few years. I feel like I'm like a late in life reader. I was one of those kids who was really, really into reading like as a high schooler and then fell off of it and now I've had to get reacquainted. And what better time for a fantasy novel to come into my life, especially one so sort of tailored to my interests and the things that I find joyful about reading than the novel Strange Animals. Jared, what got you into your work writing? Were you always a writer? Was this a recent thing? Oh, geez. I'm one of those writers who have like a very specific moment I can point to. Oh, that's perfect. Which I think is a little rare. But I didn't really grow up among books like my parents weren't big readers. But when I was in fifth grade, 10 years old, I just had one of those life-changing teachers named Miss Woolard. And she used to, and I don't know if you could do this these days, but she used to just take us out back behind my elementary school in rural Ohio and just kind of send us kids out into the woods with pen and paper and kind of just say, go sit someplace and write down what you see. We wrote a lot of nature poetry and we would come inside and sit in bean bag chairs and she would read Mary Oliver to us. And you know, that was just kind of the moment that I was hooked and I really never stopped. Wow. I feel like that's a great encapsulation of I think what a lot of teachers hope for in their careers. You know, like a lot of teachers, I think feel like if I can get one kid, if I can get one, one of these little snotty goblins can come out of this and maybe be the next poet, be the next writer, be the next novelist, like I feel like that is a culmination of sorts for a teacher. I actually sent her a note recently and I sent her a picture of a copy of My Side of the Mountain she gave me when I was 10 with the inscription in the front because you know, my novel came out last month from Penguin Random House and you know, I had my memoir published last year and I've had these poetry collections and so I just took a moment to really let her know that she started it. And you know what, good on you for like giving her her props, right? I feel like that's probably very validating, not just for her, but for probably a lot of teachers listening who are like, yes, it happens. It really does happen. She came back with shock honestly. Like she kind of, I felt so good that I reached out because I think sometimes we might assume that the teachers know when they have changed us in a significant way. And good reminder for me that it's always worth taking a second and letting somebody know that they've had a wonderful impact on your life. And she's like, for me, it was a Tuesday. No, no, I mean, she was she was she was like, wow, you know, she couldn't believe I still had the copy of My Side of the Mountain. I actually referenced it in the novel. Yeah, I remember I was, I literally was, I finished reading it like last week. So it is, it is still fresh on the brain. Very excited to talk about it. And I feel like what I, what I love about Strange Animals and what I love about your other work that I've read, I have literally right next to me, I have a copy of Field Guide to the Haunted Forest, which is one of your poetry collections. And I feel like this through line in all of your writing is this love for nature and this love for ecology and in a sort of way that I think it's a difficult line to walk. It avoids too much anthropomorphization, because you know, you're not necessarily coming it into with like value judgments, right? Like nature just is the way that it is, regardless of whether we like it or not. But also without being too, I guess, nihilistic, there's also so much like hope and optimism and comfort in it, I think. And I'm wondering where this sort of like love for nature came from. Did you grow up spending a lot of time out in nature or wilderness? Or were you more of like an inside looking out kid? Like where did that love for nature come from? Yeah, so I grew up basically in the woods in Ohio. And I have a mom who, you know, we weren't really ever religious people, but my mom used to call the woods her church. And some of my... Banger, that's a banger right there. That's where you got it from. Yeah, I have been told like later in my life is like, you understand you were raised by a witch, right? I was like, I don't know. I never thought of it that way. But yeah, I mean, that said, some of my earliest memories are crows pecking on our front door because my mom forgot to give them a snack. Or I remember going out to waking up one morning and going to the kitchen window, and my mom was standing in the yard and a whitetail deer just walked up to her and she just handed it the toast she was eating. So yeah, maybe fair, the raised by a witch thing. Yeah, I feel like I'm seeing a lot of this book. I feel like I'm seeing the behind the scenes like... Some of my earliest memories are we would take kind of daily nature walks out in the woods and just see who was around and what was growing and talk about the spring ephemeral flowers that were blooming. One day we found a green herring nestling that had fallen out of the nest and took it to a wildlife rescue. And so I just, I have a lot of memories like that growing up. So I don't remember a time not loving animals and nature and having it be a big part of my life. Hmm. I feel like when I, especially when I'm like reading your poetry, a lot of the language, I think reminds me a lot of the language that I see in scientific papers and like academic journals and stuff like that. A lot of times when I'm reading, I'm like, this feels so like it's coming from a very like researched and informed perspective with also that sense of like whimsy and magic that I think you lose a lot of in scientific, you know, papers because they have to be. What is that research process look like to you? Like how do you, how do you spend your time like learning about nature? Is this just like going out for walks and looking around or like, are you seeking out like materials about nature? Like what is the, what does the learning process look like for you? Yeah. So I've always been a science and biology nerd. You could call this bad planning, but I graduated my undergraduate degree. I had twice the number of credits I needed to graduate because I was a biology major for a very long time and eventually switched to literature and English. I actually had an English professor at one point say to me like, you have to be an English major. She's like, I don't know how you'll make money, but I mean, you just have to be an English. Right. Yeah. Really taking you away from the glamorous and illustrious high earning biology careers that everyone's striving for. Right. Yeah. But I remember a zoology professor making fun of me once. Because I had, I had a very high grade in the class and she looked and she's like, you're an English major. What are you doing here? Like this isn't a class for English majors. And that's, well, I love it. So there. Yeah. And yeah, you know, I grew up being obsessed with nature shows. The one big one for me was Wild America with Marty Stalford. But there were a lot, you know? I used to get them wherever I could. And so to me, like it isn't a binary. It isn't an either or, you know, poetry or science. It is, it is thinking of like fact and truth as sisters, not twins. Yeah. Like the facts can be the thing that we use to partner with, to make our own sort of meaning and metaphor. So I care about the facts and I need them and I want them. And, you know, without them, what am I reaching for when I am, when I am looking for those sort of metaphorical poetic appreciations of nature? Right. I also feel like I've gotten to talk to so many people who are in that intersection of loving wildlife, loving nature, loving ecology, and also having this sort of creative drive, and whether that is through words or through art, you know, music, whatever it is, people like there, there is a huge intersection between people who love wildlife and who are like creatively inclined. And I think the through line there is a sort of like curiosity and an interest in something different from yourself. Right. Like I think that if you're just interested in life that is not like you, you're probably more inclined to be a little bit more creative, right? And have ideas for how to do things differently than how other people do them. Like when I, I never feel more creative than I do when I'm like learning about some deep sea invertebrate or like, you know, some like absolutely wild like adaptation that a frog has or something. Because then you're like, Oh, I didn't even know it was possible for you to navigate the world in this way. And then once you learn about how Oh, animals do things so differently from us, it just gives you the springboard of like, Well, what if we did things differently? Or what if our world worked differently? Like I feel like there's a huge intersection there. I think so too. And I know sometimes, you know, I count myself among this group, but some of us are just moved to tears by lists of facts about animals. And then sometimes I think the creative impulse comes from it driving us a little crazy that other people don't understand why sometimes a fact about nature seems so moving or mind blowing to us. And so sometimes for me, the creative craft is like, Okay, I don't know what you're missing here that this doesn't move you to tears, but I'm gonna I'm gonna like use metaphor and poetry and fantasy to kind of help you get to where I am emotionally. And what you were saying, I sometimes think of it as imaginative empathy. You know, it gets dicey when we talk about, you know, personifying, being anthropomorphic about it. But at the same time, like, I care about building a bridge between somebody's human experience and the non human world, if that doesn't happen for them automatically. Yeah, it can be deeply frustrating to like, try to explain to somebody something that just like absolutely blew your mind and changed your entire like perspective on the world. And they're just like, Okay, and you're like, this changes everything. And they're like, cool. And I'm like, no, it's I mean, yes, it is cool. But like, it's so much more than cool. Yeah, I was recently chatting with a marine biologist, pal of mine, who teaches at Georgetown, Rebecca Helm. Oh, I yeah, I followed Rebecca for years. Oh, cool. Yeah, deep ocean exploration, I think might be on there. But, you know, she knows I write poetry. And sometimes we have these writer chats, these nerd hangouts, we call them. And she was saying, you know, she sees poetry about butterflies transforming, you know, chrysalises. But she's like, we need a poem about starfish, because there's the chrysalis, which is cool. But like, starfish, like burst out of their old bodies, they're like juvenile form that's free swimming, like this, this tiny star, you can see it just tear its way out of its old body. And she's like, you know, there needs to be a poem about that, that not all transformation is the same, or sometimes it's not graceful. And I'm sitting here listening to her, I'm just thinking, well, that is a poem all by itself. Like some facts are just like, yeah, I think you've done it. They're very poetic facts. Yes. Yeah, like, I was like, okay, I can write that down. But it's interesting, like that's one of those facts that just hits me as kind of beautifully interesting, encapsulated all by itself. So then yeah, it's an interesting science communication challenge of like, okay, how do I get you excited about this to person who isn't necessarily blown away by a starfish fact? Like, how do I explain the sort of like a kind of Durham life cycle in a way that like your eyes won't just glaze over and roll to the back of your head? Yeah, I feel that way about the evolution of whales, the whole like starting in the ocean, going on the land, and then turning around and going back into the ocean. Never mind. Yeah, like, I feel like there's so much there. There's so much meat on that poetic bone, I feel like. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the bones, you know, that sort of hand bones inside the flipper, yeah, it's there's so much there. But that's also like not even though they are very poetic facts, those aren't very like accessible facts. Like you couldn't just look at that animal outright and know that there's like, there's this incredibly beautiful, like mythical feeling backstory behind why that animal is the way that it is just by like observing it, you'd have to kind of like have the scientific level of knowledge to know like it's evolutionary history or its life cycle, which not everybody has that like foundation of knowledge. So I think that's like, that's it's so tricky to be like, Hey, this is going to be really cool if you can like bear with me and listen to me talk about taxonomy for like 30 seconds. Yes, well, something that I embrace. And I think you do very well too. Like with this show is like, sometimes I think people find the idea of an enthusiast as way more approachable than an expert because we're in it for the love of the game, purely. Yeah, right. So sometimes it's like, Hey, just nerd out about this with me, like, it can be a trick on those like, I'm just excited. Let me talk to you about my hyper fixation for the moment, you know, and enthusiasm is I think I think it's contagious in a way that expertise not all not always is it is to me, you know, like that's that's part of the trick. But I think enthusiasm can do a lot for us, especially in that imaginative empathy piece. Because first we got to get the imagination sometimes before we get the empathy part. On the topic of getting the imagination going, something that is a definitely a through line in your novel strange animals, and also has been a huge theme of the work that you've been doing, you know, online, you use the handle the crypto naturalist, which you have mentioned has gotten you into some annoying people coming to you for the looking for perhaps cryptocurrency. Or getting hate because of crypto currency. That's the worst. Guys, when I came up with that name, I was just thinking of crypto as, you know, a prefix meaning hidden. I was not thinking of Bitcoin like so. But because this was fully years before cryptocurrency was like a thing anyone talked about. It was probably a decade ago. It's probably around the cryptocurrency, but I wasn't thinking about it, you know, I certainly not cryptids and cryptozoology. But I wanted it to be broader than cryptozoology. So I went with crypto natural, which I think is such a banger, because it is it does have that like naturalists, like a scientific observer of the natural world, but also with the imaginative whimsy, right, of cryptozoology and cryptids. And I have to say, I'm coming from the perspective of I've always been sort of on the extreme end of the skeptic spectrum, like, all the way over, like, if there's no hard evidence of it, I'm not buying it. But a few years ago, I had the best conversation about Bigfoot with Elliot Helmer, who is actually an archaeologist and has a background in anthropology. And we talked about Bigfoot. Now, at the time, I did not live in the Pacific Northwest. So I was not steeped in Bigfoot culture. Now I'm a little bit more around, I'm in the Bigfoot scene, I feel like I'm in Bigfoot community. Okay. And a big part of that conversation that really resonated with me was the idea of like, cryptids, and things that are alive in our hearts and our imaginations, having an impact on the world around them, as though they were physically real, that even if they lack a sort of corporeal form, the idea of them has a very real impact on the world around us. And like, it's like what you were saying earlier, like, fact and truth being sisters, but not twins, right? Like, just because, you know, something might live in our minds and in our hearts doesn't mean it doesn't affect the world the same way as if it might if it was more corporeal or tangible. So I have come around and I have found the joy in cryptids, I feel like. So I'm like a late adopter of the cryptid like joy. So I'm kind of an outlier because cryptids have always been about the metaphor for me. Like, I've been invited to sort of cryptid festivals before, and I've kind of thought like, I don't know if you want me because I'm always sort of like, I don't care if they're real. And I'm constantly sort of making up my own partly because what I care about is sort of the metaphor. First of all, there have been all sorts of instances where something was considered a cryptid, and then turned out to not be, you know, turned out to be real. I mean, from Komodo dragons to the giant squid to platypus to mountain gorillas to. I think Ocopies. Yeah. Yeah, the sealocanth. Ocopies are my wife Leslie's favorite animal. Great taste. Great taste. African unicorn, I think they were called at one point. Which that one was even purely just like the colonial mindset of like racism. It was purely just well, a lot of these are. It was purely just all these people don't know what they're talking about. And then they're like, oh, hey, there's like a giant or before living in her forest. And then when, you know, they were just like, I hide you guys clearly don't know. It's not like you guys have lived here for hundreds of years and would definitely know what lives in your woods. Yes. Yes. A lot of these are people just ignoring the knowledge of indigenous folks who know. I mean, you know, there's a 15th century like thing of the kangaroo being doubted as a hybrid fox human hybrid, you know, it's all over the place, usually from the perspective of colonizers. You know, part of the point I'm making with this is that the mystique of just not knowing is part of what drives the fascination. I've long held that if somehow we then found a colony of big foot, big feet, big squats, it follows attorneys general rules, they're big feet. Okay, big feet, big foot, all living together. You know, I think how quickly would it become the gorilla? Like gorillas exist. And we're not that nice to them either. Yeah, exactly. We're way nicer to big foot than we are to gorillas. I think often whether people know it or not, what they are after is the lure of unknowability. And as soon as it is sort of known and documented, it falls out of the category. Because in my mind, just if we're doing pure comparison, like the electric eel is more interesting than big foot. We know the electric eel exists. Yeah, the idea that like a fish produces electricity is absolutely incredible and like seems like a sci fi concept. Whereas the idea of like, there's a big guy, and he's hairy. And like, that is like, okay, sure. My six year old son asked me the other day, like how lightning bugs glow? And you know, I'm reaching back for knowledge and I'm like, well, there's this enzyme called luciferase, which is awesome all by itself. Luciferase, come on. Banger name, they really cooked with that one. But like, yeah, like I'm hearing myself. And it's just like, in what way is this not magic? It's like, well, we've measured some things and named some things. But you know, how is a firefly less interesting than a will of the wisp in legend? There's a quote. What is it? You might know it better than me. There's a quote that's like, once technology advances to a certain point, it becomes indistinguishable from magic. Yes, I think it's Arthur C. Clark. Hang on, I have to look this up. I have to get this right. Indistinguishable from magic. It's in my Google search history. Would you believe that? I started typing it into Google and Google was like, we know what you're looking for. It's advanced enough technology. Yeah. It's from Clark's three laws. And he says, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I think that applies to any sufficiently advanced biological process. The thing that really does that for me is venom, how neurotoxins and venom manipulates the sodium gates in cells to force their sodium gates open. And I get to a point in researching this stuff where I have to kind of like, I'm in too deep, pull me out. I can't do this anymore. But learning about stuff like venom and how one animal can manipulate the biological processes at the cellular level of another animal is that is this. Oh, cordyceps. Cordyceps does not get any more magic. It doesn't get any more magical than cordyceps. Like the way that like a fungus can like do brain surgery and like hack into the brain of an insect is wild. Okay, so compare that to a big furry guy. Like it isn't any more wild. It's just the premise that you can't find them. Right. It's just like the nagging itch you can't scratch premise of something in nature that is unknowable or unreachable. And there are so many different flavors of cryptid too. Like the term is kind of wild. Like, you know, you could have the Flatwoods monster in West Virginia who is like alien flavored, right? It happened when a light went across the Scott. There's the moth man that's sort of mystic. Love moth man. My sister in law when she was in town, she bought a little figure of a moth man that for whatever reason, whoever made the figure made him absolutely caked up. Like he had like a huge round butt. And it was so endlessly delightful. Have you seen the statue? I think it must have been reminiscent of the statue because I think isn't the statue like the bronze is polished? I've been to the statue. It's in Point Pleasant, West Virginia near where the original sighting was and the bridge collapsed. But yeah, caked up is the right word. The butt on that guy is amazing. I think if I remember correctly, he has abs too and like a hairy chest. And I'm like, wait a minute, what's up with this jacked moth man? I love him bow moth man. I'm so glad they made him that way. Listen, you know, if James Cameron could give all the Navi and Pandora boobs and hourglass figures, I think we can have jacked moth man. I think we've earned it. Why not? But so nothing will derail me like jacked moth man. But like the point being like the only unifying thing in this is the unknown, right? You've got you've got alien, you've got mystic like Jersey Devil is kind of demonic or magic. And then you have the straight animal ones like Sasquatch or Chupacabra really, the Loveland Frogman. Like there's ones that are like, okay, weird animal. Then there's ones that are like magic, maybe a ritual gone wrong. There's like other dimension kind of cryptids. But again, the unifying thing here is something that we can't know, but is tantalizingly linked to nature and often specifically wilderness, which I think comes from like the weird, false dichotomy we feel between like humanity and nature sometimes, like go out into the dark woods where you know, that's where the unknown still lives off the edge of the map. And which, you know, is funny to me as somebody who goes to the woods is like my warm fuzzy comfort place. But I think that's part of it. It is my warm fuzzy place until about 8pm. And then it is no longer my warm fuzzy place. Yeah, yeah, I get that. I get that. But you know, I used to just go sleep in the woods. Like sometimes I would just take a blanket and just go sleep like under a tree. My thing about the woods is like nobody can sneak up on me in the woods. That's true. Like all the leaves, all the sticks, like there are booby traps everywhere. I get I feel more uncomfortable like sort of around crowds or in a city like now you do have to have the experience to understand that a white tailed deer walking through the woods sounds exactly like an axe murder. That's true. Those things are not once you get past a few of those. They are not watching their step. They are just all over the place. Clop, clop. In Florida, the armadillos, you could hear those things about a half mile away. There was no subtlety whatsoever. The armadillos would just just like little little tanks. Not graceful. Yeah, well, I feel that way about raccoons too, except like they can be completely silent and then they decide not to be anymore. I love the decision tree. That can be startling. I think they're trolling us. I really do. Do you have any favorite cryptids? Are there any cryptids that like have a really special place in your heart? I mean, aesthetically, I love the squonk. Have you heard of this one? Squonk. It sounds familiar. So the thing is, he's an ugly pig little guy who looks a little like a pug and is very self conscious about what he looks like. So he's specifically famous for crying. Oh my God. So he's just this sad little like depression avatar. I googled it. This is a deeply unserious. I know. So unserious. If you catch one, he might dissolve into tears. So it's just like, oh, that's really, I don't know. It's like so ugly. It's cute and so sad. It's moving kind of an idea of a cryptid. Yeah. Cause usually I feel like cryptids are, there's like an air of like menace re to them. There's kind of a sinister undertone of like, ooh, they're going to get you. Whereas the squonk is very just like, oh man, he's out there, y'all. Sorry. This is funny because it's objectively not a cryptid, but something that kind of lives as a cryptid in my head is the hellbender. Oh, yeah. That's a real boy. Yeah. But like they live around me. I'm constantly out in the woods. I look around streams, but like, have I ever seen a hellbender? Certainly not. Like I've tried. The hellbender. I love that they're also nicknamed the snot otter, you know? So I have like animals that are kind of like cryptids of my own personal narrative. You know who my cryptid is? Yeah. Yeah. Skunks. Oh, I have always lived near skunks. I have smelled them probably maybe like once a week. I smell them somewhere and I hear that they're around. I hear of them. I know academically that I live where they live. Never in my life have I seen one other than like in a zoo. Like I've seen them in zoos and stuff, but I've never seen a wild skunk and I'm starting to doubt. I'm starting to doubt. Well, I have both rescued an injured skunk when I worked for the Ohio Wildlife Center and had to take a skunk to an animal hospital. Was it the cutest thing you ever saw in your life? Oh, very. Yeah. I think they are, I'm not being silly. I'm not joking. I think they're one of the cutest animals we have in North America. They absolutely are. They are so cute. I used to run at this track at night too that was surrounded by woods and the skunks would just come out to the grass in the middle and they just were utterly unconcerned. Like I once, along with possums, referred to them as nature's D students. I love them, but like they have like one strategy that it's just their one survival strategy and so like they won't even really get out of your way. You just have to accommodate them if you're around them. Like do not stumble on one. It's not going to move. Or like if they run away from you, it's like this waddle where it's like you couldn't get away from anything. So it's good that you have that one chemical weapon. Yeah, it's aura. They're one defense is aura. But I will say I have also had to wash skunk spray off of dogs at three in the morning, like three or four times and that smell intensifies to like a sensation or a mouth feel when you're really close to it. It's soupy. It's a soupy aroma. Yeah, it's like okay. It transcends states of matter. Right. It's sort of like Hellraiser Cinnabite level. I have things to show you kind of like mixing pain and scent. Like it's, it is something up close. Yeah. At the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, they have a mounted, it's an Eastern spotted skunk skeleton. And I know it's an Eastern spotted skunk skeleton, first of all, because the sign says so. But second of all, because the skeleton is mounted in a particular position, a particular posture that only Eastern spotted skunks do. It is mounted in a handstand. I knew where you were going with that. And I am overjoyed that whoever was in charge of like putting together the display for that skeleton was like make him handstand. Because to people who like don't know that much about them, they probably are like, wow, someone was having it was in a silly goofy mood at work that day and just put the skunk in a little handstand. But like it's like an if you know, you know thing. We're like, he's doing it. He's doing the thing. The trademark thing. It's so cute. That really kind of adds insult to injury too when they're spraying you. Because you're getting emoted on also. Right. There's really stunting on you along with the spray. You'll notice from how I talk about it though is like throwing in real animals along with cryptids is like that's really how I feel about it sort of on an emotional level. Like I really do believe that there are a lot of very real, very documented animals that are no less interesting nuts, magical than cryptids. And they all kind of do get squashed together in my head. It is that I reach for them in my writing because I am trying to get to that childlike wonder that a lot of people feel when they first learn about nature, when they first go out in the woods and turn over rocks and have no idea what they're seeing. Like grownups sometimes struggle to have that feeling. And you probably noted in the novel that I do this there too, where like I will talk about a fictional, magical, weird creature, but then I will drop some facts about red oak trees on you. Right. And point out specifically that hang on, the divide between what is crypto nature and what is documented nature is really kind of arbitrary sometimes. There were a couple of moments where I had to get out my phone and be like, is this a bit? Yeah. Is this is this cryptid or is this real Z's? Yep. That's part of the fun. Hey, y'all, it's time for a quick break to hear from our friends on the maximum fund network. We will be right back with more. So stay with us. This is John Hodgman and Jan Varney coming to you from the flight deck. Please be comfortable. We have now reached our cruising altitude. Well, that's correct. You are now free to listen to the latest season of e-pluribus motto. As always, this season we'll discuss the official models of U.S. states and territories for your enjoyment. Look up the window. You'll see local iconography and creatures of all sorts. It'll be discussed this season, including California quails, Puerto Rican frogs, North Dakota horses, spiders of New Hampshire, and all matter of official and unofficial state crudence. I've now turned on the enjoyment sign. So please start enjoying new episodes of e-pluribus motto every other week on maximum fun and wherever you get your podcasts. Sit back, relax, and enjoy your listen. Saginaw, Michigan, Galveston, Texas, Albany, New York, the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and Muncie, Indiana. We've just added these cities to the growing list of meetups on April 23rd for MaxFund Meetup Day. Didn't hear your city or don't know where your local meetup is? Head to maximumfund.org slash meetup and we've got all the details there. And if you still don't see your city listed, host your own. Find somewhere, a park, library, cafe, bar, any public space a small group can hang. Then fill out the form at maximumfund.org slash meetup and we'll add you to the page so other folks in your area can find. That's maximumfund.org slash meetup. Hope to see you on April 23rd. Okay, so I did want to ask because for people who haven't read Strange Animals yet, it just came out. So I would understand if you're not on it yet, but I was early to it. I preordered. Oh, thank you. And something that I really enjoyed was how you sort of blended all of these sci-fi and fantasy elements with this sort of like folklore fairy tale vibe of cryptids, I think. Like when you were coming up with the cryptids in Strange Animals and when you're coming up with your own sort of fantastical creatures, where are those ideas coming from mostly for you? Are they from like your own experiences or from like other fantasy that you've enjoyed? Like how are what do you think is coming out in the cryptids that you're imagining? I mean, it's a classic where do writers get their ideas kind of thing, right? Where I think it's just a big old crock pot inside my skull and I'm just throwing stuff in there constantly and I don't always know how it's going to flavor the stew, you know? Some of them are pretty much like, yeah, I understand where this is coming from. Like there is a metaphysical monarch of crows in the book and that one is just like, okay, crows feel like they're magical and they're barely bothering to hide it to me. So that one's pretty straight over the plate. I think a lot of people feel that from crows, right? When I worked at the Wildlife Center, they had some crows that had become animal ambassadors because they were too injured to be returned and they had this outdoor enclosure and I would park and I would walk into the office and the crows would come up to the bars and go, caw, caw, just like that. Like in a human voice? Yes. And the first time I toured the place when I got the job there, one of the techs was giving me a tour and they did that, caw, caw. And I was like, what was that? And they were like, well, school groups come up and say, caw to them all the time. So they're making fun of us. They're doing the crow noise in a human accent. They're like, this is what you sound like. Yeah, this is you. This is what you sound like. Right. It'd be like if the crows started going like, dur, dur, talk, talk, talk. I'm a human. They start like waddling around, put a little hat on, like, I have to go to my job. Yeah, yeah. Oh, taxes. I have to pay bills. Yeah. So the idea that crows are kind of like no more than they let on was an easy one for me. And yeah, there's a, no, I can't give too much away, right? I know. I'm trying not to spoil anything. Because I do think that anyone that likes this podcast would like this book. So I'm trying not to spoil anything. Yeah, we have kind of a canid guy and we have a strange deer. The moths, the moths go crazy. Great moth representation. Love a moth moment. Yep. There's a cryptid that I nickname Blobber in it. So you can, you can try to guess what that might mean. It's giving squonk a little bit. Love the squonk. Do you have any favorite animals from fiction, like from either like fantasy or sci-fi fiction? Do you have any like favorite representations of animals or even just like works of fantasy or sci-fi that have like incorporated animals or nature in really interesting ways? Hmm. I'm sure I do. Everyone, anyone who has been listening to this podcast for more than like a year or so already knows what I've been chomping at the bit to talk about because I can never shut up about the Children of Time series. Oh, I haven't read it yet. Oh, my God. The new one just came out. The fourth book of the series came out on my birthday on Tuesday. I saw your post. Yeah. And it needs to be added to my to my to be read pile. I'm sure it ventures into like hard sci-fi quite a bit, but it is, I mean, every sort of installment of the series focuses on a sort of technologically advanced space faring civilization made up of some type of animal from Earth. So I also don't want to spoil the plot, but they the first one, I mean, probably everybody, everybody already knows the first one is spiders. They're jumping spiders. All right. I mean, you've sold me already. And it's not, you know, a lot of times you'll see space spiders in sci-fi, right? Like we've seen space spiders before, but the spiders are always the bad guys. Like it's always like they're the antagonist to the humans in some way. Like they are the, you know, they're just sort of mindless, thoughtless monsters. They're the sort of nebulous alien villain. But like the story is really about the sort of like development and like the history of spiders, spiders as a dominant species on this planet. And they're like culture and their politics and. And jumping spiders are so cute. I really don't understand how people could hate jumping spiders. Jumping spiders do feel like the easiest cell of the spider family. Yes. Well, there's the cartoon Lucas the spider too, which is this adorable jumping spider. Which is great, by the way. It's so cute. I got my son on that one early, partly because I wanted to watch it. It was one of those flimsy excuses for me to, like I love the cartoon Bluey and at some point he's just in the room. Oh yeah. We're a Bluey household for sure. Yeah. I mean, for me, like weirdly, one of the books that I love the connection to nature in is a Paranasi by a Susanna Clark. Oh, I just read that last year, I want to say. Yeah, I read that. It's not magical animals, but there's this guy trapped in kind of this world of metaphor and statues, but it has tides. And so like his relationship with like the albatross or he sees an octopus. And so it's like weird reverence for real animals that are in kind of a fantasy setting. Like in abstraction almost because he sees in sort of like devoid of context. Yeah. And he wonders about their meaning, but like they're real animals. And I kind of love them being dropped into a fantasy context like that. That was a strange book. I really liked it. It was it was it was a weird one. And I had a great time. It's also not very long. So I feel like if like fantasy books are usually like, I get so intimidated when I see a big fantasy book that's like 800 pages long. And I'm like, there's no way. But this it's it's not a long one. You can polish it off in like a week or two. Yeah, there's there's another one I reread recently. I think it's just called Grindel. And it's the Beowulf story, but from Grindel's perspective. And he's kind of an animalistic cryptid. And you know, I'm a real sucker from telling a story from a cryptid's point of view. So that's another one that I might recommend if, oh, for sure. If you want to have a book that kind of blends the line between what is personhood and what is animal. That's a good one. Years ago, I read this book that I've talked about on this podcast a few times. I'm a few times before I'm pretty sure that actually was recommended to me by a listener who emailed me and was like, you should check this book out. It's called Hollow Kingdom. And it is a like a post apocalypse, like freshly post apocalypse, zombie apocalypse, but told from the perspective of a crow who was raised by a human, basically. And then there's a zombie apocalypse and the crow is trying to figure out how to save the humans because he was raised by them. And it's a really, it is also a very, very like nature and ecology heavy book, but it's from the perspective of the crow, which I think is a really, really cool, such a charming and like charismatic narrator voice. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I grew up in a kind of a framework of nature writing that was very against anthropomorphizing animals. And I got why, because I think at the time part of the concern was like this papers over what is actually unique, interesting about the animal and makes it into a cartoon character. I get that. But I do think that to me, it's about bringing the animal into a human context that we understand to figure out something about ourselves or our relationship with nature in a way that I still think is useful. You know, like, I always want more diversity in writing and storytelling and meaning making. And so I do, I do like reaching for that tool sometimes. I also, you know, when you were describing Bigfoot and all the different like elements of like different cryptids being informed by fantasy or informed by science fiction or informed by folklore, like the Chupacabra, I think is very sci fi. Like it's even like specifically sort of like late like post mid century sci fi. Like it is so like it feels very like emblematic of like the pop culture of that time. But you know, then you've got Bigfoot, that Bigfoot legend goes back, you know, hundreds, I think thousands of years. And I was wondering about like how those cryptids can kind of express the way that we feel about nature. Because I feel like Bigfoot wasn't ever really like a villain or something to be feared. Like he was just a guy that lived out there. And the idea was that like you needed to kind of be mindful of him, like not encroach too much on his space. Almost like there was like a like a neighbor out in the woods who like there was someone out there who like you need to be polite and respectful of him. But then you have the more recent additions to the cryptid bestiary, like the Chupacabra and things that I do think seem much more menacing. And it almost seems like it's expressing like a shift in our attitude towards nature itself from being like, that's our neighbor, you know, we just kind of stay away from him and give him his space and respect him to now like, oh, it's there's scary stuff out there that's going to get you. That's why you need to like stay away. It's always a reflection of the writer or the person doing the storytelling. I mean, I think Bram Stoker was kind of afraid of foreigners. It was where we got Dracula. Oh, he's foreign and he looks foreign and I don't know. He's going to come and influence our English culture, you know, well, I mean, Bram Stoker was not. Anyway, yeah, I'm very much into the Bigfoot as sort of the old man of the woods. Growing up, my mom's favorite movie was Harry and the Henderson's and I still I still love that movie. If you haven't seen it, it's Bigfoot is definitely a good guy in it. But there are like, I don't know, even recent novels like D Evolved is a novel that's like Bigfoot's just a slasher. But I think it really is just a reflection of how you feel about nature in the woods. And if it's unknowable in a threatening way, then we get cryptids that are out to get you or, you know, have dark and unknown purposes that are sinister or threatening. Every once in a while, there is a cryptid that I think is supposed to embody something threatening, like, I don't know, if we consider like the wind ago, sort of the First Nations myth, the idea of sort of greed and hunger. So every once in a while, you do have cautionary tale cryptids. But again, like as a storyteller, often for me, they are more like enticing or enriching figures that really just embody a thing I think of as very positive, which is the idea that I will never know all there is to be known about nature, science, animals, even in my own little area of the woods. Sometimes I just go out and look around and see what I can name. And the answer is always not everything and never will be. Yeah. My five year old recently has been in this phase where if anyone has a thing that they like, or a thing that they're like interested in and talk about sometimes, it's fun for him to like ask you really obscure questions and try to stump you. And then once he stumps you, he'll go, so you don't know everything about that. And I'm like, yeah, dude, he'll like ask me weird obscure questions about like Pokemon or something. And I'll be like, I don't know. And he's like, so you don't know everything about Pokemon. I'm like, yeah, dude, I know, I never said that I nobody knows everything about anything. Like it's not attainable. And then he's recently also started because we were talking about, you know, imagination and building these sort of like, when you're building like fantasy worlds and stuff in your brain, he's also started coming up with these like, he's got this imaginary game that has like a lore and a backstory, he's five, okay. And like it has all these characters and all of this lore and world building that is completely in his brain. And I think it is very satisfying to him to think I'm the one that knows everything about this, because I'm coming up with it. I get to be the one that knows everything. Because like, if I don't know it, it's not there, right? Like, I think it is this sort of he has this drive to like, know absolutely everything about this thing. So he's created something in his head that he can be the one that knows everything about it. Because that's just not attainable in real life. And I think that's like an interesting, it's interesting to watch him approach creativity from that angle of like, I want to be the one that knows everything about this. It's, it's impossible. But it's also a fun impulse, right? Like, I just turned in a nonfiction book about dandelions that I wrote that'll be out in 2027. And I thought I knew a lot about dandelions. And in fact, this publisher came to me and just said, Hey, we're doing the series where we take one writer and they just write about a natural obsession, just kind of whatever you want. Do you want to do one? And I was like, Well, yeah, I'll take dandelions. And so actually delving into the research, I couldn't believe the number of times I was surprised by dandelions, just the common dandelion. I want to say on record, I'm on record as being pro dandelion, like a few episodes ago, I was talking to Emily Hall, and we were talking about like, what is a pest? Like, who gets to decide what a pest is? And we were talking about how like, what is a weed? Who gets to decide what a weed is? And what's just a wildflower? And I was like, I happen to love dandelions. Well, they're fascinating. And I mean, dandelions are often sort of the first flower upfeeding pollinators in my area. But interestingly enough, they have zero biological need for pollinators, like they reproduce asexually. They're enough for the love of the game. Dandelions make clones. Purely for fun. And so that's just, you know, it's a vestige of the parent species before they became dandelions. And even the question of if they are native is muddy. Like botanists will usually say yes, but then like, you start to delve into Native American tradition. And the answer seems to be no. Like I was, I was talking to ethno botanist named Linda Blackelk, who was like, every tribe I have worked with has a name for dandelions. And then you start to look at why they are considered non-native. And some of it is genetic evidence that seems to indicate they evolved in Eurasia. And that's fine. But that doesn't tell us if they arrived with the Mayflower, which is a popular, popular myth, or if they've been here for thousands of years. And it gets complicated. Like, all right, so are they native to, you know, the Russian peninsula next to the Aleutian islands, because they have air dispersed seeds, and they're found on the Tundra coasts, you know, in along Canada and, and in Alaska. And so like, when did they arrive? I did this paleobotany study, and they found dandelion seeds in indigenous hearths dated, you know, thousands of years ago. And, and so it gets really muddy. But the point is, like, I know what dandelion, I know about dandelion, sure. It's like, yeah, I did, kind of. But it's one of those things where you just keep scratching the surface. And how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? It's like, well, infinite, you can just keep licking. You can just keep learning more. For some people, the idea that like, it's impossible to know everything. I feel like I have two separate, like, emotional responses to it. One of them is like, deeply frustrated of like, wow, I'm never going to know everything about this. I'm never going to like, reach a point of like, completion of like, knowing about this thing. And the other part of me is just like, so relieved by the burden, right? Of like, you know what, it's okay. Nobody's ever going to know everything. It's okay to just not know things. And that's fine. But this is, this is where we get back to the metaphor of cryptids, where like, I think it's important to think that finding out is better than knowing, like, the potential energy to find out more is what's intoxicating. Like, that's what's fun about cryptids. And that's what's fun about science. Like, there will always be another like, shadowy creature or fact around the next, the next bin. Like, that's, that's wonderful. Let people have fun. I think let people enjoy things. Also that. I think that was kind of like where I landed when I was like, kind of coming around to not being such a, I don't know, I can't describe it in any way other than like, having a sort of stick in the mud stance about it of like, you can't prove it. You can't prove that it's real. And so we can't ever like, I just wanted to like, do away with the whole like concept entirely. And then like, just kind of coming around to be like, you know what, actually, the world is so much more whimsical and joyful with these ideas about things that, you know, we can't touch or see. Let the world have joy and whimsy. Yeah, well, yeah. And storytelling and fantasy. And I feel like these things have objective uses, even if, if we, you know, say they're subject, you know, objectively fictional, but like these sort of subjective acts of meaning making are here and with us and have been for the whole of human history as far as we know. And like, there's some kind of objective weight in that fact, I think. Also as like a huge fiction lover, fiction is so much more enjoyable and meaningful, I think, if you can just immerse yourself in the fiction and not worry about like picking it apart. It's like when at the end of like any sort of piece of fiction that involves, and then they woke up and it was all a dream, you know, and I'm like, God, what, this was a waste of my time. Well, I get there sometimes with fantasy or sci-fi that decides that they have to explain their supernatural elements in like a scientific framework. And I'm just like, stop it. Like that's enough. Don't tell me why there are zombies. Like, if you give me a guy who can fly at the beginning of the chapter, like, I will accept that as just part of the physics of your universe. Like you don't have to like meticulously back into the logic of how that could work in our universe. You just don't have to like. Okay, in fantasy, anything goes. I don't care. You can fly, change shape. I don't, whatever. Anything's fine. Let them do it. In sci-fi, I tend to kind of be a little bit more like, okay, I expect a little bit more explanation. I expect a little bit more like, I guess groundedness in sci-fi, but like my criteria for that is so low. Like it can literally just be like he was genetically engineered to fly. And I'm like, got it. All right. That's all I needed. Thank you. Well, and that's, you know, part of what we're talking about here is genre expectations, right? Like in science fiction, like the word science is there for a reason. You do want, you do want the science to be somewhat fleshed out. But he can be Technobabble. I will accept Technobabble. Or like Frankenstein is considered one of the first classic sci-fis. And it's not like Dr. Frankenstein ever tells you how the process comes about, that he makes the monster. In the book, all he really commits to do is not tell the captain who rescued him so that he doesn't go down the same dark path. You just accept that I used some kind of science. Science happened. Science happened. Dot, dot, dot. And then fill in the blanks here at your leisure. You figure it out, actually. Dot, dot, dot. I'm very much. Yeah. I mean, you know, and on the sci-fi side, like I do love like books like The Martian, where the point is, is the science that rescues, you know, him. And fun side note, my editor for Strange Animals was the editor for The Martian. Are you kidding? That's crazy. That is a crazy pull. Yeah. He was editor for The Martian and Ready Player One. Oh, geez. He was my top pick, honestly. They get. Nicely done. Yeah. Also, if we want to nerd out about fantasy, the book was put out by Ballantine, which they were the first publisher to bring the official Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to the US. No way. Hey, that was wild. So yeah, I definitely, there were definitely some tears when I got. Oh, you're in the pantheon now. I was, I was really, I was really shook. You're on the Mount Rushmore, for sure, baby. That was, that was a serious high when I got to work with that guy on Strange Animals. Oh man. And I did want to ask one more thing. I wanted to ask for people who maybe, like me, perhaps, approached the, the woods and the forest and wilderness with like curiosity and enthusiasm, but also tinged a little bit with fear, right? I get kind of scared when the sun goes down and I don't know what's out there in the woods and I get pretty spooked in the woods at night. So would you like have any advice or recommendations for people that maybe like want to spend more time out in wilderness or out in the woods? But you know, maybe there's just that little bit of hesitation there. I would say that all feelings are correct and listen to your body, honestly, partly because I feel like we can get lost in these sort of, I should be interacting with nature in this way or if only I could do it this way, like leave that aside. That's not what nature is here for. Like we are nature, our gut biomes, you know, our every breath communicating with phytoplankton. Like you're part of the legacy that is special about, about the woods and the forests and all these places. Go to them however you feel comfortable. If you live in a dense urban area, maybe stop and look at a splotch of lichen on a sidewalk. Take a little time to learn about what that creature is because it's really mind blowing. Look at the sky. We were going into the gym the other day and I pointed out we were getting out of the car and there was this light pole right next to our car where there was like a cement, like a concrete sort of like, I don't know, reinforcement around the bottom of the light pole and the entire concrete reinforcement around the bottom of the light pole completely carpeted with moss, like fluffy feathery moss and these big, like frilly lichen and like it was just, it looked like, you know, like overgrown post-apocalyptic sort of like humans have long gone extinct, you know, that sort of thing. Like it looked like it had been just completely like reclaimed. I love it. I saw there, I was like, dang, look how cool this light pole looks. Yeah, I share a fence with a cemetery and I walk over there and look at the lichen on the headstones quite a bit and I once read that some scientists studying lichen use cemeteries because the date on the stone can give them clues about lichen growth rates and patterns, which is just, that is so interesting. A wonderful kind of metal fact, I think. Oh, on metal facts, actually, my friend Ralph Crue told me this one a while back, it's about vultures. This might be a little too morbid for this podcast. I don't know, maybe it is, maybe it's not, but in the United States, we have turkey vultures and we have black vultures and the black vultures range was much further south than the turkey vultures, but during the civil war, when there were battles and then there were a lot of bodies on the ground after the battles, the black vultures would gather around, they were following the turkey vultures and they would gather on these battlefields and the black vultures like kind of daisy chained their way up the eastern United States and he was telling me that there is now a single like pocket of black vulture population that is like way farther north than the rest of the black vulture range and it's because it was over the Battle of Gettysburg. I both love that and I have to disagree, I have seen black vultures. Oh, wow. And we rescued one at the Wildlife Center, a chick fell into the back of a truck and came to us as a fluffy little guy we nicknamed potato. Potato. So they are rare, but I do see them in Ohio sometimes and yeah, I always heard that like their sense of smell wasn't as good as the turkey vultures, but they are more cantankerous so that they would follow the turkey vultures and then chase off the more gentle turkey vultures from carcasses. One of my most popular early poems was about turkey vultures. Do you know that one called clergy? Clergy, is it in the, I have field guide to the haunted forest right next to me. This one's from Love Notes from the Hollow Tree. You want me to read it real quick? I have it. Yeah, yeah, of course. Okay, clergy. Vultures are holy creatures, tending the dead, bowing low, bared head, whispers to cold flesh. Your old name is not your king. I rename you everything. That's so beautiful. It's just about how I love them as sort of decomposers and you know, the turkey vulture scientific name, you know, the golden purifier. Or a farming. Or yeah, so good. Before we let people know where they can go to find more of your work, I did also want to check in on this was because I realized that I had actually earmarked. I know people who are like book maintenance purists don't like when you dog your pages, but you know what, I dog your pages. Sorry. And that's not me. Yeah, me too. This is a book that I own. Nobody else is ever going to see this. I'm going to make it my own. Like I'm going to enjoy the experience of this book. Yep, meant to be lived in. So I had this poem from Field Guide to the Haunted Forest, Dog Eared, because it was my favorite one. It's called This and More. And if you wouldn't mind, I would love to read that one for people who haven't heard it before. For people who haven't heard it. Go for it. It's called This and More. Yeah. The world is the sound of tree shapes, decoded in a bat's brain. The world is electric fields, flexing in the mind of a shark. The world is a landscape of sense, recalled by a wolf like an old friend. The world is a mosaic of temperature shifts on the tip of a python's snout. The world is you making meaning for marks on this page. I love that. I like that one. I like that guy. Yeah, bars, actually. Huh. He seems cool. Was that like so long ago to you that you're like, I'm a different person? I mean, honestly, like as somebody who's very neurodivergent and squad both ADHD. Yeah, like every what sometimes I remember things when I go back and visit. And sometimes they do hit me in sort of a new way. And I don't know. That's part of the fun for me. Well, for anyone who wants to be part of the fun right along with you, who wants to join in, where can people find more of your work? I'm all over the place as both Jared K. Anderson and the Crypto Naturalist on Instagram and Blue Sky and Substack and all that stuff or at jaredkanderson.com. And where can people find strange animals? Honestly, your local bookstore. I love local bookstores and go in and they will probably have it. And if they don't, they will absolutely order it for you. So I would say go to your favorite local bookstore. If you don't have one of those, I like bookshop.org. But yeah, if you just search strange animals, you'll find it. Yeah, it is a lovely book. I really do mean that like I crushed this book. I read it really fast. It's a very slow reader. Like I have to like, I'll space out while I'm reading. And then I have to go back and read the whole thing again, because I wasn't paying attention. So I tend to like take forever to read books. But I zoomed through this one, like I really ate it up. It was delightful. I also like read a, I'm usually an ebook reader, but this was like a physical copy that I had, which was very, very pleasant. I've heard the audiobook is also very good. That was fun. I actually got to give quite a bit of feedback and almost choose my own narrator from a pool of like 12 people. So I'm a huge audiobook lover. I mean, I listen on hikes and doing chores and playing Stardew Valley. And so, yeah, the audiobook is very important to me. And I'm very happy with Jay Meyers, who, who narrates the audiobook. And you said you've got some, some more books on the horizon. So we've got more to look forward to. Always. I have a fourth poetry collection coming together. And yeah, I just turned in a nonfiction book to Timber Press. There were the folks that published my memoir about nature and depression called something in the woods loves you. And now they've let me write a book about dandelions. And am I pitching another fantasy novel? Yes, I am. So again, ADHD, I'm all over the place. Is it going to be in the same universe as strange animals or something totally different? Yeah, honestly, likewise with my fiction podcast, the crypto naturalist, like it all kind of takes place in the same universe. I like that whole Terry Pratchett building a universe thing. Even if I don't explicitly come out and say it all the time. Yeah, it's it's in the same universe. I love Ursula Le Guin's like approach to it. There was like a forward in one of her collections where she was like, yeah, some of my details don't match up. Get over it. She was like, there's a really good explanation for why some of these chronologies and some of the there's some inconsistencies and the names of things. There's a great explanation for that. And it is I forgot. I forgot what I wrote. I'm with the creators of the podcast I love, Welcome to Night Vale. When you're dealing with strange otherworldly like mystic happenings, like you want me to explain away something I forgot? I can. It's going to be less fun. I'll give you a rationale for why this part of reality slipped. But I think we just need to be on board with reality being a little bit slippery here. Yeah, there's going to be some wonky reality and you're just going to I mean, I feel like anyone who's like a fan of abstract surrealist sort of stuff like Welcome to Night Vale is going to be pretty like, okay, yeah, we'll allow for some reality distortion. Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite sci-fi fantasy writers to is Jeff Van Jermier in the area X series to I mean, being of weird nature. And so I like it when reality gets a little untrustworthy. Yeah, the I read the Annihilation series to those was those are the series I read on actually listen to the audiobooks of and I know that Jeff Van Jermier is from Tallahassee. And, you know, a lot of the inspiration for that world for that setting was the wildlife refuges along the sort of Florida panhandle. And as someone who grew up in that area and has spent a lot of time like hiking in those sort of like wildlife refuge areas, I was like, that's it. That's exactly what it's like. Yeah, he does some cool charity work there too, with with wildlife refuges. He's interesting too, because he's definitely a guy who loves nature. But there's certainly a sinister element to it in those books. But also like sinister, but weirdly not in a malicious way. Beautiful. You know what I mean? Like it's sinister, just threatening and beautiful, threatening in its own way. But like not in a way that's malicious. It's just the way that it is and it can't necessarily help it. Like, well, and that first that first book Annihilation too is told through the perspective of a biologist who ends up being sort of very kind of clinical and curious about how the landscape has changed and how it's actively changing her. It's again, it's a cool thing to play with perspective on questioning kind of the dichotomy between humanity and nature. I liked the movie too. The movie was very cool because that was how I was introduced to the series was with the movie. The movie was very cool. I haven't seen it yet. Now that I have read the books, I would have probably thought that the books would have been unfilmable. Yeah, same. Yeah, they seem so like purely abstract, like especially towards the end, they're just so abstract that I would worry about like, is this something that's going to suffer from being like contained into a visual? But I thought it was cool. The ending of an eye is first of all, there's some stuff in Annihilation that I think in the movie that I don't remember being in the books. It is viscerally horrifying, like the sort of thing that like we me and my husband still talk about as being like the scariest thing we've ever seen in a movie. And the ending I'm not going to spoil the ending because the ending is quite different. The ending of the movie is quite different from how any of the books end. And it is unique and something about the combination of the visuals on screen and the music because we were watching this in the movie theater. Something about it gave me a sensation of abject panic. Like I was like in a state of absolute panic. I had to like I was so close to leaving the theater. I was like, I don't think I can do this. Chris was like, it's okay. It's almost the end of the movie. It's ending in like five minutes. But it was something about and I don't normally feel that way about movies, but something about it really hit like, it was like, which is what you want from horror, I guess, right? Sometimes. It surprises people, but I'm a little bit of a baby about horror sometimes. My imagination's a jerk. And sometimes I'll watch a horror movie. I'm like, oh, I'm going to pay for this later. I'm going to pay for this at one in the morning, laying in bed. You know, I feel like for how so much of your work can kind of, I don't know if morbid is the right word, but for like, for how much of it can kind of express these like themes of death and decay, interested in death and decay and stuff like that. It's really not, I wouldn't describe it as horror at all. It's like not even like body horror or anything. It's very like, it's, it's like cozy horror almost. Can it be cozy? So you're not the first person to call the book, cozy horror. Yeah. Really? Yeah, it's gotten cozy horror. A fan of somebody called it cozy creepy. I can see that. Yeah. Cozy creepy. I like that. Because it does feel warm. It feels comforting, and it feels like optimistic and hopeful in a way, but with like creepy vibes. But ultimately, you don't come away from it feeling like depressed or like heavy. Like you come away from it with a feeling of like comfort and hope. But I'm somebody who both loves nature and struggles with chronic major depression. So like, I have a lot of experience kind of manually making friends with reality. And so I think sometimes that is what comes, comes across to as both the preoccupation with morbid stuff and ultimately being kind of warm and gentle about it. It's kind of a reflection of my own inner life, I think. Oh, wow. Well, you know, I've, I've found great comfort and I have found that your, your work has really enriched my sort of love of nature and my also, you know, experience of just reading your, your novel and from your poetry. I'm also not a huge poetry person. I really don't read a lot of poetry. It tends to be a little inaccessible for me. Sure. But I think because there's a lot of this like language that really resonates with me about like nature and ecology that really like is endearing to me. So this is a personal recommendation at this point. I think anyone who likes this podcast would, would delight in your work. So Jared, thank you so much for spending this time with me. Thank you for talking about the fantastical nature that inspires you. It has been an absolute delight getting to talk to you. Oh, thanks, Ellen. I, I really love chatting with you and I love the show. Thank you. Well, we'll talk to you later, Jared. Bye. Bye. Thank you all so much for listening. I hope that this conversation has inspired you to seek out the nature around you and find some real world magic in it. If you liked what you heard, I would love it if you left behind some kind words for us in a review on your podcast app of choice. If you want to come hang out with us online, we're on Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Blue Sky, links to everything will be in the episode description. You can send me an email at ellen at justthezoo of us.com. If you have a cool animal you would like to hear us talk about on the show, we'd like to thank Maximum Fun for having us on their network alongside the other amazing shows that they have like the ones that you heard promos for here today. You can go check those out and learn more about the network and how you can be a part of supporting our show, plus get access to our exclusive monthly bonus episodes over at MaximumFun.org. Finally, we would like to thank Louie Zong for our theme music. 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