[APPLAUSE]
Good evening, everyone.
I'm Lucy, as Manuel has kindly primed you.
In my anxious flurry of trying to figure out how
to introduction, I was grateful that the Poetry Center
records all of their readings and puts them online.
The second one I watched was one done
by the director of the MFA program, Ander Monson,
for a wonderful poet in 2013.
I should have stopped watching when he said,
I'm using this as a lesson in hybridity,
and that's what genre is often to the hybrid heart--
a guide of what not to feel obliged to do.
After watching it through, I closed
my browser, confused and a little distressed,
hoping that the same quality would not be expected from me.
Trust Ander to make it new, a lesson, and a work of art.
I'm not surprised that Nicole Walker, our esteemed guest
and reader this evening, is a dear friend of Ander's
and of many in the program.
She exercises the strength of mind and artful craft
in nonfiction writing that earns her
a great deal of respect in this community and in many others.
Nicole has an impressive list of accolades,
and I'm sure she would hate for me to list them.
Her previous works of nonfiction include,
Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, and Quench
Your Thirst with Salt, which is for sale.
She has edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections
Science of Story with Sean Prentiss and Margot Singer,
and also Bending Genre--
Essays on Creative Nonfiction, again with Margot Singer.
And she has a book coming out later this year in June,
I'm told, called The After-Normal--
26 Brief Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet
from Rose Metal Press.
Tonight Nicole will be reading from her latest book, which
came out at the end of last year, called Sustainability--
A Love Story by Ohio State University Press.
Sustainability is an essay collection
that gathers the ephemera of dailiness and layers
them with the durable, and by doing
so challenges us to rethink what these categories actually mean.
You'll find in her essays bats, beef from Sam's Club,
and bullets.
You'll find fire, rain, and carbon emissions.
You'll find bath time with her children, wine,
and the trees in Flagstaff.
You'll find death, but you will also find mountains and life.
On the cover of Nicole's book, which we have here for sale,
it says that the book is for the burnt-out environmentalist,
the lazy environmentalist, the would-be environmentalist.
I mean, who could identify with any of those categories?
Her essays gently remind us that things are bad
and exactly how they are bad.
But with Nicole's characteristic playfulness,
they also remind us how hard it is to be hard all the time
on yourself and on others.
She writes, "being one with the forest
seems easier than being one with the humans."
Amitav Ghosh recently wrote that the climate crisis is also
a crisis of culture and thus of the imagination.
Writing about climate change is hard, and what Nicole is doing
is not writing a scientific treatise.
There are plenty of those out there.
What this book does is that it creates space within culture
to make moves of scale, bringing large environmental concerns
into the dailiness of living and oftentimes letting
things coexist, even as they grind against each other.
And this is what Nicole's book is about, to me--
not forcing an answer or a solution
but finding life in the spaces between despair and guilt
and finding a way to go on.
Please welcome Nicole, everyone.
[APPLAUSE]