During the fall of 2012, Ander assigned a Nicole Walker essay,
and it spread through the MFA program like peanut butter,
like gossip, like top 40 songs, and the best disease.
Have you read Where the Wild Things Are,
poets and prose writers whispered outside glass doors.
We liked the essay in part because it
echoed themes of our lives in the way
that good writing often does.
No, we were not likely as Ms. Walker
on the cusp of parenthood, but were, like her,
researching, thinking, exploring the landscapes of our lives
in order to make meaning from a small thing, from a big thing,
from all things.
A week later, one of my beginning nonfiction
writing students posted a photograph to our class blog.
She wrote, "I stumbled across this while walking
to class today.
It was so lovely I had to take a picture
and share it with all of you."
In the photograph, a poem displayed on two by fours
and staggered across a rock wall as a student art installment.
It read, "In Persian, there are 89 words for love.
I would be happy just to remember one.
Keeps me up at night memorizing your name."
A poem by, of course, the many genred and multitalented Nicole
Walker, whose name Tucson cannot seem to forget.
Actually, no one can forget it.
At the AWP Writing Conference in Boston this year,
the Sonora Review table sat almost back
to back with the folks at Zone 3 Press, who in June will
probably publish Nicole Walker's first book of nonfiction,
Quench Your Thirst With Salt, winner of the Zone 3 nonfiction
prize.
In an attempt to locate Ms. Walker, I approached them.
Hello, I said.
I did an interview for Essay Daily with Nicole.
And before I could finish, the young man interrupted,
have you met her yet?
She is so nice.
I'd suspected as much.
Slowly I was piecing together a portrait of Nicole Walker that
went beyond the misunderstanding I'd had with Wikipedia, which
said that Nicole Walker was a fictional character on the NBC
soap opera Days of Our Lives.
This is another Nicole Walker.
So close.
Instead, and quite preferably, Ms. Walker
is the co-editor of Bending Genre: Essays on Nonfiction.
She's the nonfiction editor for Diagram,
and the editor of an artist and writer collaborative
project, Seven Rings, on the Huffington Post.
She teaches poetry and nonfiction at Northern Arizona
University, and is the author of a book of poetry, The Noisy
Egg, and a book of nonfiction, Quench Your Thirst With Salt.
Of the book, she writes, "Are bodies
the corrosive power of water, the stalwart force of granites?
I love it when metaphors break down,
when they break down like water.
The water is so bossy, the granite is so bossy,
the church is so bossy.
We don't like authority.
We take it out on our bodies.
Growing up in a place where subduing the landscape
is as practiced as subduing the people who
live there is a hard thing.
A person is shaped by that hardness.
Is a person as malleable as a mountain?
Is she is well defined as cracks in the granite?
Is she as useful as a valley of water pipes?
Shaped by the dominant culture of my parents fighting
against that subculture, taking the subculture to an extreme,
escaping the whole thing.
This is a book about how I try to stand
some ground in a shaky family situation
on the dry edge of the [INAUDIBLE] Fault."
In Quench Your Thirst With Salt, Nicole Walker
is contrasting the hard and soft,
the masculine the feminine, the landscape of Earth
and the landscape of family.
She's using her training as a poet
to create prose that is lyric and thoughtful,
reflective, lovely, striking.
I respond to her work because I'm a lover of words too.
I suspect it is why we're all responding in this whispery
wildfire way to her prose.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me
in welcoming Nicole Walker.
[APPLAUSE]