Max was two. Zoe, seven. I was forty, when the nurse called and told me I needed to come in for a follow-up mammogram and ultrasound. My manners couldn’t catch up with my physical reaction. I started yelling why…
I wrote this essay with Andrea Askowitz and Allison Langer as part of Writing Class Radio and the Festival of Science. Andrea and Allison came to Flagstaff to workshop essays for the festival twice. The first time, in April, I, with a number of Ecosystem scientists, worked to write 1000-word stories that we could perform. Allison and Andrea are gifted at eliciting stories combining science and narrative that work well on the stage. The second time, they challenged us to perform our stories dramatically.
“Still. Life.” came from these writing sessions where others worked on stories about a terrifying helicopter flight to conduct research near Fairbanks, about a restoration project that took a sad, dammed river into diamond glory—that then had to be protected from every Arizonan hoping to take refuge in that glorious beauty, about frogs in Panama, and about imagining Siri as the main communicator in a flailing relationship, among other great essays.
Because I’m always braiding essays, it seemed straightforward to me to bring together a recent personal health scare with another kind of scare—the one where a plant endemic to Northern Arizona may disappear as the climate changes and the drought persists. But the audience for a performed braided essay is different than an audience that reads one. Andrea and Allison wanted me to draw on my experience with poetry, with breath, with breaks and spacing, to make the essay not only make sense but sound powerful.
As I was practicing this piece, I traveled to Miami to perform a different essay in support of Amendment 4 which, if passed, would protect reproductive freedom. Even though both essays involved bodies and personal stories, practicing them aloud made me see how braiding essays and performing essays do similar work. By braiding, one can, if the personal subject gets too hard, dip into research. When performing a personal essay, practicing a thousand times gave me some distance from the personal story.
Writing about abortion is harder than writing about potential cancer. Writing about the devastation of pinyon pine trees seems easier until you tell the story a thousand times or braid it with the personal. Then, the fragility of the tree matches the fragility of the body. Then the fragility of the body matches the fragility of the body politic. But, as I hope the essay confirms, even the fragile persist.
NICOLE WALKER is the author of Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose and How to Plant a Billion Trees: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and the Healing Power of Nature, both forthcoming from Bloomsbury, as well as Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster; The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet Sustainability: A Love Story; Where the Tiny Things Are: Feathered Essays; Egg; Micrograms; and Quench Your Thirst with Salt. She edited the essay collections The Science of Story: The Brain Behind Creative Nonfiction with Sean Prentiss and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction with Margot Singer. She edits the Crux series at University of Georgia Press and nonfiction at Diagram. She teaches creative writing and serves as the Writer-in-Residence for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University. Find her on Facebook @nicole.walker.18041.
