NICOLE WALKER is the author of three forthcoming books Sustainability: A Love Story, Microcosm, and Canning Peaches for the Apocalypse. Her previous books include Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. Her work has been published in Orion, Boston Review, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School and other places. She curated, with Rebecca Campbell, 7 Artists, 7 Rings—an Artist’s Game of Telephone for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a notable essayist in Best American 2008, 2014, 2015, and 2016 and nonfiction winner of Best of the Net in 2013 and 2014, she’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.
What is most difficult about writing?
I love writing–it’s all forward momentum and even when it’s not moving forward, you click over to Facebook for a second to think about what the next move might be and something will pop up that will give you the one right word, the one right idea, the next bit of research or perfect fact. I think revising is impossible. That’s where chance and serendipity have to be reined in. I think of writing as wild and revision as domesticating that wild, but although that sounds judgey, I don’t mean it to be so. Domestication is where significance and are given enough context for things to become significant. The wilderness is fabulous because it just IS but to make meaning, you have to bring it home. That’s the hard part. Wrestling grizzly bears through the front door.
What is your philosophy of failure?
My philosophy of failure is that all writing is a kind of failure. It’s almost there–the connection between the thing you’re trying to say and actually saying, between the vehicle and the tenor of the metaphor you’re trying to make almost connecting. I can actually taste how close I came but how far away I’ll always be. Still, that’s the fun part. Feeling like maybe one day. Feeling like, close still feels pretty great.
What is the biggest mistake you have made as a writer?
The biggest mistake I made as a writer was thinking I could make myself a different kind of writer. I’m not going to publish in the New York Times. Probably not The New Yorker. Probably not The New England Review. I’m too big on metaphor and I don’t really like connecting the dots to obviously for the reader. I like to pull a couple of ideas together, put them in a pot and shake them up. It is so exciting when two of those ideas crash into each other. It doesn’t happen when I try to hard to make it happen. I can’t narrate its happening. I can only remark on what’s there and on the very coolness that these two things come together.
What is the biggest mistake you have made as a person?
The biggest mistake I made as a person is probably the same as the biggest mistake as a writer–trying to be something I’m not. I’m not the kind of person who walks into the Dean’s office and demands a raise. I’m not confrontational in workshop. I’m the ‘nurturing’ professor even though I hate confirming or conforming to gender assumptions. I do so much better when I just let myself be myself. I mean, I want to work harder and be better at things but I also have to accept that I’m not an in-your-face kind of arguer. Instead, if I make progress, it’s by throwing some ideas out there and seeing which ones stick. It’s not very often the raise. But it’s occasionally a eureka moment when working on a student’s essay or poem, which is more satisfying, in the end.
What is your best failure story?
The biggest failure? Oh my god. This deserves/requires a list: The time I neglected to order Brady Udall’s books for his reading. The time I yelled at my daughter for coming running and then going slow. The time I submitted an essay with no ending. The time I submitted a poem with seven typos. The time I dropped my phone and cracked the lens again (yesterday). The time I submitted an essay to the same magazine twice. The time I wasn’t watching Max closely enough and he fell down the stairs in the garage. The time I yelled at him for pulling the towel rack out of the wall. The time I told my husband to go to hell. The time I bought three pounds of English Peas from Whole Foods and didn’t taste them and when we got home, they were starchy as all get out. But really, the biggest failure was thinking that success meant big publication. The best thing that has happened to me is when one or two people send me notes or write a short goodreads review, that my friends are like, nice book, and my kids say, you’re a writer! because really, they had no idea. The connections across the small town, the ones from across the world, don’t come that often but when they do come, I’m as amazed as when two ideas come together and I’m able to wrangle them through the front door, or, probably less to do with my wrangling skills and more to do with luck: when those two ideas, like two people. come together and crash into each other thanks to the big pot of writing.
