Dear Governor Ducey: Alert. Shots fired. Alert.

Dear Governor Ducey,

Yesterday, I went to drop off some books I wrote at NAU’s president’s office so she could showcase NAU research, perhaps in a bid to stave off more budget cuts: “Alert. Alert. We’re doing work here,” she wants you to see.

On the door was a poster for NAU Alerts. You can sign up to get text-messages alerting you to immediate threats facing the NAU community. When I first started working at NAU, the alerts rang for the swine flu. NAU was all over that, installing Purell stations in the hallway, handing out surgical masks, inviting us to the health center for any symptoms. I signed up for the alerts then. I signed up for the vaccine administered by county health services. My daughter Zoe and I landed early inoculation list since she had asthma and I was pregnant. NAU was on top of it. The state was on top of it. The Swine Flu never got that bad but maybe the Purell helped. Zoe didn’t get pneumonia that year. For that, I am grateful.

But yesterday, as I noted the NAU Alerts and remembered the alert I got only 6 or so weeks ago about the shooting on NAU campus, I walked into the lobby of the administrative offices, where there are no security guards but where there is, for some reason, a flat screen TV hung from a wall. I watched that screen as two SWAT team vehicles pulled around a black Suburban, or, as the newscaster corrected herself, a black Expedition. I watched for a minute but not too long because I’ve seen TV before and big black SUVs and California highway SWAT teams. The news has been on forever and, if you listen to CNN too long, it’s hard to get the CNN anchor’s cadence out of your head. “The suspects who are suspected to be apprehended soon. We suspect we will learn more when the suspects are apprehended.” The word suspect takes so many grammatical positions. It’s hard to sleep at night when the word ‘suspect’ acrobats around in your brain.

My friend Julie lives in the mountains above San Bernardino. I texted her to say “Oh my god, are you all right,” because that’s what you ask even though you know your people are probably safe but you still want to check because you never really know. I got an early morning text before I received the NAU-shooting alert from my sister-in-law asking if I was all right. I was all right. I was in bed. She probably knew I was all right but you never know. If you are worried and you hear about people you love, you want to check it out, just like if you hear there’s a bad flu going around and you want to make sure that your friend didn’t get it, or, if they did, if they saw the doctor.

Julie texted me back, “Hi darling, thank you so much for checking in. We are all okay. I am shaken because the boys stayed home with low fevers today and I was supposed to go in for service stuff and I was going to bring the boys to campus, which is effectively on lock down (it's very close to the facility where the shooting occurred). I paused to see if a neighbor could check on them & then my chair called with instructions to stay home & not bring the boys. She did not mention the situation in her call but the news broke directly afterward. I put a good face on for the kids but I'm worried sick about all those folks stuck on campus. Also the "lock down" is not official in the sense that it's not being called that but there are police at all the entrances & the president has stated that people not leave campus as the freeways are not secured. But as you know it's an open campus that backs up on foothills & the suspects are still loose. Pretty badly shaken have referred so many to the planned parenthood right around the corner and am fielding some panicked calls from folks who feel stuck on campus. Thank you for your good thoughts Nicole. thank you for checking in. It's awful how much the townspeople are venting about middle eastern folks--I don't see confirmed anywhere on the news sights that the shooters have been reported as middle eastern; we have a strong Middle East program in world languages and we have many visibly Muslim students & faculty; I hope they are not the victims of prejudice and violence. Okay. Am pulling self together & going to play board games with the boys. Much love Xo xo xo Julie

See how the worrying expands?  I am worried about her, she is worried about her kids. She is worried about her students. She is worried about her family and Planned Parenthood, after the shooting in Colorado less than a week ago, and she is worried about her Muslim students and Muslim fellow-faculty after the hate-spike post the November 13 attacks in Paris. This slow terror spreads. You can track it like you track the spread of the flu. The idea that as I idle at a stoplight, the person next to me could not like my Obama bumper sticker. The idea that my friend, Kazim, is walking down the street right now has grown eyes in the back of his head. I’m dropping my kids off at school to who knows what terror. I’m going to school every day like I did during the Swine Flu outbreak. I’m checking my phone for alerts but Arizona is not providing inoculations for this terror.  The state is saying, you are on your own. The people, especially in this state, are as locked and loaded as a human-animal-hybrid flu. You have no natural resistance. Purell won’t get you anywhere.

The Swine Flu didn’t end up killing very many people. Not nearly as many people in that year as guns have in this. The swine flu killed 3,433. Guns killed 12,220 according to http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/. I don’t know if that includes the 14 people killed in San Bernardino yesterday or the 4 people killed in Savannah Georgia earlier that morning..

I remember how grateful I was to wait in line at the King Street Health Clinic to get my and Zoe’s flu shot. Relieved and grateful knowing that the community, the state, the feds, the WHO had come together to say this is scary. We got this. How possible it was to take this on. How once we recognized a health threat, we sounded the alarm.

Here’s your new and seemingly forever flu: 12,220 in 2015 alone. Alert. Alert.

Dear Governor Ducey: Lichen Lichen Lichen. Letter #64

I promise I will stop talking about the NonfictioNOW one day very soon. But not quite yet. The first night of the conference, Joni Tevis, read from an essay about rafting through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It’s a longish essay about science and magic and how there’s not a hillock available for privacy as Joni and her husband and their guide set up camp in the still-frigid June on the banks of the river in Alaska. Tevis tells us about how the raft got stuck on a rock and threatened to upend their boat and all their gear, and, in that cold of waters, maybe dunk them to death but that she and her husband and their guide used their paddles as winches and levers and cranes to pop themselves off the rock so they could float to their next near-freezing death experience. They ate from cans. They sang Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” They danced under the Northern Lights.

            Tevis came to a part of the essay and looked up at the audience and said, in her slight southern accent, “I’m going to skip this part.” She chanted “Lichen, lichen, lichen.” as she skipped through the pages. I was glad and sad. As the host, I am grateful to her for keeping the reading short. As a writer, I wanted to know the lichen details.

The next day, at Brian Doyle’s keynote speech at noon, he preached to the audience. He said, every day, you are a witness. You are the listener. If you listen to every detail, you will be a writer. On Friday, during Tim Flannery’s keynote speech, when asked how did he write about something so big as global climate change, he said, he starts with the science, with the observable, with the little details. In his book, the Weathermakers, Flannery writes about global warming. Yes, he says, there may be more rainfall in some places but even if there is more rainfall in more places, it won’t come at the right time or the right season. For example, when it rains instead of snows in Alaska, the rain freezes. Normally, reindeer feed on lichen underneath the snow but the reindeer cannot break through the frozen ice. Their snouts were made for burrowing through snow to reach the lichen. Now, that it rains instead of snows, they starve.

            Later at the conference, I was introducing my co-chair Robin Hemley who would introduce Ander Monson and Michael Martone. I had to fill some empty space as Ander and Robin played with the audio/visual equipment. As a notation for skipping through time, I recalled Joni Tevis’s reading and said, “Lichen, Lichen, Lichen.” But I misunderstood the point of Tevis’s lichen delay. Later, at a panel reading called “Unusual Foods and Edible Guests” Joni Tevis read the lichen part of her Alaska essay. She hadn’t been skipping over the details—she’d been waiting until she could better press them into service.  She read this about lichen,

“So I find myself looking down, at things small enough to focus on, and discover lichen in amazing profusion. While David and Carl read, I go a-hunting for powdered sunshine, rippled rockfrog, and fairy puke. There’s elegant orange lichen splattered across a stone but no frog pelt nor rock tripe, nor pixie cups, a club lichen that looks like minute goblets.”

Dear Governor: Rock frog and Fairy Puke! These are the tiny details we have been waiting for! This is the science. This is the magic and the life.

I get it. You can’t busy yourself with every tiny detail of your constituents’ lives or their jobs. There are too many of us and we are too multiplex and varied. But perhaps, for example, on the one day you visited Puente de Hozho elementary school, you could have let the students who worked hard to prepare for your visit tell you about the bones they learned the names of in Spanish or, if when you visited NAU, you could come into the classroom to see how my students came together to help put the conference together by filming the sessions, writing about the panels, registering guests, and spreading the word about it, and how, in that same classroom, they came back burbling for new ideas for their own essays and how to teach essays, or if you went one day to see how my students sit in the hallway waiting for engineering students to come by to work not only on the mechanics of their papers but on the argument and evidence of those papers—on the details—well, then maybe you would see that what we do is worth the big, abstract idea and would do anything in your power to make sure that those details continue to get done.  

Thank you, NFNOW15. Thank you, Governor Ducey--Letter #63

Dear Governor Ducey,

I mentioned a few months ago when I first started writing you letters that I was hosting the NonfictioNOW conference. This event is meant to bring together 400 writers from across the globe to discuss nonfiction. The panels included topics such as how to write about behemoth subjects (answer, use a form!), the science of cognition, how to talk about bad guys in your work, how to talk about eating bugs in a panel about edible guests, that asked the question is this the golden age of the essay,? panels that discussed poetry and the essay, fiction and the essay, how to turn crime into story, how to make your relatives come alive on the page and then how to deal with them when they find out you’ve made them come alive on the page. Keynote speakers and offsite events plus a game show night filled the program.

In anticipation of the event, my co-event coordinator, Stacy Murison, and I worked hard to make sure things ran smoothly. We raised funds. We organized a book fair. We corresponded with panelists and keynotes. We reserved hotel rooms and the conference center. With the help of our Australian friends, we published the schedule and the program. We ordered spanakopita. We copied maps of Flagstaff. We stuffed Tote bags. We coordinated volunteers to tape the 60 panels and the keynote speeches, to run the volunteer desk, to drive people to and from the airport. We couldn’t have done it without the volunteers.

There was one hard element: the budget. I never had enough money and couldn’t spend above the memo of understanding I made with my provost and dean. I’m not a marketer or an event coordinator, I am not a knower of how to make tote bags or where the closest UPS is or volunteer coordinator, a trade shower, an IT person, an AV person, a flier designer or a spreadsheet maker. But spreadsheet make I did because while some universities offer apparatus for conference hosting, apparently my university does not. Or at least, not to me. There are things I wished we could have done or done differently: hosted more dinners, sponsored scholarships, recorded every single panel session (although, again, the volunteers did so many and so many so well), promoted the event more broadly, supported the book fair participants more solidly, and found someone to make the spreadsheets and the name tags and the lunch lists without me. Someone to coordinate the lunches.

Still, I have to say, even though we had only little administrative support because we have little funding in our department or college for such things, I still have to say, I am grateful to you because you still fund the university, to some degree, which means the university was still able to help host the event. It was a great success. Over 500 people attended the conference. In the hallways, writers discussed how to better incorporate place into their nonfiction. No one was jockeying for position. No one was saying, “Oh, I’d love to chat but I have to go meet my agent for lunch.” People were grateful and glad to be here, in love with Flagstaff and full of joy. I had hoped there would be great collaboration and conversation.  I didn’t know there would be so much joy.

I’m feeling so grateful for all the participants who paid to come and each of the panelists who prepared mind-blowing talks and the book fair tablers who promoted their published writers and looked to publish new ones and to the dean for saying ‘yes’ to this event and the provost for saying ‘yes’ and for my colleagues who supported this event and helped stuff tote bags (thank you, Angie) and ran excellent readings and the Diagram book fair table (thank you, Lawrence and Andie), and spoke brilliantly about the lyric and the essay (thank you, Justin) and chaired and spoke at what I heard was one of the best panels (thank you, Jane) and came to the conference and the recorded so many sessions (thank you, Erin) and who came to town all the way from Oakland to attend the panels (thank you, Ann), and who helped host the first night’s reading (thank you, Allen) and who helped host our guests (thank you, Monica and Jeff) and who helped chair this event (thank you, David and Robin) and who helped make the program and the schedule and gave us guidance from the Melbourne iteration of the event (thank you, Ali) and who helped run the registration table (thank you, my amazing nonfiction students, undergrad and grad both) and to my support staff of one who did so much for this conference, from emailing panelists to gently suggesting panel chairs to send in their revised bios, from thinking about name tag holders to stuffing bags with me, from finding the AV people hiding at the conference center to reading her own work at an offsite reading, she was the instrumental part in making this conference a great one. 

 One thing that money can’t buy is generosity and while I think it would behoove you to support such work and attention and conversation and collaboration, today, I can only say, I am grateful that NAU exists so that this conference could come to Flagstaff and be the thing Jessica Handler said about the conference, “Nicole Walker &co, ‪#‎nfnow15 topped the conference charts. Thanks to you and so very many friends, colleagues, and fellow writers for making this the way a writers' conference should be. Plus the Grand Canyon.” From Sejal Shah, “Thank you, Nicole, for all you did to make NonfictioNOW 2015 an amazing, inspiring conference! What a gift to the whole CNF community. And from Lynn Kilpatrick, “Now that I am safely home, I can say, without a doubt, that‪#‎NonfictioNOW2015 was the BEST CONFERENCE EVER. I met so many new people, got to express my gratitude to people who have helped me, and got to hang out with some of my favorite writers who also happen to be my friends. I also learned that American Airlines is not my favorite. Many thanks to Nicole Walker for making it all happen.” And from Clint Peters, who asks, “What a wondrous experience at the NonfictioNow Conference in the ethereal city of Flagstaff! I'm bowled over by the event, by the many amazing people it drew. Big thanks to the Jedi Master Nicole Walker and our guru Robin Hemley and the everlasting Stacy Murison. Thank you so much Iowa friends for including me: Lucas Mann, Kristen Radtke, Amy Butcher, Joshua Wheeler, Kendra Greene, Will Jennings, Mieke Eerkens, Patricia Ann Foster, Inara Verzemnieks, Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, Ned Stuckey-French,John T. Price, Sarah Viren, Catina Bacote, Honor Moore. Thank you amazing, new friends: Erin Stalcup, Kirk Wisland, Joey Franklin, Alex Madison, Elena Carter, Annie Sand, Hannah Doyle, Steven Church, Elena Passarello,Simmons Buntin, and others I've shamefully forgotten. Also, an especially, mega-thanks to my co-panelists, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Angela Davies Pelster-Wiebe, Wendy Call, and Yelizaveta Renfro. We had a kick-ass panel, didn't we? How upon earth can NNow 2017 top this?”

I’m going to work on the NFNOW17 conference. It won’t be in the same capacity—much more brain-in, hands off, but in some ways, I will be sad not to host it again here. It was true collaboration between university and town, student and professor, writer and magazine, person and place and I will miss hand-typing every participants name because I can now call each of those 500 people a writer I know. 

Now I'm off to do laundry. And teach. 

After Umpqua--Letter #62

Dear Governor Ducey,

I’m not entirely sure what your stance on gun control and the NRA is, but, since you side with the rightiest right on public education (we should get rid of it) and private incarceration (we should do more of it), I assume you believe that the second amendment guarantees your individual right to have as many guns as you can get, no matter what you want to do with them. Although that reading of the Second Amendment is much disputed (and can be further disputed, get to work, we non-righty rights), that reading is how you wrap yourself up in your beliefs when another school shooting happens and say things like Jeb Bush said, “stuff happens.” Shrug your shoulders. Pet your gun.

In Mockingjay, the third film based on The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, the president of District 13 and the leader of the rebellion against the capital, notes that freedom comes with a price. We see citizens of other districts pay that price. Loggers, taken to their cutting trees by security forces start to run. The forces shoot at them.  Many die but many other climb into the treetops to escape the landmines that kill the capital’s security guards. In District 5, men and women carry explosives in large wooden boxes toward men guarding a hydroelectric dam. When the guards kill the men on the front lines and drop the box, the people behind pick up the box. They charge the guards, make it inside the doors. The people run out. The bombs go off. The dam breaks. The capital loses power. The revolution gains traction.

The Hunger Games is a distinctly American movie. Revolution is all to the good. It’s the Revolutionary War kind of revolution, not the Cultural Revolution or the Russian Revolution, where we remember the right-deprived, the starving, the dead. The Revolutionary War was the revolution that worked out, in our self-congratulating cultural memory, in the end, happy for everyone, even those who died battering down dams or standing up to the king’s redcoats.

Gun advocates wrap themselves in this belief: that freedom comes with a price. It doesn’t matter who pays it, even if it’s a six-year old in kindergarten, a six-year old at the wrong end of his brother’s playacting, a six-year old at the movie theater, a six-year old wondering what this dark, metal tunnel is that weighs so much in his hand. Six year olds like to push buttons and a trigger is just a more effective button.

When the dam breaks in Mockingjay, I tear up. YES! We must fight.

One of the subtle elements of Mockingjay is that everyone uses propaganda. Even the ‘good guys.’ Even the filmmaker. I am crying for a revolution that does not even exist. Set ‘freedom’ to music. 

But, I would like to ask the gun-must-havers, what revolution are you fighting? The revolutionary war was over long ago. The redcoats went back to England. A revolution requires two things: an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ We are a country. We are only an ‘us.’ The only ‘them’ is the six-year old that didn’t know he was a solider in a war that doesn’t exist.