Book Talk with Prescott Authors

Nicole Walker is the author of multiple books including her upcoming release How to Plant a Billion Trees: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and the Healing Power of Nature. She edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections Science of Story and Bending Genre and 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.

Laraine Herring is the author of A Constellation of Ghosts: a speculative memoir with ravens, a trilogy of writing books from Shambhala. She edited the essay collection Becoming Real: How Women Reclaim the Power of the Imagined through Speculative Nonfiction from Regal House. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and has been widely anthologized. She's a retired professor of creative writing and psychology, and is now focusing on the intersections of visual art and grief work.

A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and the Healing Power of Nature by Nicole Walker

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.

A Speculative Memoir with Ravens by Laraine Herring

A ghost is not what you think it is, says Raven. A ghost is a commitment. When Laraine Herring receives an unexpected colon cancer diagnosis, her father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a raven, setting off a magical journey into complicated grief, inherited trauma, and ancestral healing. As she struggles with redefining her expectations for her life, she slips further and further underground into the ancestral realm, where she finds herself writing a play directed by her father-as-raven. Raven says, It will be a cast of only four: you and me and my mother and my father, and we will speak until there are no more words between us. And then you can decide the ending. Tick, tock, write.

A Constellation of Ghosts takes the reader into the liminal spaces between one world and another, where choices unspool into lives, and the stories we’ve told ourselves fall apart under the scrutiny of multiple perspectives like flesh from bone, reminding us that grief is the unexpected ferryman who can usher all of us back together again.

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