Dr. Alan Townsend Touches Hearts and Minds With 'This Ordinary Stardust'

Scientist, speaker, and dean of the Franke College of Forestry & Conservation at the University of Montana, Dr. Alan Townsend, visits Writer’s Voices to discuss his memoir, This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist’s Path from Grief to Wonder. In his book, Dr. Townsend wrote about the two devastating events in his life that occurred a decade ago when his then 4-year-old daughter, Neva, was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor, and then a few months later, his wife, Diana, developed a different, unrelated form of brain cancer. While his daughter did survive, his wife succumbed to the illness. Although writing the book was difficult at times for Dr. Townsend, he pursued it at Diana’s request. He explained, “…my purpose in writing it was… multifold, and part of it is just memoir and telling the story of our family in the hopes, as the book says requested by my late wife, that just our story might help others who are going through hard times… just knowing that they’re not alone and seeing the story of others… there was [also] a broader purpose where they interweave my own path through this as a scientist… and did allow me to see my profession in a broader, new light in one that was just a source of comfort and in going through that grief… what I’ve learned is that just some understanding of the world around us and the natural world can bring a source of wonder… that can just help us put our lives and our own struggles in context and see that difficult times are often followed, even in the natural world, by much better ones…”

Regarding the title, Dr. Townsend explains that the name, This Ordinary Stardust, comes from a connection to his field of science, biogeochemistry. “…as most of us probably know, there’s this very cliche saying… that we’re all stardust, and we are, right? In the end, the elements that form our world, life… everything, they all originally came from stars, from the incredible heat and fusion of stars… but at some point, and especially going through this, it really hit me that thinking about that we’re all comprised of that, and that in effect those elements are immortal, they have been here since the dawn of time. Everything we are and have is, was, formed by very long, dead, stars now from billions of years ago… and those elements combine in us for awhile… so they really do carry the full story of the world and they continue us on in their own way when we disintegrate and move to something else… just the thought of that, in that light, actually brings me a lot of comfort… that form of immortality and that form of what connects us all in a whole bunch of ways.”