Funky Fables and Twisted Fairy Tales Astrophysicist Moonlights as Storyteller BY KAREN SHIH ’09
we’ve all heard the story of the three little pigs, or the Greek tale of Persephone and the pomegranate seeds that explains the seasons. But have you heard the one about the lonely moon who stays up later and later every night to see his friend on earth? Assistant Research Scientist Tim Livengood was looking for a fun, simple way to help people remember the moon’s shifting schedule—so he made up a story to help keep it straight. “Traditional stories have been refined and perfected, and connected with people for decades, centuries, maybe thousands of years,” he says. “They organize things you can observe in nature. What I do is create stories based on our modern imagery, modern metaphors.” But other than his two kids, who would listen to his tale? Luckily, there’s a thriving local storytelling community, which Livengood helps organize through the Grapevine series at Busboys and Poets in Takoma Park (the first Wednesday of each month) and informal story swap sessions, held at homes around the area, including his own in Columbia, Md. As a child, he spoke his first words a year after most of his peers. He’s spent the rest of his life making up for lost time. Yet it wasn’t until his first open mic night 20 years ago, shortly after the physicist started studying planetary
atmospheres at nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center, that he realized strangers might enjoy his narratives too. “It was a truly appalling story involving various horrible things and a deceased animal and bodily fluids,” says Livengood, whose confidence grew as the crowd laughed and gasped at all the right places. “A truly good personal story is not about me. It just happens to star me as an avatar for you. You think, ‘I might not have had a dead monkey puke on my shoes, but I’ve been in a situation where everything went terribly wrong’.” He hopes to see that universality reflected in the audiences at the Grapevine events, which tend to “hit opposite ends of the human lifespan” and are mainly white. As he works to bring in more diverse crowds, including inviting well-known African-American performers to speak, he thinks another group could benefit from some time with storytellers: his fellow scientists. Livengood believes his ability to capture an audience’s attention has made him a more engaging presenter and teacher. “What we communicate very poorly during the developmental process of the larval scientist is just how much time they’ll spend the rest of their life communicating,” he says. TO LISTEN to one of Livengood’s stories, visit go.umd.edu/3xg.
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