Nicole Walker’s essay, “Unattended,” appears in the summer 2022 issue of The Southern Review. Here, she discusses climate change, individual choice, and burning down the idea of shame.
Jake Zawlacki, Editorial Assistant: The piece begins with this idea of the ember in the form of cancer and the ember with the possibility of mass destruction. What was the ember, if you will, that inspired you to connect the various tracks within the piece?
Nicole Walker: It’s difficult for me to discern the difference between intentional self-destruction and accidental disaster. I remember reading Shakti Gawain when I was in high school. She wrote about the power of positive thinking. In her book, she said you shouldn’t say negative things, like, “I want to die,” because even if you don’t mean it, your body will hear it and you may end up with cancer later in life. The idea that everything an individual does is an individual’s responsibility is both empowering and exhausting. What a thought to imagine that if I just speak positively to myself, I can avoid all the grim possibilities. It’s individualism running rampant but also puts the blame on you if things don’t go well for you. With respect to climate change, corporations have left it to the individual to make the best decision for the climate as they can—while offering fancy coffee drinks exclusively in plastic cups. This essay is a part of a book where I explore the possibilities of acting collectively as the trees do. But this is to get back to your question, even the trees and their fast wit can’t outrun the forces behind fire or climate change.
JZ: Growing up in east San Diego county, I remember evacuating first from my own home, and then from my grandparents’ home from the Cedar Fire in 2003. To me, that’s always been the benchmark of when fires became way more dangerous than expected. However, that’s just anecdotal. In your research for this piece, did you find a moment where fires went from the “before times” (442) mentioned to something totally different?
NW: It’s so nuts how different my life is here in Flagstaff than it was growing up just 400 miles of here. I remember the Yellowstone Fires of 1988. News stations broadcast live from the edge of the park seemingly day and night. The sky in Salt Lake, where I lived then, turned orange. It felt devastating but not apocalyptic. Then, I moved to Portland. Fires far away. Back to Salt Lake. No fires close to the city. Then, in Flagstaff, the first year we lived here, a fire blocked the road we took to visit our family in Salt Lake. I felt closed off. And then, five years later. Another fire. Then a year later. Another fire. Then, this year, two fires in a row in nearly the same place. So now I see those fires in a different context—the Yellowstone fires were probably part of a natural and necessary burn. Fires have gotten out of control not just because of climate change but from years of fire suppression policies. It’s weird that in the fall in Flagstaff, the forest service prescribe burns all year long. Imagining the difference between controlled burns, clearing burns, and mountain-town destroying burns has made me appreciate fire, even as I’m afraid of it.
JZ: Evanston, Wyoming seems to be the only town in the piece untouched by a fire. Although, it seems like there’s a different kind of fire there. Would you agree? Or am I grasping for metaphor?
NW: Evanston is a wild place. So many booms and busts. Such a strange position—right on the edge of Utah. In the before-times, the legal age to buy liquor there was 19 so kids drove up to Evanston all the time to procure alcohol. Fireworks, speaking of fire, have always been legal. People from Salt Lake drive to Evanston for both the Fourth of July and the twenty-fourth of July—Pioneer Day when Utah was “founded” by Mormons—celebrations. It’s a town that survives by a thread, until the next pot of oil is discovered. It’s got some dark stories that burn more like rubber tires than trees.
JZ: This line is just brimming with great metaphor and punch: “The pressure of sunny bootstrap culture plus a shiny layer of wealth makes the gray silhouette of a bleak individualism stand out.” (439) Do you ever just say to yourself, “Damn, that’s a good one”?
NW: I am in the middle of retyping a manuscript. Most of the time, I’m like, I majored in English? But once in a while, I read over something and it makes me laugh out loud. Those are my favorite moments. I wish they came more often! Maybe if I type more slowly . . .
JZ: The essay balances many threads throughout i.e., fires, cancer, family history, and suicide. When writing a nonfiction piece like this, how do you maintain that balance?
NW: Andre Dubus III said that “The best writing comes not when you want to say something but when you want to find something.” Sometimes I feel like I create a wilderness of threads—fire, cancer, family history, trees, etc. and then try to find, by tracking each thread a way through the wilderness. Each thread actually gives me some direction. For me, to write is to put one idea against another and letting it shape the next idea. It’s discovery more than mapping, although I do hope I leave a bit of a map behind for the reader to follow.
JZ: The topic of suicide sits just beneath the surface of most of the piece. In thinking about suicide, I’m heavily informed by Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, which, from the title, makes her philosophical position clear. While the piece ends with a series of questions trying to inhabit Aunt Michelle’s mind, is there an unwritten declaration somewhere in there?
When I applied to college, my essay spoke about my sister’s boyfriend’s suicide when he was 14. I had just read St. Augustine and had been thinking about free will. Is suicide the ultimate free will? I argued that yes, in a vacuum, it probably is but John Donne, etc. etc. no man is an island. To commit suicide is to take down a piece of everyone around you. So, if I can return that idea of a collective—if we are all connected, suicide is an individual choice and full of free will, but individual choice and free will are how we ended up in this climate situation.
JZ: This is a bit of a wild question, but if you saw the piece as a wildfire, what would you hope that it burned down?
NW: What a fantastic question. I would love this piece to burn down the idea of shame—that we have to go it alone or not go at all. I would love this piece to burn down pretense and falsehoods and let the facts stand like those giant trees that can withstand fires. I would love this piece to burn down narrow definitions of family and then also narrow definition of species. I would love this piece to burn down all the carbon, but I know. That would just put more carbon in the sky.
JZ: This piece felt close to me in a lot of ways and I look forward to reading more of your work. What else are you working on at the moment?
NW: This piece comes from a manuscript I’m working on called How to Plant a Billion Trees. I have a wild belief that if everyone tells their unique story, the effect will be similar to planting a billion trees—if only because we’d have to stop driving our cars or drinking iced coffee drinks out of plastic cups, and listen to each other the way the trees seem to be able to stop and listen, once in a while.
Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster, Sustainability: A Love Story, and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet. She has previously published the nonfiction collections Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and a book of poems, This Noisy Egg. She is the copresident of NonfictioNOW and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and a noted author in Best American Essays. Her work has been recently published in the New York Times, Longreads, and Ploughshares, among other places. She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ.