Category: Uncategorized

Happy Birthday

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Egg is officially released today although yesterday, I saw smatterings of posts on Facebook showing me it had arrived at some people’s houses. There is so much kindness in someone purchasing your book. A book is not free and, while a book is also not super expensive, it’s still a portion of money people could use for something else–a sandwich and a pint of beer in Flagstaff. Two sandwiches and a pitcher of beer in Portland. The work people put into making a book astounds me: reading the early drafts (thank you, Erik), inspiring the book (thank you, Rebecca), contributing to the book, (thank you, Margot, Okim, Tanya, Hailing Lou, Wiehong Wang, Hui Lang) reading the proposal, (thank you, Ian and Christopher), reading the later drafts, (thank you, Christopher), reading the final draft (thank you, Haaris!), marketing the book (thank you, Laura) proofreading (thank you, Anita Singh), writing jacket copy (thank you, Lucy Corin), interviewing me on Essay Daily (Thank you, Ander Monson), posting about it on Facebook (thank you, Heidi Czerwiec, Valerie Koonce, Paige Walker Ehler, Angie Hansen, Todd Grossman, Todd Kaneko, Erin Stalcup, Justin Bigos, Bryan Asdel, and Stacy Murison), hosting a book release party (thank you, Lawrence and Andie). It’s incredible to me that people are willing to invest time, energy, and money into a book. This book tries to show my gratitude to the people who have made the idea of creation, destruction, fertility, potential, and kinesis as clutchable as the egg. Eggs as gifts. I believe.

Micrograms

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“There is no other writer like Nicole Walker for weaving a fabric that incorporates all the threads of her reality: the scientific and the poetic, the trivial and the dire, the mundane and the apocalyptic, all held together by her deep pleasure in the operations of language itself.” –Katharine Coles ”

Like Galeano’s BOOK OF EMBRACES or Weil’s GRAVITY AND GRACE, Nicole Walker’s MICROGRAMS portray the force of a keen mind fully engaged with disparate, successive parts of the world, which unify, reconfigure, and become new things in her strange, wondrous prose. These essays are not description or depiction but revelation; they both show and prophesy.” –Patrick Madden

“Though I’m tempted to applaud the micro-joys, micro-fascinations, and micro-revelations of Nicole Walker’s MICROGRAMS, the truth is that this miniscule book of micro-essays offers inquisitive readers gargantuan pleasures. A micro-burst of essays, fresh and intriguing.” –Dinty W. Moore

“MICROGRAMS by Nicole Walker is a cause for swooning and celebration. I cleaned my glasses and caught my breath. She is a microscope and a telescope, gives us a book writ large, writ small. ‘Let’s go smaller,’ she asks us, but never in import as, in her delightful deadpan, she leads us through life and death. Yes, it’s a small world after all. And an extraordinary book about looking close, and thinking far.” –David Lazar

Egg

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“This is the eggiest book ever, and the egg is everything. Egg is forthright, joyful, mournful and charming, as personal and expansive as the good great egg.” –  Lucy Corin, Program Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English, University of California, Davis, USA, and author of One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (2013) – See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/egg-9781501322877/#sthash.lUS77uL2.dpuf

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.This book is about a strange object-strange in part because it is something that we all have been, and that many of us eat. Nicole Walker’s Egg relishes in sharp juxtapositions of seemingly fanciful or repellent topics, so that reproductive science and gustatory habits are considered alongside one another, and personal narrative and broad swaths of natural history jostle, like yolk and albumen. Mapping curious eggs across times, scales, and spaces, Egg draws together surprising perspectives on this common object-egg as food, as art object, as metaphor and feminist symbol, as cultural icon.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

– See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/egg-9781501322877/#sthash.lUS77uL2.dpuf

Bending Genre

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Ever since the term “creative nonfiction” first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. This debate over ethics, however, has sidelined important questions of literary form. Bending Genre does not ask where the boundaries between genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from today’s leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, and David Shields. Each writer’s innovative essay probes our notions of genre and investigates how creative nonfiction is shaped, modeling the forms of writing being discussed. Like creative nonfiction itself, Bending Genre is an exciting hybrid that breaks new ground.

Quench Your Thirst with Salt

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Quench Your Thirst with Salt won the 2013 Creative Nonfiction Prize and was published by Zone Three Press.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. “Part affecting memoir, part lyric meditation on water, part cultural critique, but finally about all that is unquenchable in the human experience, Nicole Walker has created a book that is truly sui generis. By turns wry, elegiac, and always elegant in its precision and force, Walker investigates all that is contradictory and curious in the micro climate of her immediate family and the macro climate of Utah to create not a dry treatise, not a windless flight of experimental prose, but a natural history of thirst in all its manifestations, at once compulsively readable and intensely personal.”—Robin Hemley