Nicole Walker
Writing the Hard Stuff
June 26, 2026
11 AM PDT | 12 PM MDT | 1 PM CDT | 2 PM EDT

As memoirists, we tackle the hard things, be they personally traumatic, conceptually difficult, or sticky political subjects. How do we write these things without re-traumatizing ourselves? As we dig into the subject so that we learn more about ourselves, we’re also learning how our story fit into the world.

Your story matters. How to make it matter to everyone else? You’ll need nodes. Entries. Points of connection. How are you going to invite your reader into a world that you’ve been living in so long? You know the shape of your brain. You know the salient details. You know the flashes of image and story. How can you convey your interiority with equal parts clarity and emotion? To gain distance and understanding, you may need to use the tools of dissociating from your subject through language, research, an extra-terrestrial point of view. And then, to make the emotional experience available, you’ll have to get down into the dirt. During our conversation, I’ll provide a prompt to explore how we might create distance and spur imagination. 

In this presentation, we’ll discuss how to dig deeply into issues and experiences using special craft techniques to make the writing experience bearable, maybe even joyful, and make that material more accessible to the reader.

We will discuss how:

• conducting research can help you write about the hard stuff.
• Using forms like the braided essay can hook your personal story into a larger narrative.
• Employing tools like distance, metaphor and speculative nonfiction can give you a break from writing some of the hard stuff, while adding texture and connective tissue to the work.

NICOLE WALKER is the author of several books including How to Plant a Billion Trees and Writing the Hard Stuff.  She has written pieces for The New York Times and is a noted author in several editions of Best American Essays. She edits Crux, the literary nonfiction series at UGA Press and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University where she serves as Writer-in-Residence for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society.

You can find her at:
facebook.com/nicole.walker.18041
@nikwalk.bsky.social
instagram.com/nikwalker28/
nikwalk.substack.com 
nikwalk.com