Nicole Walker, author of the memoir Quench Your Thirst with Salt, comes to the July Reading Series of the Murray State MFA in Creative Writing program. Her book is part cultural critique part scientific treatise on the 'strangeness' of growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah. On Sounds Good, Kate Lochte speaks with Walker about her book, the power of writing and her series of letters to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey on her website Nikwalk, protesting cuts to higher education.
Quench Your Thirst with Salt Author Nicole Walker is the 6:30 p.m. Wednesday presenter for the July Reading Series of the Murray State MFA in Creative Writing program.
Her book is part nature writing, part formal analysis, part science writing, capturing the spirit of weaving between personal, public, private, political, fantasy and science. Walker says she considers her voice conversational and associative. Without a novelistic narrative arc, she approaches elements of the universe as though she's a large prism that walks through the world associating things like a tree and a Volkswagen and finding ways to connect them together. "If I use enough associative energy I hope to persuade the reader to come along with me on the associative ride."
Walker says she finds power in the act of writing and in the act of saying "these things happen." It's the keeping of secrets that can become the perverted, infectious part of you, she says. By having a loud voice she says she's able to own her writing and experiences as if saying "this happens to me and it happens to others" instead of a shame that women hide. She encourages writers to be loud. "The more I write the more powerful I feel," she says.
The world of creative writing is changing, she says, encouraging her students to take the powerful feeling of writing into all kinds of jobs, whether teaching or politics or to future writing progress. Approach writing as its own vocation, regardless of the kind of job it might lead you to.