In this episode of Summer Reading with UENLitFlix, Matt and Jenn are joined by author and professor Nicole Walker. Listen as she shares a fascinating perspective on the importance of place in writing and learn how paying attention to the details surrounding place can help us create engaging writing that reflects the world around us.
In this episode of Summer Reading with UENLitFlix, Matt and Jenn are joined by author and professor Nicole Walker. Listen as she shares a fascinating perspective on the importance of place in writing and learn how paying attention to the details surrounding place can help us create engaging writing that reflects the world around us.
Nicole Walker Website: https://nikwalk.com/
Explore classic films and related book lists with UENLitFlix: https://www.uen.org/litflix/
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I'm so excited about our guest today. We have a fantastic writer, researcher, and editor who talks about some of the most amazing parts of writing, in my opinion, which is when you can take a reader and put them in the place in all ways. So she talks a little bit about the feel of things, the taste in your mouth, those sorts of things. And it's just a fantastic interview. So who's our guest today, Jen?
She's Dr. Nicole Walker. She is an author and she's a professor at the University of Arizona. And she is here to talk to us today about her love of place and how it's affected her writing and also how she works with creative writers.
That was my favorite takeaway from this. I'm so excited to jump into it, but this idea of how do we get a reader into the place that we're talking about. In her case, specifically Utah and the desert and everything that's going on there. So shall we jump into the interview, Jen?
Sounds good.
So, Nicole, you have been a prolific proponent of creative nonfiction through different communities. How do you help people who need creative nonfiction to understand it in relationship to other genres?
Well thanks so much, Jen and Matt, for having me today. And thanks for this great question, because I've really been thinking about, what it is that is inviting about nonfiction. How is it that I can encourage people from across different communities to contribute and write in community workshops, undergraduate workshops, and graduate classes-- even in the sciences I've led a few creative nonfiction workshops.
And I think one of the things about creative nonfiction is that, first of all, it seems like such an oxymoron of a word. What is this creative nonfiction? Just the invitation is lying, I think, in that compound idea of nonfiction is usually something that I read for information, what can I do that's creative about it? And I think just the label itself sometimes is inviting.
It's a vast genre. I mean, it covers everything from the lyric essay, which can look a lot like a prose poem, to truly informative research-based writing. And that way, I feel like everyone has some inkling of what they might want to do with a genre. People write letters to the editor, people write-- they write personal essays, they write historical genealogical work about their families.
There's something in the idea that there are not very many rules, I think. That there's-- it's a vast genre, but also a very open genre. And sometimes I think it might be one of the easiest ways into creative writing. I think poetry sometimes scares people with line breaks and sometimes they've been led to believe that the poetry has to be really confusing, that it's not plain speech, although of course when I teach poetry, I try to reckon with that idea and convince people, no, no, you can write in your regular voice.
And I think fiction can be daunting, too. There are rules for fiction. People expect plot, they want character, they want setting. In nonfiction, you can say, well, why don't you just start with the word "I?" What do you think? What do you see? What do you imagine around you? And in this way, I think, it begins. It's a really great entree into the world of writing the literature of any kind. And therefore, a lot of different communities have-- I feel like I've had some success across a diverse group of people.
I taught-- it's called the Diné Institute, and I led a seminar for teaching fellows. And these teachers work on the Navajo Nation in elementary or secondary classrooms. And I taught a class called The Personal Essay and Creative Nonfiction, and it was place-based. And the teacher fellows who are taking what I teach them and then going to interpret what I teach them to teach to their-- in curriculum units in their public schools on the Reservation-- sometimes private schools, too, they were able to tell stories that I think they hadn't had a chance to tell before.
From telling stories about what the sage plant means to their community to walking toward the tree where one of the teachers' mom had buried her own placenta. Having the opportunity to just say, this is my place and this is my story is, I think, an experience. Not a lot of them had been asked to share. And they were grateful to have somebody who said, just do it. Just write that first-person's story and we can work from there.
That's absolutely incredible, Nicole, and I really love that you're diving deeply into writing around place and how place organizes people's thoughts about their own life and about their own situations in the larger scheme of things. Specific landscapes, especially here in Utah, seem to feature pretty heavily in your work. How does your personal relationship with nature and other settings fuel your writing and how can it feel for any writer?
Yeah. I love that question, Matt, because again, one of the great opportunities in teaching creative nonfiction is to say-- I say over and over again to my students or the workshopers, put your body in a place. And that's just sort of a big heading over how to create a scene, how to use your senses, how to really get a narrative started.
But what is it about place that makes it something that people can use not only as scenery and backdrop but actually for the texture and the meaning of their stories? And I think it's easy for me because I grew up in Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake is such a dominating environment. I mean, you cannot look around without seeing those gigantic mountains to the east, the Wasatch Mountains to the east, and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. You have this shimmering weird lake far, far to the west. This valley that was once not as green as it is now, and you can see the way that irrigation has transformed the Salt Lake Valley.
Everything about Salt Lake to me just hits you in the face as this is where you are. This is the place is literal, I think, is one way I've taken it. And then also I have environmental leanings as well. So to imagine, why is this place as green as it is, and is that sustainable? I was looking at it the other day about Utahns and their use-- Idaho apparently uses the most water per person per day, but Utah is right there second. And it's the second-most arid state in the country.
And so it's a place of vast contrast, too. So you have these amazing mountains and this-- you're living in this high desert environment, but it's also green because of the incredible irrigation system. But also perhaps maybe doesn't need to be as green as it is. And it just becomes part of your imagination. I think of it as wearing the grooves in your brain.
I'm starting a new project and I'm thinking about the brine shrimp and the devastation that's happening on the Great Salt Lake. And how little attention the actual Great Salt Lake gets. And I began talking about the bathtub ring that lines the Wasatch Front of the old Lake Bonneville and how there are seashells still trapped in the crust there. And how that water diminished, diminished, diminished enough to only support one life form, at least in the water. I mean, the brine shrimp support a vast array of other animals, but the only thing that can live in the water are these brine shrimp.
And how because of the causeway, it's getting too salty, or for some brine shrimp-- or the brine shrimp are adapting. And the way that they're-- one of the ways they're adapting is by parthenogenesis instead of sexual reproduction. And so I'm thinking a lot about gender and thinking a lot about what does it mean to survive in a climate that is pretty harsh and is getting harsher every day.
So it's pretty easy for me to write-- to take these images of what I see around me and extrapolate and make associations. And that's what I imagine for the writers that are in my workshops, is to think about how place informs their understanding of the world. I'm teaching a really short creative writing class right now, and I just have this beautiful essay by a student who takes us through just images of the desert, and I learned so much.
I learned that the Palo Verde is the only ever-- is an evergreen tree. And the ironwood is the only hardwood that grows in the desert. And that those crazy javelinas that have started to come up to Flagstaff because of climate change, these little pig-like creatures-- they're not pigs, they're peccaries of a sort and they're bristly and they're somewhat daunting because they come right up to you. But they live in the desert and they eat the fruit of the saguaro cactus. I had no idea.
And I just think for some people who grew up in the desert, that the desert is not a dead place. It's a fecund place full of flowers and strange beasts with prickly, bristly-- not fur-- on these javelinas. But it's-- that place, by paying attention to it, I think you're doing an honor for it and you're making it sacred. But you're also finding meaning there and watching how it shapes you and shapes your experiences, and therefore, shapes the meaning of your life.
And as you're speaking, your clear love and appreciation and joy in a place and in knowing a place and caring for it by attending to its details and learning more about it and always being open, like that comes through. And now I want to go out and write an essay. You're inspiring me.
But in addition to the love of place, of course, there's the dimension of time. And as you were talking about the Salt Lake Valley where you stand up on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail and you can look down, and I kind of imagine through the different eras and eons of time.
And then if we take a look at time in your work as a writer, for example, your book, Processed Meats, weaves memoir and history with forecasts of the future. And to me, that brings the sense of the narrator is in this present plane that's just lacerated with these intersecting planes of time. Is that just a function of how you think or is that something that you also go in and cultivate intentionally?
I love this question. It made me really-- it makes me really think about how does time work in my work. What am I doing by imagining things so distant as a million years ago and then imagining how things might play out? And I'm wondering-- it leads me back to the question of place in a way, too, of growing up in Salt Lake City and wondering how much of the culture of Utah, and particularly the LDS culture, is invested in genealogy.
And this idea of why-- how do we turn out the way we turn out and why do we turn out the way we turn out? And as much as place shapes us, obviously, the people around us were equally if not more. And so there's that history of that ancestry that really does seem to make me think, well, do I do this because my great-great-grandmother-- do I can peaches because my great-great-grandmother did?
Do look for-- am I a worrier? And that's one of the great things about thinking about the future and one of the terrible things, is you worry. What can I do and what sort of impact can I have and what does it mean to still drive a car? Although finally I did get a hybrid, but still drive a car and be an environmentalist? And just these spiraling ways that associations work in my mind.
Also makes me think it's stretched out into the future to see what kind of impact I'm making, what kind of impact writing is making, and what kind of impact any sort of environmental work is making. And so you think historically in terms of the past you say, OK, how did we get here? And then you imagine-- what is the next-- what cause and effect are happening-- can we speculate toward as we imagine things playing out?
And I don't know if I like that or not. Some part of me thinks that perhaps staying in-- Donna Haraway has this great book called Staying With the Trouble. And I do think that it's not always my greatest gift, is to stay in the moment and to be present. That worrying that I may well have inherited from my great-grandmother takes me out of that moment, takes me out of the present.
And so one of the edicts that put your body in a place, one of my writing tenets is to probably bring me back to that present moment to say, OK, you're spiraling, you're making associations, which is, again, one of the ways that I write and one of my habits. But I think my practice is to try to say, OK, now come back to the present, come back to the present.
And it does make me think that time is layered and that by coming back to that centered place, I can imagine another track to follow or another track to remember.
Fascinating. All the stuff about time, but then also, is the action that I'm taking is it a reflection of my own personal choice, or is this history and lineage coming out? In an interesting way, it's one of those great thought experiments of the 21st century to dive into that.
As you were talking, though, I was struck by your talk about one of your tenets of writing, which is about place and staying centered in that place and time. Could you dive a little bit more deeply into that for us and tell us a little bit like-- I'm coming from the standpoint of a K-12 education teacher teaching writing and getting students excited about personal narratives, about developing good writing skills. How can we get students to write in these exciting ways that you're talking about and get them going in that direction?
That's a great question because I think people, and me included, want to take a moment and then abstract about what it means for people-- for them to understand where they're coming from. So how do we get students to say, OK, we want to hear where you're coming from, because of course, that's the point of writing, we want to communicate, but we also want the reader to experience that meaning and that abstraction with them.
And so conveying this idea of, OK, put us in that moment. Don't automatically take us to, this is what I think it all means, but describe to us what those prickly points on the Palo Verde tree feel like. That smooth bark is such a contrast to the pointy thorns that try to convince people to stay away.
How did the javelinas get into that saguaro fruit without coming away with the needles stuck in their own bristly chins? What is interesting about your story is the question. And now-- OK, and then once you can find a way to say what's interesting is the world around you, back and forth, playing this sort of accordion way between telling us a little bit about you, tell us a little bit about the world, tell us a little bit about you, tell us about the world.
We start to see and envision this larger scape that the writer's in and can then feel our own presence at that moment. And I think that's, to me, one of the hardest things to teach, is that we don't automatically understand where you're coming from if you don't ground us somewhere real. And to definitely-- I say this more than the students need to hear, but that I want to feel what it's like to be them and to feel like what it's like to be them I have to know, what are they touching? What is the wind doing to their hair at the moment? What are they listening to? What is the weird taste in their mouths?
And once they can enlighten me toward that or involve me in that, then I think they're-- then I'm much more able to follow them down their mental pathways and their intellectual concerns and their emotional beings.
That makes a lot of sense. Grounding first in those details. As writers often say, it's through the specific that you can reach the universal.
Exactly. And it's-- again, I feel like we say it so much that it's one of the great things about nonfiction, is that you can show them, again, that vast array of nonfiction and you can say, look, here's an informative essay that has a little bit of research in it. See how that can really be some of those details. Or see how just describing the lineage in your family can also be another kind of detail.
So I think it's expressing just the variety and availability of data in the world or of details or of idiosyncratic specific moments that they can immerse themselves in is another reason that I think, taking at least the early avenue through creative nonfiction can be really successful.
In addition to being a writer and a professor, Nicole, with all these great insights and tips for getting our newer writers engaged, you're also a parent. Have you found any particular ways to inspire or feed your kids' curiosity about their world? And if so, how might that tie into books, film, and other media?
I'm pretty sure I mainly drive my children insane. I have-- I keep threatening that I'm going to get these little business cards made up, and every time I'm waiting for the kids in the parking lot and somebody's idling their car, that I'm going to give them one of these cards that say, your idling is producing so many tons per second of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Or it's like walking past people in the sprinklers or watering the gutter and I'm like, these people have no idea how little water is left in Arizona. I do drive them mostly insane.
But I do think that constant attention, even though it's probably a little on the-- for the kids anyway, irritating side, I think that has driven them to pay quite a bit of attention to the world around them. And it's been-- and it's not definitely not all me, but, I mean, we are raising kids, I think, in a time of awareness of social justice issues.
And I think my kids are pretty invested in social justice. They worry about how their fellow friends are getting called on in class or if certain students are falling behind. I think they understand that there are reasons for that and that things, when I was growing up, just aren't in the lexicon. Like they don't really just decide who's smart and who's not anymore. It's like, well, this person does this really well and this person is really great at math and this other person-- this person really plays the piano beautifully.
There's this understanding that you don't have to be brilliant at everything all the time, which I felt was definitely a pressure at least in the Gen X generation that I experienced. And they're both really-- they're really good writers, which is rewarding of course. Because they do pay attention to those details.
So we wrote this beautiful piece about-- she was born prematurely, and Jen knows this. And she has this essay about being born and not being able to breathe, moving, tubing, this incredible cross-country runner. And just being able to make those connections and those metaphors I think is connected to me constantly harping on people and their environmental snafus.
And then also, I think that they're invested in those kinds of books and movies. And The Hate U Give was one book that they both read almost at the same time. They watch films and TV shows with that angle toward thinking about how does this matter in terms of social justice? In terms of environment, I worry about kids these days because I know most of the rhetoric surrounding teenagers and tweens is, well, it's all going to end soon anyway, which is-- it's kind of devastating. Like there's nothing to do about climate change, it's already happening. We're just going to have to live with it and deal with it.
There's optimism, I think, in that they have ways of understanding how that is a social justice issue, that environmental devastation is going to happen to those with less first. And I think they're concerned about it, but I also think they are resigned to it. And that makes me really sad in a lot of ways. And so that's why I send them to-- tomorrow I'm taking them to a rally. We go to climate change rallies, we go to Read for Ed, which is what we call our education. Come on, Arizona, you don't have to be last in funding forever kind of rallies.
So I hope that gives them-- inspires them to some degree to keep that-- the hope of change alive. I do worry about that for my kids sometimes a lot.
Back in 2000 when I moved out here for grad school, you were responsible for introducing me to the wonder and the beauty of Southern Utah. So as you know, I came from the Finger Lakes region. I was a water-- water girl, lakes. And I was like, I don't know that I want to go down to the desert. That doesn't sound like a place I want to be.
And you got to stick her down there, and I realized that the wind coming down through Torrey was like the ocean when it's had like a really-- surf thousands of miles to gather some steam. Like it just was so wild and amazing. It was so different to me. That's why I fell in love with Utah. So you're responsible for that. Do you get out with your kids into nature and do you think that that's part of their way of being in the world?
Yeah. I think for sure, Zoe, my oldest, loves-- she runs. So she runs the forest and she'll hike anywhere with us. Max is a little bit less interested in-- no, he loves the outdoors, but he hates going on hikes for some reason. But we just took the kids to New York, and of course in New York, you walk 10 miles a day not even noticing it.
So we had our Fitbits on and we're like, Max, we just walked 10 miles. That would have been like up to the top of Mount Elden and back. And he's like, no way, not going hiking, but I'll walk anywhere in New York City. And it makes me think, this is what-- I wrote a book with my friend David Carlin from Australia and it's called The After Normal. I don't have a copy here. It's called The After Normal, Brief Essays on a Changing Planet.
And one of our thoughts behind the book is that the made world is our natural world, too. And it is-- it's our environment and it's where we live. And that you can still appreciate the people and the trees of New York City as much as you can the wild and quiet spaces of the Coconino National Forest. And that reminds me of that, that we can always appreciate those tiny details no matter where we are.
That's incredible. And it's been so fascinating talking to you today. Specifically I just absolutely love the discussion surrounding place and how it can really influence individuals to do things in their lives like you talked about with your children, but then also to write and develop really interesting, engaging structures in their lives and to build a story around it. Tell us a little bit about where we can find you, where we can find your books if anybody wants to go out and find them.
Yeah. Well, I think most of my books you can find at the King's English. My most recent book is called Processed Meats, Essays on Food, Family, and Navigating Disaster. And talking about-- as Jen was talking about, the way that I talk about time in this collection, begins with the concern about Y2K and ends with thinking about the pandemic. So it's got 20 years of all kinds of disasters running through it.
But you can for sure find that at the King's English and Ken Sanders. And also, I have a website, nikwalk.com You can find me on Twitter @Nikwalkotter.
And that's Nik with a K. One K.
Yes. That's right. N-I-K-W-A-L-K. Thanks, Jen.
That's amazing. So thank you again, Nicole, for being here today and having this conversation with us. I deeply appreciate it and I think our audience will as well.
You both are a gift. Thank you all for your great questions. It was so much fun talking with you. I could do it for hours. Super, super fun. And thanks, Cassandra, for producing the show. I'm grateful to you all.
Thanks, Nicole.
Well, in case you didn't figure it out, full disclosure, I consider Nicole just a dear friend as well as she's just one of the most inspiring creative forces on this planet to me personally as a writer and as a scholar. She's just-- as you can tell, I just love the way her mind works.
I can see why after talking to her, I love the discussion about the brine shrimp, talking about the Lake Bonneville Tub Ring that she referenced, I thought that was a great way to put that. And just the process that she talks about with your students and with her writers, I think that's such a valuable takeaway from this interview, even though we didn't spend a lot of time-- I think this is a more lit side than the flitx side of the podcast, but I think it was super valuable to take a while to think about what place means in art.
And moving that over for a second to film, where would we be in most films without the location? And we talk about a lot of the big movies or special effects-oriented and green screen, but when there's a movie that it really takes in the place and adopts that place as its-- it's almost like another character in the story. And I think she did a really good job throughout the interview making a case for the place being another character in all creative processes.
So really good point, Matt. There are many, many films that wouldn't be the same experience and it wouldn't be as meaningful an experience without that specific setting that it's in.
Absolutely. And I think if you're walking away from this going, well, I'm not sure I want to write a personal essay about my location that I'm and those sorts of things, going in watching a great film that has a great location and a great setting where it plays into that being almost a character can be equally as satisfying.
So much of what Nicole had to say about bringing a sense of place and starting from a sense of place in your creative writing, I could see that working well with a film class, with a media class. Would take a mobile device take a camera out and start from there, do a video essay.
Absolutely. And going back to our previous interviews where we've talked about close reading, personal essays, letting things breathe, this is that same ball game, and being able to take out a camera and do that would be incredible. So this is such a wonderful interview and I'm so glad that we were able to bring her on through you, Jen, and bring that to our audience.
Me, too. Thanks.
We'll see you next time.
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