“Processed Meats” Essays on food, flesh, and navigating disaster. By Nicole Walker

Nicole Walker, Author & Academic

When a poet turns to creative non-fiction weird and wonderful things happen, like associational leaps (from Beef tongue to cunnilingus, from pedophilia to crows) and metaphors that take on lives of their own (like the cougar on the porch or a crow that moves the forest). Immersed in Walker’s latest collection of essays, I found myself laughing, crying, and scratching my head.

With an utterly disarming style, Walker points out the absurdity of our responses to disaster. Y2K looks especially silly next to the existential threats we face only two decades into the 21st century. Then there are personal disasters. As Walker explains, “The food of divorce is the food of the climate crisis. Both will be good practice for the COVID-19 pandemic.” (36).

Walker turns the familiar into something strange when she writes,  “so many people eating so many animals.” (155) Well, when you put it like that . . . Walker should know. She comes from a long line of carnivores.   “Beef stitched my family together.” (29) I raise my hand here and yell, “Me too!” Descended from a stringy brood of Nebraska cattle ranchers, my kids grew up on meat loaf and Big Macs. Last year our son upped the ante and made beef wellington for Christmas dinner. I found myself reaching for seconds despite promises made when gazing into the sad brown eyes of a cow on Boulder Mountain. We can’t quite give up eating flesh but at least she and I have the decency to feel guilty. As we darn well know, those gorgeous black Angus that dot our meadows are a scourge on earth and air.

The book asks, “What of the future can you divine from a single detail?” Then it delivers intimate details plucked from the author’s life. We see Walker hanging out with a woman who’s almost-a-friend. When the woman turns out to be a climate denier things turn . . . AWKWARD. Then there are the bombs that go off in her head when husband Erik says, “I thought you were getting lunch.” (191) These moments invite the reader in and hint at a shared future that we might all enjoy.

By insisting that we acknowledge our many absurdities, Processed Meats gives us permission to laugh at ourselves.  In “Making it Palatable” Walker writes of a man who saved 23,083 plastic bags and now waits for the woman who will crochet them into sleeping mats for people who sleep on sidewalks. “She’s crocheting as fast as she can.” In a strangely hopeful, “If only,” Walker imagines a time when we realize “that doing things to help the people and the planet feels better than feeling good yourself.” (127) She deftly skirts the Pollyanna afterburn with, “We need a metaphor for that.” Ah! The power of metaphor and the delicious relief of gallows humor!

Walker admires the cougar on the porch who survives despite the interference of humans. But she can’t let her five-year-old daughter take the bus to school. She drives. But she doesn’t sit with her engine idling and watch her baby walk into the building. “Because people are waiting and I am a considerate human except, like all humans, to the cougar.”  We are all complicit and we are in this together. Walker makes this clear in every page even as she manages to persuade this misanthrope that human beings are strange and loveable creatures.

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Author Interview

When in doubt, go to the library. I searched for Nicole in the catalogue at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library and found eight books. Wow. This woman’s prolific! Her 2001 PhD dissertation was there; a collection of poems titled “Six of one, half dozen of the other.” The most recent item in the catalogue was a 2013 book called, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, that Nicole edited with Margot Singer. Accessing it online, I was able to download and devour Nicole’s essay, “My Mistake.” Another thoroughly delightful read!

By then, I was dying to meet Nicole Walker. She and I have a lot in common. We went to the same schools (Reed College and the University of Utah) and, in times of trouble, we both turn to growing and making stuff. That, plus a comment in the book. “I wish I could go into politics but I’m afraid I might punch people.” (193) We clearly had a lot to talk about!

Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

A: Tell me the story of this collection.

N: Processed Meats has been in process [ha!] for years. The order these essays were written is not the order they’re presented in. I started at middle and the beginning and ending were wrapped around the middle parts. I had an agent who sent it out and presses came back with questions like, “What is narrative arc?” These drove me to put them in a kind of chronological order. Then I revised it using poetry book-making skills from Jackie [Osherow] like, recurrent images. The pandemic helped me organize the book but it also forced me to reinvent it. It  would seem out of step if you’re talking about disasters and not addressing the pandemic. Then I added another layer: shapes of food. So, I assembled it layer upon layer.

A: Did being an academic help?

N: No. We over-think everything and look for the tiny connections and assume people will make them. I’m told you have to signpost things and I am so resistant to do that. I don’t want to say “Here’s the connective tissue.”  I love it when cohesion just emerges. I want it to come together in this orchestra of light. This keeps me out of main presses. They want more signposting. So I set the book aside for four years.

A: How was it working with Torrey House Press?

N: It was great! It’s a small press located in Salt Lake City and named after the founders’ place in Torrey. I met  Kirstin Johana allen, their main editor> This book is a little different for them. They do books based in the west, tied to environmentalism. They are known for books about the Southwest, Bears Ears. My book slips in there and I love it because these are my people, activist environmentalist, I love them. I write more personal narrative than they do. But I admire them from afar. Maybe they’re not my people but I’m lucky and glad to be with them. Small presses will be ever more important. Authors usually have to do all their marketing these days but the folks at Torrey House did everything. They have an active publicist, They set up readings. They’re reviewed by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly booklist – not yet in New York Times. They do a great job with marketing.

What I see about publishing is we’re down to four big presses wth 100 imprints each. There’s fragmenting in readership. You won’t reach 350 million Americans. They’re curating their own news, they’re own music and publishing is following that model so presses have a signature style, content. A specific kind of book they’re interested in. That drives their audience. You can subscribe to a press and they’ll send you 10 books. This insures you a constant stream of books you will enjoy. I love that.

A: I love the humor in this book. The way you point out our absurdity.

N: I just did an interview on climate change in the imagination. They asked, “Do you get depressed about climate change?” and I said, “No I’m basically optimistic.” Absurdity works. Humans are absurd and instead of hating them for it I want to recognize and laugh at it and remember moving forward. That’s our way. If you’re going to be ridiculous have an escape route planned. So you’d better come up with a back-up plan.

A: Do you have a favorite essay?

N: I love “On Anger” and a lot of the essays towards the end. By then I felt I was in my element.   That’s when I can trust the reader and they’re not going to say, ‘Oh Nicole, you’ve really jumped the shark this time.”

A: Jumped the shark?

N: There’s an episode in Happy Days where Fonzie tries to jump over a bunch of sharks on his motorcycle. People say that’s when Happy Days stopped being a good show. There’s a website called “Jump the Shark” that lists TV shows and marks moment they stopped being good.

Anyway, by the end the essays got weirder and I took more risks.  Like “Tongue” That was a notable essay in Best American Essays, 2016. Cunnilingus and tongue. Those registers are awkward. Cow’s tongue. It’s weird. I think it messes with people’s heads. It’s a good one to take on the road. “Tongue” is for grown-ups. Then there’s “Unkindness of Ravens.” Does it fit? I don’t know. It’s not about food but it fits narratively if not thematically.

A: Tell me about your next project.

N: It’s a new book more based in climate change. It has the same form. I’m not trying to say it’s the best and only form for non-fiction and essay writing. But I hope to force people to accept this premise: as we launch ourselves further into climate crisis absurdity becomes ever more clear. Humans pat ourselves on the back for our communication skills, our ability to use stories to progress the human race. This book talks about my traumatized past and the trauma of  the western United States: Native Americans. The successes of trees. How they communicate and shore up resources for a sick tree. Or they just say, “It’s your time to go.” Scapegoat trees. Trees are adapting to climate change due to their successful communication skills. So the new book tells stories about trauma and trees. It thinks about other ways we might be able to communicate that aren’t so direct. I guess I’m promoting my own writing style – always multiple stories, multiple perspectives. Maybe if we can tell multiple stories – like trees can hear fungus with their chemical responses – if we can be sensitive and multiplex in our way of understanding each other – we can create a paradigm shift that gets us to a different place.