Amidst projects, Spring 2023 registrations, and the post-quarantine chaos of readjusting to life ‘in person,’ I would first like to offer everyone a belated welcome to campus. For many, moving from the virtual classroom to the physical space of academia has felt like coming out of hibernation. As November takes us into winter, we find ourselves in the new-old-normal of checking the weather to know if we should bring a jacket along with our mask. It has been a busy semester, equal parts excitement and nerves, but it is not over yet. And so, to everyone reading this, welcome (or welcome back) to URI and to our graduate student blog.
On September 30th, URI was honored to have author and poet Nicole Walker read aloud from her poetry collection, This Noisy Egg, and her book, Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster. Walker has received particular attention — entirely supportive, she enthused during Q&A, with no small measure of surprise — for her recent essay published in The New York Times, “My Abortion at 11 Wasn’t a Choice. It Was My Life.” Walker begins the article by explaining that, without access to abortion, she would not have the wonderful daughter she does today. The essay adds a unique perspective that addresses issues often overlooked during debates over reproductive rights. Walker also confronts motherhood — its anxieties, its love, its messiness — in much of her poetry and essays. “Move Out,” an essay Walker read aloud at the Alumni Center, heart-stoppingly narrates the experience of having to take her then-infant daughter to the hospital after respiratory trauma.
A skilled writer and a delightful speaker, Walker answered all our questions with sincere enthusiasm and an authenticity that immediately gave the room of various students and professors a sense of camaraderie. If you missed Nicole Walker’s presentation, please make sure to check out her website, nikwalk.com, to keep up-to-date on her writings and tour dates.
Cherie Rowe, an English instructor and PhD student at URI, had the honor of introducing Nicole Walker to the audience gathered in the late morning of early fall. Before passing on the podium, Rowe gave a poignant review of Walker’s work that calls on us as readers to be open and adapt:
“Junction,” a poem from This Noisy Egg, offers, “Something you would call a parallactic vision.” The OED defines ‘parallactic motion’ as “the change in the apparent position of a celestial object resulting from a change in the observer’s position.” Visioning Walker’s writing as such a celestial object, from positions of student and teacher, we experience her writing as delicately painful, offering both surreal and familiar ways to experience the visceral politics of the body. Experiencing her writing, we are mutually severed from the familiar and comforted by the expectations she has of us as ambitious readers. We rise to her challenge and re-experience what we have become accustomed to.
As we continue forward with our first semester fully back on campus — its expectations and ambitions, its surrealism and its familiarity — I wish us luck in always rising to the challenge.
Aries Cubilla is the editor of Essential Context. A Graduate Teaching Assistant and M.A. student at the University of Rhode Island, Aries devotes her days to instructing undergraduates in English and her evenings to the exploration of feminism, metafiction, and language in contemporary fiction.