Ever wonder why a gaggle of Duke Marine Lab folks would write stories about resilience?

This story begins during the fall of 2020 when our after-school outreach collaborators at the local Boys and Girls club told us that COVID had rearranged their priorities: "We don't care about science outreach in afterschool programming right now. Our kids are suffering and just need mentors who can connect with them and talk to them. Can your Duke students help?" I knew our volunteer marine lab students could help. But I also knew I needed help to train our students to be more than just science educators: they needed to learn how to be mentors too.

So, I reached out to the wonderful Dr. Patrick Jeffs (CEO of the Resiliency Solution) and together we developed a Resilient Mentor training program called Ready, Set, Resiliency. As part of the resilient mentor training program, we created an assignment where we challenged the Duke students to find examples in nature that highlighted the roots of personal resiliency. They were more than up for the challenge, and that assignment turned into one of the most creative and profound discussions of the mentor training.

When the training ended, Patrick and I realized that the resilience assignment was a seed of something bigger, that we needed to harness the power of nature and create nature stories to augment the resilience training. But it was 2020, and sometimes even great ideas can suffer from COVID! The idea needed a catalyst.

Luckily we found that catalyst in Aurora (Rory) McCollum, author of "Live Oak and the Wind". In the summer of 2022, Rory worked with the Community Science Initiative to transform the resilience training program Patrick and I had begun into a middle school curriculum. One part of the larger curriculum involved Rory working with three undergraduate students from Duke University Marine Lab's DukeEngage 8-week summer service learning program to write nature and resilience fables that would serve as primary sources for the curriculum.

The fables used the art of story to show resilience in action - they brought the abstract concept of personal resilience to life in concrete, relatable ways. When our curriculum team of teachers listened to the fables, they created english, science and history lesson plans to compliment the fables. And then, during the 2021-2022 school year, they taught our co-created curriculum with the fables to their middle school students. As it turned out, this fresh approach invited students into conversations about personal resilience and lit up their classrooms. And when we got back together in May of 2022, the teachers urged us to keep them coming-to write more and publish them in a book.

And so that's just what we did! More DukeEngage service learning students wrote more nature fables and we had the luck of finding Susanna Klingenberg as an editor (we could not have done this without her!). Just like Ollie couldn't feed himself without his pod, we couldn't have made this book without our pod. Thank you to all of the pod who provided support and helped "feed" this book: Leslie Babinski, Lisa Campbell, Alice Carrol, Robert Condie, Mary Katherine Dufour, Jessica Emory, Lindsey Fodrie, Stacy Ham, Kayla Ipock, Patrick Jeffs, Charlotte Johnson, Kathryn Lienhard, Aurora McCollum, Andy McCollum, Cristina Quattrone, Max Smith, Kathryn Stevenson, Matthew Turpin, and Betsy Vorster.

Just like Gustav helped Gilbert find fish in new ways; we hope Quint, Ollie, Gilbert, Terry, Sammy, Shelly, Finn, Antoinette, and/or Betty can help you "fish" in ways that nourish you.

Liz is an ecologist by training and is the director of the Community Science Initiative at the Duke Marine Lab. She loves forests with tall trees. In middle school, Liz loved science class and going outside for recess.