Nicole Walker - Böcker

Bringing together a diverse range of writers, The Science of Story is the first book to ask the question: what can contemporary brain science teach us about the art and craft of creative nonfiction writing? Drawing on the latest developments in cognitive neuroscience the book sheds new light on some of the most important elements of the writer’s craft, from perspective and truth to emotion and metaphor.The Science of Story explores such questions as:· Why do humans tell stories?· How do we remember and misremember our lives - and what does this mean for storytelling?· What is the value of writing about trauma?· How do stories make us laugh, or cry, make us angry or triumphant?Contributors: Nancer Ballard, Mike Branch, Frank Bures, J.T. Bushnell, Katharine Coles, Christopher Cokinos, Alison Hawthorne Deming, David Lazar, Lawrence Lenhart, Alan Lightman, Dave Madden, Jessica Hendry Nelson, Richard Powers, Sean Prentiss, Julie Wittes Schlack, Valerie Sweeney Prince, Ira Sukrungruang, Nicole Walker, Wendy S. Walters, Marco Wilkinson, Amy Wright.

Bringing together a diverse range of writers, The Science of Story is the first book to ask the question: what can contemporary brain science teach us about the art and craft of creative nonfiction writing? Drawing on the latest developments in cognitive neuroscience the book sheds new light on some of the most important elements of the writer’s craft, from perspective and truth to emotion and metaphor.The Science of Story explores such questions as:· Why do humans tell stories?· How do we remember and misremember our lives - and what does this mean for storytelling?· What is the value of writing about trauma?· How do stories make us laugh, or cry, make us angry or triumphant?Contributors: Nancer Ballard, Mike Branch, Frank Bures, J.T. Bushnell, Katharine Coles, Christopher Cokinos, Alison Hawthorne Deming, David Lazar, Lawrence Lenhart, Alan Lightman, Dave Madden, Jessica Hendry Nelson, Richard Powers, Sean Prentiss, Julie Wittes Schlack, Valerie Sweeney Prince, Ira Sukrungruang, Nicole Walker, Wendy S. Walters, Marco Wilkinson, Amy Wright.

A reflective and practical guide for writers wanting to dig into difficult or personal subjects, this book offers a road map to the special craft techniques that will allow authors to navigate trauma and tough topics to create compelling and accessible prose. With consideration of traumatic experiences such as domestic violence and sexual abuse, but also thinking about how best to tackle political, scientific, cultural, environmental, and other thorny, emotional, or potentially objectionable subject matter, Nicole Walker demonstrates the craft techniques that can provide distance, context, and multiple entry points for writers to shape difficult content. Drawing on her own backstory and experience teaching students from many backgrounds who often have painful stories to tell, Walker offers in this book ways both she and her students discovered how to write the hard stuff effectively.With each chapter providing a strategy to attain a form of distance, including rest, metaphor, object writing, detachment, detour, distraction, point-of-view shift and ducking into different content through braided essay, this book enables writers to tell their story whilst connecting to the larger issues attendant to their theme and experience. Utilizing writing prompts and examples from a wide range of texts, Writing the Hard Stuff promises to broaden the reach of writers’ difficult and hard-hitting prose by connecting the interiority of the personal story with the exterior world.

A reflective and practical guide for writers wanting to dig into difficult or personal subjects, this book offers a road map to the special craft techniques that will allow authors to navigate trauma and tough topics to create compelling and accessible prose. With consideration of traumatic experiences such as domestic violence and sexual abuse, but also thinking about how best to tackle political, scientific, cultural, environmental, and other thorny, emotional, or potentially objectionable subject matter, Nicole Walker demonstrates the craft techniques that can provide distance, context, and multiple entry points for writers to shape difficult content. Drawing on her own backstory and experience teaching students from many backgrounds who often have painful stories to tell, Walker offers in this book ways both she and her students discovered how to write the hard stuff effectively.With each chapter providing a strategy to attain a form of distance, including rest, metaphor, object writing, detachment, detour, distraction, point-of-view shift and ducking into different content through braided essay, this book enables writers to tell their story whilst connecting to the larger issues attendant to their theme and experience. Utilizing writing prompts and examples from a wide range of texts, Writing the Hard Stuff promises to broaden the reach of writers’ difficult and hard-hitting prose by connecting the interiority of the personal story with the exterior world.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This book is about a strange object—strange in part because it is something that we all have been, and that many of us eat. Nicole Walker‘s Egg relishes in sharp juxtapositions of seemingly fanciful or repellent topics, so that reproductive science and gustatory habits are considered alongside one another, and personal narrative and broad swaths of natural history jostle, like yolk and albumen. Mapping curious eggs across times, scales, and spaces, Egg draws together surprising perspectives on this common object—egg as food, as art object, as metaphor and feminist symbol, as cultural icon.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Ever since the term "creative nonfiction" first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. An early and influential book on questions of form in creative nonfiction, Bending Genre asks not where the boundaries between the genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. The expanded second edition doubles the first edition with 23 new essays that broaden the exploration of hybridity, structure, unconventionality, and resistance in creative nonfiction, pushing the conversation forward in diverse and exciting ways.Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, David Shields, Kazim Ali--and in the new edition--Catina Bacote, Ira Sukrungruang, Ingrid Horrocks, Elena Passarello, and Aviya Kushner. Each writer's innovative essay probes our notions of genre and investigates how creative nonfiction is shaped, modeling the forms of writing being discussed. Like creative nonfiction itself, Bending Genre is an exciting hybrid that breaks new ground.Features in the second edition:-Updated introduction to the new edition-Expanded sections on Hybrids, Structures, and "Unconventions"-A new section on Resistances-50 essays in all

Ever since the term "creative nonfiction" first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. An early and influential book on questions of form in creative nonfiction, Bending Genre asks not where the boundaries between the genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. The expanded second edition doubles the first edition with 23 new essays that broaden the exploration of hybridity, structure, unconventionality, and resistance in creative nonfiction, pushing the conversation forward in diverse and exciting ways.Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, David Shields, Kazim Ali--and in the new edition--Catina Bacote, Ira Sukrungruang, Ingrid Horrocks, Elena Passarello, and Aviya Kushner. Each writer's innovative essay probes our notions of genre and investigates how creative nonfiction is shaped, modeling the forms of writing being discussed. Like creative nonfiction itself, Bending Genre is an exciting hybrid that breaks new ground.Features in the second edition:-Updated introduction to the new edition-Expanded sections on Hybrids, Structures, and "Unconventions"-A new section on Resistances-50 essays in all

When Nicole Walker was molested and had an abortion at age 11, the distance between her and the world grew until she couldn’t imagine a future place for her anywhere. In How to Plant a Billion Trees, Walker tries to understand why her whole life didn’t fall apart, as was predicted. As she pieces together her story, she finds that it was thanks in no small part to her mother, her sisters, her friends who did not let the sexual abuse to define her. In this candid portrayal of a young girl, Nicole Walker writes about how, thanks to her family, her friends, and the mountains of the Wasatch, Cascades, and San Francisco Peaks, she reknit herself into the fabric of a supportive culture.Employing the forest as a model to understand how to reconnect her life with the world, Nicole studies the way that ecosystems anticipate, react, and support each small part of the whole. As she learns more about ecology, she discovers that in a healthy forest, even the gritty, decaying elements contribute to the health of the forest. The process of rebuilding the self into a community parallels the process of a forest’s growth. To apply that lesson to the human ecosystem, Nicole realizes that even the hard-to-stomach stories need to be told, and, with air, that grit is transformed into something alive and new.