[Music] (Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, how artists are beautifying the ugliest street in America.

(Logan) And why was it the Ugliest Street in America?

It was because the visual landscape was dominated by commercial interests.

(Tyler) It's exciting to think about what does it take to change that narrative.

And we know that an artist has spent time to make something beautiful for you.

(Tom) The benefits of the native plant, the desert honeysuckle.

(Hanna) So you get a wide range of hummingbirds and bees and butterflies attracted to it.

(Tom) Counseling in the streets of Arizona's rural communities.

(Rebecca) I am not a licensed mental health professional and I can use this program.

And now these students are they're going to take it out and they're going to use it with more people.

(Tom) And a neighborhood party with some very special guests you won't believe "WHOOO."

(Barry) We have a lot of people that come out if not every evening, almost every evening.

People say, "Oh, this is even better than going to the zoo."

[Music] (Tom) Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

And today we're joining you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

And not only is this a great place to escape the high temperatures outside in the summer, it also houses the largest freestanding collection of poetry in North America.

Recently, the Center collaborated with Alley Cat Murals and took poems out of the books you see here and turned them into vibrant works of art.

Now, the Poetry Center is located literally steps north of Speedway Boulevard, which back in the 70s was dubbed the "Ugliest Road in America" by Life Magazine.

Enter a new collaboration that paired six muralists with six poets to change that narrative.

So how do you turn a poem into a mural?

Watch and find out.

♪ AMBIENT MUSIC (Tyler) The Speedway Corridor Mural Project is a chance to beautify a section of Tucson that gets very little beauty normally.

This project brings six new murals into that space, but it also brings poetry.

It was developed by Allison Miller of Alley Cat Murals with a vision to figure out what it would take to beautify these six walls on the Speedway Corridor and reached out to the Poetry Center thinking that one of them might be about a poem or a poet.

And the muralists decided that they all wanted to work with poems and with poets.

(Jodie) My role was to take a poem from the UA Poetry Center and illustrate it, so I painted a mural based on a poem.

(Tyler) What does it look like to translate a poem and to imagine it visually, but also what it means to bring art into public spaces, not just in museums, not just poetry in rare book rooms.

(Jodie) It's almost a surprise, you know, when you're walking on the sidewalk and then all of a sudden you just get hit with this beautiful color and I think it's vital to the human experience.

(Logan) First time I actually met Jodie is when she came up to me and said, "Hey, I'm gonna do a mural of one of your poems."

[ LAUGHS ] And that gave me a real pause.

It was the first I had heard of it.

They said, "Oh, that sounds very interesting.

Let's take a look at that."

Once you release work into the world, it takes on its own life and begins to move in its own ways and at that point the work belongs to everyone.

(Tyler) And it can teach us something about someone else's experience in the world.

What has happened has been this really great gift of how something goes from language to a sort of visual component.

All the artists are local and they're all really aesthetically different.

We're west of Campbell Avenue and we're east of Park Avenue.

We start at the Poetry Center, which is a great place to park.

Parking is free after five and on weekends.

And there's a water fountain here to fill up your water bottle on the way.

T.C.

Tolbert was able to come and paint a little bit with Monique Laraway.

Brenda Hillman lives in California, her work as a sort of Tucson-centric and Tucson-raised poet.

And then Leslie Marmon Silko's work, reinterpreting the mural that she painted.

Such a beautiful way of bringing that mural in a way back to life.

And Jenna Tomasello's work has been just truly tremendous in that regard.

Marcus Williams' lyrics are used in the mural that Alex Fass has painted.

Marcus is a hip-hop artist here in Tucson.

Connections between poetry and hip-hop are profound, exciting, continuing to develop.

Allison's mural takes a Madison June haiku as its source.

How do you make a haiku into an 80-foot long mural?

It thinks of bicycles, a revolutionary road, and the becoming wings.

You can see the sort of cyclist on a path, but then the edges of the mural have an almost wing-like shape, and it was a sense of sort of taking flight.

In Jodie's piece, you obviously have the belt buckle that is a very Southwestern style.

And in place of where the hands might be of like a giant, shiny gun, you have these flowers of the desert.

What this landscape can produce, its beauty and its majesty, this is what these hands have to offer you.

The Poetry Center gave us a collection of poems, and this one was called Reckon.

I was like, that's my poem.

(Logan) What's your version of events?

Was I foolish gold, thinking I could get away?

(Tyler) Logan Phillips is a tremendous Tucson poet, an incredible community member.

Reckon deals with themes that animate a lot of Logan's interests, of what the desert teaches, the embedded histories in that landscape.

(Logan) As a work, it's really a work of memoir, examining the myths that I was raised on.

It ended up winning a 2021 Academy of American Poets prize.

(Jodie) It's about Tombstone, the poet's reflection of growing up in Tombstone, and it's kind of a different spin on a traditional tourism, you know, pro-Western thing.

It's a little more like, what is the meaning of this?

The poet compares himself to bird of paradise and ocotillo blossoms and huckleberry.

My dad had given me a belt buckle that had this beautiful filigree that was my grandfather's.

And I was like, that would be a cool mural there.

Okay, we could have this hand-tooled belt with some of the filigree elements of the toy horse.

Everything that wild west seems so masculine.

I kind of wanted to challenge that a little bit and have this Western woman with high-noon stance, with flowers just coming out of the holsters, and I wanted her to be tough and have the barbed wire tattoos of strength and the bird cage on the other hand with the hawk flying out, escaping.

(Tyler) You see and feel these things in tangible ways in his poems.

And I think what Jodie has done is sort of helped bring that forward really powerfully in a visual way in the mural.

[ CARS HONKING ] I think of the famous headline from the 70s that Speedway is one of the ugliest roads in America.

(Logan) And why was it the ugliest street in America?

It was because the visual landscape was dominated by commercial interests.

To this day, that continues to be the case.

But when we think about our visual sphere, what we interact with every day, we are interacting with advertisements, the commercial world.

[ TRAFFIC NOISE ] (Tyler) It's exciting to think about what does it take to change that narrative, and we know that an artist has spent time to make something beautiful for you that's based on the work that a poet made that you found your way to as well.

(Logan) I look out to Tucson today, and I see a skyline that has greatly changed, I think is more important than ever to think about what kind of a city we do want to be.

We have to remember that a cultural life of a place creates the conditions in which abundance flows.

(Tyler) When you create that kind of calculus, I think you change the dynamics around what art can be about and who it's for.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC It teaches us, I think, that we belong to it and it belongs to us.

(Jodie) I hope to just inspire people, create beauty, take from that and walk away the rest of the day and maybe have a smile on your face.

(Logan) I think when we encounter art in the world, it gives us a chance to pause and have a brief moment with ourselves and with a different connection to the world around us.

(Tyler) The murals in their greatest incarnation are an invitation to imagine a whole other world, a portal to another place.

It's been a real richness for us to have these six invitations into visuality and I hope that we can do more of it.

(Tom) You can grow thousands of native or drought-tolerant plants in the Sonoran Desert and some have the added benefit of producing flowers or nectar for pollinators while being unarmed for homeowners, no spines or thorns to stick you.

Here's a great option for your yard.

(gentle music) My name is Hanna Blood and I work here at Tohono Chul.

I am the Propagation Manager and the native Plant Nursery Manager as well.

This is the Desert Honeysuckle known as Anisacanthus Thurberi.

It is a really wonderful nectar-producing shrub.

It is a shrub of the Sonoran Desert.

Its distribution is in Arizona, in northern Sonora, and it gets a little bit into the southwest of New Mexico.

Typically, Anisacanthus thurberi can get to about six feet tall and about five feet wide.

This one's exceptionally large here at Tohono Chul.

Our gardens tend to have very large specimens of all our plants.

It has a range of flower colors.

It can be yellow to like a pale beige almost.

This one's a little deeper orange.

It is a really great nectar producing flower, so you get a wide range of hummingbirds and bees and butterflies attracted to it.

It's an unarmed plant.

There's no prickers or thorns on it.

It's semi-deciduous, so when it gets cold, it will get thinner, but it won't lose all of its leaves.

All plants are host plants, but this one's specifically a larval host plant to the Arizona Checkerspot Butterfly, and it hosts other butterflies as well.

It can grow in full sun to reach its full size.

It would like a moderate drink of water.

It can take down to 10 degrees, so it's really hardy for Tucson, and it's found usually in like gravelly slopes, along canyons, blooms from spring till fall.

This is a common plant to be able to find in the plant nurseries.

It generally, though, will look like a couple of sticks, so it can be a hard sell, but obviously, it has great potential to be a wonderful Sonoran plant in your garden.

This other plant is Anisacanthus quadrifidus.

It's Flame Honeysuckle.

And it is from East Texas and down the east side of Mexico.

So you can tell it's different than our native one by it doesn't have curled petals, but there's still one up and three down.

And it will stay evergreen more than our native one in the Sonoran because its cold tolerance is better and it goes down to zero without any trouble.

It is smaller.

It will be about five foot by five foot.

It's another really good pollinator plant to add to your garden.

And like the Anisacanthus Thurberi, it's unarmed.

There's no thorns.

It's leafy and beautiful.

(Tom) To see many more examples of native drought tolerant plants that will thrive in your local landscape, check out our website azpm.org/desertplants (soft music) Across Arizona, there's a shortage of mental health services, especially in small towns and rural communities.

Residents there face lengthy travel distances, limited transportation and long wait times.

Enter Counseling in the Streets, a peer counseling group developed during the pandemic to help offset the lack of services.

And the program is finding success in Cochise County where it was first piloted.

[Calm Guitar Tune] (Rebecca) So today you have chosen unit five which is depression.

We're going to start with Mark's story and then we'll go through discussion questions and the activities.

Each section starts with a story.

(Bethany) Life seemed to be okay but it was also overwhelming.

Truthfully, Mark dreaded waking up in the morning and going to school but he kept going.

What else could he do?

(Rebecca) When you're reading someone else's story, it kind of takes that edge off and you can relate to it and you can talk about it in terms of that story if you're not ready to share with yourself yet.

(Mercedez) As the weeks went on, Mark knew something was wrong.

He was always exhausted and getting out of bed was a struggle.

(Rebecca) Then you talk about what you heard in the story, important concepts.

It has definitions, different terms.

Each section has different activities.

So you can pick and choose.

You can do all of them if you have time.

Those activities are also really great to do one-on-one or in a classroom setting.

He was having physical symptoms, not just the emotional.

So why do you think Mark doesn't feel well physically?

One of my favorite parts is the bounce back strategies.

Teaching kids about resilience.

(Mercedez) Well, when my mother is very stressed out, she is very nauseous.

- Okay.

- And sometimes cannot get out of bed if she physically cannot.

(Rebecca) There's trauma, substance abuse, adverse childhood experiences.

And one of the big ones is family relationships.

I've had students share things they didn't know they were going to share when we're on that subject.

Have you or anyone close to you ever been in a situation like Mark?

And could you tell us about it?

(Bethany) At the time, he wasn't taking care of himself and he just felt lifeless.

(Rebecca) The great thing about this program is it's not just used in groups.

I use it individually.

And I've even used some of the components in my class.

It doesn't have to get personal for you to learn about depression or anxiety, how to deal with people in your life, how to handle when your parents are fighting at home and how to develop coping skills.

You come first, you are important.

So even if we're busy, we're here.

Shaulee and her co-creators, they really put a lot of time and effort into it.

She has made it very easy to use this program and to help other people.

(Shaulee) And you get to choose what group you're gonna be in, okay?

All right, you get to choose and you're gonna have just 10 minutes and you're gonna talk about it.

And I'll come around and yeah.

(Shaulee) My heart was really broken thinking of all the people in the world that do not have the mental health services that they need and they're struggling.

Some indicators, if someone is in abusive, that might be in an abusive relationship, okay?

Our task was to provide something that was structured yet flexible that could work with people from all walks of life.

Finally, we connected with Arizona Community Foundation and they said, "We love the program, what about doing it for kids?"

I'm a school counselor, so I thought, "Of course we wanna do this for kids."

They gave us a grant and then we created a high school, a middle school and a primary school version of the program.

Then we started training Cochise County educators and then they took it back to their schools and implemented the program however they saw fit.

(Rebecca) One of the reasons I love it so much, I am not a licensed mental health professional and I can use this program, but it's the snowball effect.

I use it with these students and now these students, they're gonna take it out and they're gonna use it with more people (Shaulee) We have done these with five-year-olds with 80 year olds and everywhere in between and human beings we are social creatures.

We want to connect.

We're not trying to replace therapy in any way or traditional counseling.

We're trying to provide an additional resource.

If they can't meet with a counselor, if it's not possible, but they can talk with people in their own community, in their own neighborhood, in their schools, in their places of work.

Seriously, like you guys are so powerful.

So, you're now peer counselors.

[applause] (Bethany) It's important to have these kind of groups, so people have a safe space to share.

It makes me feel like I'm not alone in my struggles, so I can open up more to people.

(Max) My depression was so bad.

To the point where I couldn't even do anything that I used to like.

Now that I'm here, I can feel happy, safe, comfortable, and people to talk to.

(Mercedez) It is much easier to talk to people your age about problems than it is an adult sometimes, because you're more on the same wavelength.

(Rebecca) Mental health access for youth is scarce.

We have a number of students who are in unstable living situations, who have anxiety, depression, ADHD, problems at home, absent parents, parents who are incarcerated.

The students themselves have been through the system, whether it's DCS, they're in probation right now.

So, why don't people always ask for help?

(Max) They're scared about what the outcome can be.

(Rebecca) They don't know that they actually can take control and do something for themselves.

I won't be in our school next year, so our students, they're kind of leading the way and they're going to take charge next week, actually.

Because I know I'm not going to be here next year, I wanted to focus on getting it set up for success after I left.

I chose these students because I know that they have an interest in helping people and they're driven to move this program forward.

(Mercedez) I do believe it will be difficult at first, because we are just kind of kids in a way, but I'm pretty sure we will get through it, because if we plan with her on her absence, then it will be easier in her absence, I guess.

(Rebecca) I can't stay on a skateboard to save my life.

- I almost fell off a bike.

- These kids, they don't know how wonderful they are.

They don't know.

What are you grateful for?

(Max) My new house got put in this week.

(Rebecca) That's wonderful.

That's amazing.

- Yes.

- Congratulations.

- Thank you.

- I'm excited.

- Do we always have to be grateful for those big things?

- No, you can be grateful for the small things.

- You can be grateful for accomplishments.

- Okay.

- You can be grateful that you woke up that day.

- Great start.

- What are you grateful for Miss Bell?

(Rebecca) Oh my goodness.

Um, a lot.

I have a lot to be grateful for.

I love my family.

I love my job.

I'm very grateful that you are here.

Teenagers are a lot.

And that's okay.

They're transitioning, and they're going out into a world that is not easy.

Dust yourself off.

Then you try again.

(Max) Don't.

You get knocked down, but you get up again.

(Rebecca) Okay, are we going to start singing?

- No.

[Laughter] - I just like that.

- Okay.

[Laughter] (Tom) If you're ever driving through Tucson's Palo Verde neighborhood and you see dozens of people staring up into a tree, you may have stumbled onto an owl party.

You see, each evening these folks gather to check out what's up with their resident Great Horned Owl family.

And in the process, they're getting to know each other and creating a stronger community.

[ BIRDS CHIRPING ] (Matt) We moved to the neighborhood in the fall in October.

Pretty soon after we moved to the neighborhood, one of our neighbors told us about the owls in this tree.

We just bought our first house and we had all these misgivings and sort of feeling stressed in general.

But kind of like having these Great Horned Owls as neighbors kind of made us feel, I don't know, connected to the neighborhood in a certain way.

(Neighbor) And I'll tell you, they pay attention.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

(Barry) We're like their TV show.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

There you are popping up.

They're so cute.

(Alli) I grew up on Lee Street, so I'm really familiar with this neighborhood.

We've always had these nice mature trees, but I've never seen owls quite like this, or at least with this kind of neighborhood following.

Now my new interest is bird watching, but I've never really been aware of all the birds of the desert and in Tucson until we started following this owl family.

I live underneath the tree with all the owls in it.

We have a lot of people that come out, if not every evening, almost every evening.

It also slows down the traffic because when a car comes down the street and they see a huge crowd, they slow down, they roll down their window, they ask what's going on.

People say, "Oh, this is even better than going to the zoo."

These owls came to us about three years ago.

Prior to that, a bunch of Cooper's Hawks had built this nest, and they were in there seven to ten years.

Three years ago, a pair of owls arrived, and they nest earlier in the Cooper's Hawk's, so they kind of took it over.

This is the third batch of kids, owlets.

There was an accident where the female owl got poisoned.

Sometime end of November, first part of December, because people use rodenticide, and then an owl will eat a dead mouse or a dead rat, and you get a dead owl.

So, then we had three weeks of the male owl just hooting every night for hours.

Then he kind of disappeared.

We didn't think we were going to have any owls this year.

Then rather late, he arrived with a female owl.

They are much later this year, but they did have three owlets.

(Matt) This is one of the things I really love about Tucson.

Is just like, there's this weird mixing of urban space and wild space, and people really appreciate that here, I think, more than other places we've lived.

If there's a Night Blooming Cereus at Tohono Chul, people come out in masses.

Or like, if water is flowing in the Santa Cruz, people come to check it out.

There's this appreciation of nature, which I think is cool.

(Tom) Aren't those owls cool?

Sweet birds!

You know, we'd love to see the birds you're seeing in your neighborhood.

So in the coming weeks, please tag Arizona Illustrated, or use the hashtag Arizona Illustrated on Facebook, Instagram, or X, along with any bird or wildlife photos, and we'll be sure to share those.

In fact, they might even be featured on our show.

Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

(Sarah) In 2012, the counselor at the middle school actually reached out to me and told me she had been buying food with her own money and sending it home with kids at the middle school who didn't have enough to eat on the weekends, and so she knew they were coming to school hungry.

And she asked me, "You're already out in the community.

You think you can ask them to just donate the food and we can still keep feeding these kids?

I want to make sure that they keep being fed."

And once we started within that one school and I started gathering food from the community and putting it in a closet at the school, it was all over happening, but it was out of the school district employees' own pocket.

And it was, you know, just here and there where they saw the need.

And so we consolidated into one program.

We started in one school, we had 11 kids, and now we're in 20 schools, and we serve 450-ish kids every week.

(Tom) Thank you for joining us here at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

We're gonna go check out a little bit of the collection now.

I'm Tom McNamara, we'll see you again next week.