In Episode 4, we interviewed Dogwood’s own Marketing Director, Amanda Rodriguez. Amanda is a published author and the director of the award-winning documentary Stories Happen in Forests. Join us as we explore her creative inspirations, the power of story and forests, and the many moving and inspirational interviews she captured for the documentary.

“My goal was to just interview as many different people as possible with different backgrounds and different connections to the forest to really showcase the diversity and the beauty of these various connections that people have, and also hopefully inspire people who watch them to connect with the forest, to be able to see themselves in that connection and remind them of their own connection.”

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Amanda is a queer, first-generation Cuban Sicilian American. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, NC. Her short fiction, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry can be found in Germ Magazine, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Mud Season Review, Thoughtful Dog, Rigorous, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Change Seven, Image Out, Cold Creek Review, The Acentos Review, Label Me Latina/o, Lou Lit Review, Scalawag, Indolent Books, NILVX, PANK Magazine, and The Rumpus (coming soon). She is also the first-time filmmaker of the award-winning short documentary Stories Happen in Forests. Find out more about Stories Happen in Forests by visiting www.storieshappeninforests.com.

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You can read the full transcript of the podcast below!

Elizabeth Lashay:
I am Elizabeth Lashay with SlaytheMic and I am so excited to be with you all today. And I am joined by my cohost…

Kimala Luna:
I’m Kimala Luna, and I’m with Dogwood Alliance. And today we have a very special guest. We are joined by Amanda Rodriguez, who is a queer, first-generation Cuban-Sicilian American and the marketing director for the environmental nonprofit that I also work for, Dogwood Alliance, which is based in Asheville, North Carolina. Amanda holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. Her short fiction, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry can be found in Germ Magazine, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Mud Season Review, Thoughtful Dog, Rigorous, Stone Boat Literary Journal, Change Seven, Image Out, Cold Creek Review and several others. She’s also the first-time filmmaker of the award-winning short documentary, Stories Happen in Forests, which you can find out more about at storieshappeninforests.com. But it’s also going to be a lot of what we’re talking about today. So hi, Amanda. Thank you so much for joining us.

Amanda Rodriguez:
Hi, thanks for having me. I’m very excited.

Elizabeth Lashay:
What a bio.

Kimala Luna:
I know. So Amanda, we’re going to talk a lot about Stories Happen in Forests today. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what that’s about and maybe how it started?

Amanda Rodriguez:
Sure. So, Stories Happen in Forests is a short documentary that is right now running the Film Festival Circuit, but it started out about three or four years ago where I started doing these sort of short vignettes where I was going out into the forest and meeting with someone and just capturing their story and their connection to the forest. And my goal was to just interview as many different people as possible with different backgrounds and different connections to the forest to really showcase the diversity and the beauty of these various connections that people have, and also hopefully inspire and people who watch them a connection to the forest, to be able to see themselves in that connection and remind them of their connection. Because I know that, especially as a nonprofit environmental organization, a lot of folks can get tired of hearing stats. That forests are good for the air, forests are good for water. They’re good for carbon sequestration, but they’re also really important to humanity as part of our legacy and our connection to the earth and our stories. And so once I’d done several of these, I decided to go ahead and put them together into a longer form, 30-minute documentary so that people could see them all together instead of just one-off and then submit them to festivals so that they could reach more people. And it’s very exciting to see how well they’ve been received. They’ve been accepted at a lot of the festivals, and they even won an award at one of them. So, I’m very happy that so many people are really feeling that beautiful connection that I feel when I watch them.

Elizabeth Lashay:
What age did you really feel the connection to nature, to the forest, to the outside?

Amanda Rodriguez:
Well, I am actually, by birth, an ocean baby. So I’m from Florida originally and I was in love with the beach and in love with the ocean, just always wanted to be outside in the sunshine. And it wasn’t until later when I was a little bit older, maybe in, I think it was in fourth grade, I don’t know how old that was, but we moved to West Virginia and it was a much more rural area. Mountains became a thing and it’s sort of awakened my senses to an entirely different ecosystem and an entirely different way of connecting with the natural world.

Kimala Luna:
Do you remember your first moment of awe in the forest since you were older?

Amanda Rodriguez:
I think so. I have not honestly, I’ve not gone on a lot of camping trips, but I remember we went on one as a family when I was probably around fourth grade, we went camping and it rained and we all got sick, but I do remember just being out in the woods and seeing a deer.

Amanda Rodriguez:
And that was the first time I’d seen an animal like that before, like a wild animal that wasn’t a fish or a squirrel. And I was just so captivated by it, to be in this like a magical place where your imagination can run wild because, I guess as a creative young person and a writer, it’s really all about connecting to that imagination and forests are an endless wonderland of imagination.

Elizabeth Lashay:
So whenever you are creating now and trying to find inspiration, is there a place where you like to go or draw from?

Amanda Rodriguez:
I guess I don’t have a particular place. And it’s also hard to think about in quarantine. I know that I am very connected to my backyard and I feel very lucky and privileged to have a backyard and access to trees and green space and to just sort of be out there and get that sort of renewal. And I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s a particular place, but I am always, I think inspired when I’m out in nature on a hike, say. It sort of opens my senses to make connections in a different way like seeing shapes in the clouds or seeing a rock formation and imagining what it could be, if you took it on a supernatural bench, say. So just sort of those little things out in nature is really kind of what inspires me.

Kimala Luna:
I want to jump forward from your initial discovery of nature to the first time that you recognized… because you brought this up when you said the privilege of your backyard and this comes up a lot in our work about access to nature and how that’s a privilege that we take for granted pretty often. So when was the first time that you recognized that divide and then really owned the space of this is something we need to fight for?

Amanda Rodriguez:
Well, I guess having grown up in more urban environments as a small child and being introduced to the natural world as a nine or 10-year-old. I probably intuited that there’s definitely a difference between what I and other people had access to in a city or in a suburb than in a more rural setting.

Amanda Rodriguez:
Certainly not anything very nuanced, but I guess it probably happened where I fully understood the difference in accessibility to outdoor spaces When I started doing the stories happen in forest. Just based on interviews with folks I’ve definitely had several BIPOC storytellers and several of them have told stories about how their first experience of nature wasn’t until adulthood and that there’s a sense of a state of a stigma around it, or fear, or just literally a lack of access because green spaces are not available to certain communities. I think that’s also a part of the mission of stories happen in forests is to kind of help expose that sort of inequity and I guess, encourage a more equitable access to the forest because it shouldn’t belong to any one of us. And I think you had Dr. Thomas RaShad easily on your episode one who was one of my interviewees. And he says this thing where he’s like, we don’t own this pointing at the forest. It owns us and it’s really true. The forest could exist without us, but we could not exist without the forest.

Elizabeth Lashay:
Going off of that, I feel like there is a disconnect that’s within our world, that we do need the forest and what are some things or ways in which we can create awareness really of what is happening and what we can do to connect our experiences with nature?

Amanda Rodriguez:
Well, I definitely always recommend getting involved with organizations who are doing the work or whose mission you feel excited by, or that you sort of align with and sort of tapping into the work that they’re already doing. And I especially encourage folks to look at organizations that are BIPOC led that really center BIPOC perspectives, especially in regards to the environment and environmental justice and access. But I guess kind of on a very simple level, I think it’s important to share. Share your story. Nobody has a monopoly on storytelling. Stories don’t belong to anyone. So, I would love if folks were to watch the stories and share it and then be inspired to share their own stories of connection. Because I think that’s really what it is that drives people to make change is when you have a connection to a place versus kind of an abstract forests are important for air.

Kimala Luna:
Can you talk about the first time that you were working on this project and you got chills and you were like, this is something really special that I want to continue with?

Amanda Rodriguez:
So I interviewed a retired biologist. His name is James Woodley. Maybe he’ll someday be on What’s in Wilds the podcast because he is fantastic. And yeah, so he’s a retired biologist and his story is about how he grew up with polio. And he grew up in an Environmental Justice Area. So his access to nature was diminished, but he found that when he would go into the forest, he would feel strength and beauty and wholeness and part of, I think he says, that his disability I’m quoting did not affect him negatively. It was just part of the complexity of life.

Amanda Rodriguez:
And I’m getting chills saying it right now. I can feel it. And every time I watch his story, I have to push back those tears because it’s just so beautiful and so important. Like his strength is such a beacon to others.

James Woodley:
Well, I was diagnosed with post-polio and I had to move back to North Carolina to come back to the forest and hopefully recapture some of that spiritual inspiration that I found as a youth that got me through everything that I needed to get through. I began to remember what the forest meant to me and what I can overcome and what I can deal with and how I can deal with it. And I began to pull on those kinds of feelings again, that I can be okay, that I may look different, but I don’t have to give up. I don’t have to give up. That is my message. Find your light and hold onto it with everything you’ve got. So, and this is mine, this is mine.

Elizabeth Lashay:
I do think we forget how powerful just being outside and not just seeing it through a window or yeah, just actually being. What are some things that you want to continue to do? I mean, you have been published in so many publications and receiving national and awards and recognition. So what is next?

Amanda Rodriguez:
Well, I definitely want to continue to promote the Stories Happen in Forest documentary and I’m so excited to release it. I’m hoping we’ll be able to release it at some point next year to the public, which is just going to be so fun, but I also really want to fill more of them, maybe a different style, but I’m really thinking how can I grow this project into something more and have it evolve into something different. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, I’m certainly not asking folks to come out into the woods with me and film, but I’m also… I also feel like my writing… I guess I’ve always been from a young age, a bit of a political activist. So I always… It’s very backwards from the way that all the teachers I’ve ever met say where it’s like, the story should drive the message. And that’s not really the way I think about it. I always think that you should be trying to say something, you should be trying to change something when you write. I remember reading this article about, they were saying that the London fog that is so famous. It didn’t really exist in people’s consciousness until Charles Dickens wrote about it and manifested it to their consciousness. And then they started to see the London fog and it became this thing that is associated with the signature of London.

Amanda Rodriguez:
And I just think that’s such an important way to think about writing is that you’re trying to uncover things that people aren’t seeing. You’re trying to write into reality or create into reality the future that you want to see, one that is more just, and is more equitable for all people. Not just for some, I’m going to continue to write and I’m actually working on a website right now. So hopefully I’ll be able to catalog some of those things and make it easy for people, should they feel inspired to read them or watch the stories happen at force trailer, or be notified of release dates.

Kimala Luna:
Since you mentioned the future too. And I’m cheating a little bit because I’ve seen some of the segments and I have my own personal favorites, but I want you to talk about the youngest Stories Happen in Forest participant and what that experience taught you.

Amanda Rodriguez:
So the youngest participant was Lila. She is part of, or she was part of… She’s a fifth-grader at time, the Muddy Seekers Program that’s based out of her Bard, which the goal of that program is so incredible. It’s to get young people into the woods to learn science through experiential learning and connection to nature, which is so cool. When I interviewed her, I mean, it was such a different experience from interviewing all the other adults.

Amanda Rodriguez:
It was just like you just never knew what she was going to say next. And just like the wisdom, the wisdom of a fifth-grader, it was like, she would crack me up and then she’d break my heart. It’s just like kids just intuitively know, they just know that forests are important and that the animals in the forest are important. And we can learn things from our forests. Also, she really loved bugs, which I found incredibly endearing. She must’ve mentioned bugs 10 times during the interview. Maybe more.

Elizabeth Lashay:
Yeah. I’m not the biggest fan of bugs. That’s what [crosstalk 00:19:04]

Amanda Rodriguez:
Me neither. Me neither.

Lila:
My name is Lila. I’m in fifth grade. I like to pick up bugs a lot. I like to put ladybugs on my hand. Sometimes help a frog get to where it’s going, probably to the pond. And I like to dig in the dirt a lot. I don’t mind getting dirty.

Amanda Rodriguez:
It’s just so cool that this fifth grader loves bugs. She loves spiders. And she taught me things. She taught me about that North Carolina has a state salamander. I had no idea that we had one and she was explaining to me convection and how they learned about convection. I mean, this girl is going places.

Elizabeth Lashay:
I’m so happy that you interviewed someone that was being fifth grade at the time. And that’s something that we don’t talk about is the different ages and the generational wisdom that we just need to continue to move towards. And we forget about our identities and we stay locked into just this one area. And so when we talk about nature and the forest and the potential and the wide openness of it, what do you think people are missing out on?

Amanda Rodriguez:
By not connecting to nature?

Elizabeth Lashay:
Right.

Amanda Rodriguez:
I mean, so many things. I know a lot of folks use it for recreation, exercise, solitude, anxiety management. And one of the stories in Stories Happen in Forest that I also found really moving was his name is Noah. And he went through a wilderness therapy program to help him recover from drug and alcohol addiction. So just the idea that connecting with nature and connecting with yourself can heal you in so many different ways. It’s just so incredible. And I also think there’s… There should be a sense of humility about the forest. It’s so big and we’re so small and it’s so complex. And as much as I say, it’s so important to, to think about our human connection to forest. It’s also… It isn’t about us. I mean, the forest has its own really complex ecosystem full of animals and plants that are doing things that we still do not fully understand, from trees communicating with each other to different organisms relationships with fungus.

Amanda Rodriguez:
I mean, it’s so incredible, to just be able to experience something like that and be humbled by it. I think is really important. And if folks are either not going into the forest or can’t go into the forest, it’s just really a shame that they’re missing out on that.

Kimala Luna:
I guess now I want to ask, and you don’t have to get into specifics. You can speak in just feeling words, but maybe talk about a time where your connection to nature healed you and like what that experience looks like.

Amanda Rodriguez:
I think that… I guess I might be one of those people that really benefits from the sort of silence that you can find in nature. Certainly there’s all the sounds of the wind and the birds and the insects. But I think you really find a silence inside yourself that… I struggle with anxiety so it is such a rarity for me to have my mind calmed and silenced and slowed and to actually be able to feel fully present and immersed. And I think being in the forest is really one of the only ways that I experienced that.

Elizabeth Lashay:
I’m just trying to think is because you said you moved from Florida to West Virginia, correct?

Amanda Rodriguez:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

Elizabeth Lashay:
And that is such a big change and not only the culture and the feeling and people, but again, like you mentioned the atmosphere outdoors. Do you prefer to be at the beach or in the mountains?

Amanda Rodriguez:
That is a tough one. I mean, I definitely love to visit the beach now as an adult. I love to spend time there. I guess, because just like the forest, I do feel more of that sort of like calmness settle into me just like being near the waves and being under the sun, but there’s always like a sense absence until I see those mountains on the skyline when I’m heading home. And that’s when I feel like I’m really home.

Kimala Luna:
I also want to touch on, we talked about stories happening for us a lot, but you’re a pretty prolific writer and nature plays a predominant theme in a lot of your writing. And so I guess I want to talk about the last meaningful time that nature really hit you and that you did like tap into those supernatural elements that you talked about and were creatively sparked.

Amanda Rodriguez:
I wrote a poem about, I think I called it something like the Death of Magic. And I think it is actually published as part of an environmental disasters edition. I’m terrible and cannot remember where it was published. But the connection that I was drawing was this idea that… So this idea of unicorns are magical, mermaids are magical and fairies are magical, and they’re all gone from the earth. And so much of the natural beauty of the earth is that it is magic. Narwhals are magic, glaciers are magic and we are losing that magic. I guess that was a time when I sort of melded the natural world to a sort of supernatural, I guess, lent through a supernatural lens.

Elizabeth Lashay:
So this is completely different. If you were to be in a fairy tale, what would be your go-to animal? Because I’ve always seen entangled. There’s, I believe, a lizard. I can’t remember at this point, but princess and the frog, the frog, Pocahontas. So what would be your go-to animal in your fairy tale?

Amanda Rodriguez:
In my fairy tale? It’s funny. You should ask that because I actually do write a lot of fairytale retellings. They tend to be dark though. And I’m thinking a little bit more light about this. I guess I keep feeling like it would be a fox.

Kimala Luna:
I could see that.

Amanda Rodriguez:
Yeah. I mean, they’re just, I love red for one and they’re just so I don’t know. They’re beautiful. They’re elusive. They’re also misunderstood I feel like, yeah.

Elizabeth Lashay:
I love that. I love that a lot.

Kimala Luna:
If there was one main point that you wish everybody could understand about the connection to nature, what would it be?

Amanda Rodriguez:
It’s hard to narrow it down. It really is.

Kimala Luna:
You could do points. You could do multiple [crosstalk 00:27:01]

Amanda Rodriguez:
Of a multi-point system. Well, certainly do viscerally immediately need our forests. [inaudible 00:27:16] Not Sunday. It’s not far away. It’s now. And we need natural forests. We don’t need pine plantations. We need real genuine forests that can thrive, protect us from storms, house Biodiversity, all those stats I said that I try to avoid. I guess if I had to boil it… I guess if I had to boil it down, it was we need forests now. I guess I would also like to stress that the environmental movement needs to become more broad. I think that it really needs to center BIPOC perspectives and the struggles of environmental justice communities who are… Industries are coming in and they’re taking resources out of those communities and depleting them, making them sick and economically depressed. There’s always a jobs argument, but it’s not true. If you take away a forest and clean air, clean water there, there’s not much left. So I really want to sort of like lift that up. And I just think it’s really important to not forget that. That deforestation isn’t happening somewhere else. It’s happening here. It’s happening now and it’s not new.

Elizabeth Garland:
As the Director of Marketing Communications. And like, how does that intertwine with the awareness of nature?

Amanda Rodriguez:
I guess I feel like… I also feel like marketers get a bad rep, and I think it’s often deserved, but I don’t work for a for-profit. I work for an organization that I really believe in, which is really trying to do good in the world. And it has had a lot of successes and has managed to grow and evolve over almost 25 years. So I’m really passionate about what we do and how we try to move through the world. So I certainly come at it from… Come at marketing from a place of political and social change. My goal is to, I think even as a marketer, tell a story, tell, share stories, lift stories up, tell stories to inspire of that connecting with nature. Because if you don’t know about it, you can’t do anything about it. Yeah.

Kimala Luna:
Well, I think I get the last question. And so what is the call to action? What do you want people to do? And then also, what are some of things that people can check out to get involved, get outside, et cetera?

Amanda Rodriguez:
Definitely. I’m going to plug Dogwood Alliance, visit Dogwood alliance.org. Visit our ActNow page. There is such a wealth of information on that site. Your eyes will be open to things you did not know were happening, and hopefully that’ll get you fired up and ready to take action on that ActNow page.

Amanda Rodriguez:
But I guess in the short term, I guess I just really encourage people to reflect. Reflect on your experiences with nature and what have those been like for you and how can you draw upon those experiences or remember what that was like in order to hopefully inspire you to connect again with nature, if your connection is gone dormant, say. But also to consider if you are somebody who spends a lot of time in nature, what can you do to help increase accessibility? What can you do to sort of share that privilege and share that wealth, which it really is a wealth to be able to experience a natural forest with others.

Kimala Luna:
Yes. That’s beautiful.

Elizabeth Lashay:
It is. Thank you so much. Thank you for what you’re doing. You are really making a huge impact and it’s a ripple impact that is spreading all over, not just within your writing, but your documentary and tapping into a place that we tend to forget about.

Kimala Luna:
Yes. Oh, oh no. I forgot to ask. What was the award that your documentary got? And what do you think about it like stood out beyond the other documentaries?

Amanda Rodriguez:
So it won an Award of Merit from the IMPACT DOCS award, which I think… I know when I first started submitting it, I was pretty nervous because it was a two-woman crew. It was just myself and Andrea Desky from Call to Action Creative filming these. It was not high budget, very much a shoestring, very much as traveling across the country, trying to capture these stories. And I guess I was… Since it was my first film, I was intimidated by the sort of like gorgeous cinematography of some of these nature documentaries. And these folks who really have a lot of experience in making films. But I think that what I learned was that it’s not always about that. And that’s not necessarily what people are looking for. It really is about the story. It really is about how it makes you feel. And you can do that without a lot of money. And I would certainly encourage other folks to do the same. You can make a movie on your phone. So if you’re inspired to make a documentary about whatever is important to you, whether it’s nature or something else, I think it’s so important that folks be empowered to tell their own stories.

Kimala Luna:
Yes. Well, thank you so much, Amanda. And again, you can find out more about Stories Happen in Forests by visiting storieshappeninforest.com. And we want to thank everybody who tuned in today.

Elizabeth Lashay:
Yes.
Amanda Rodriguez:
And we will thank you so much for having me. I so appreciate you.

Kimala Luna:
Yeah, Thank you.