David Carlin is a writer and creative artist based in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Abyssinian Contortionist (2015), and Our Father Who Wasn't There (2010), co-author of 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (2019), and the editor, with Francesca Rendle-Short, of an anthology of new Asian and Australian writing, The Near and the Far (2016). His award-winning work includes essays, plays, radio features, exhibitions, documentary, and short films; recent projects include the Circus Oz Living Archive and WrICE. He is a professor of creative writing at RMIT University where he co-directs the non/fictionLab. Nicole Walker is the author of Sustainability: A Love Story (2018), Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and This Noisy Egg (2010). She edited the essay collections Science of Story with Sean Prentiss and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction with Margot Singer. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and is a noted author in Best American Essays. She is a professor of English at Northern Arizona University, where she teaches creative writing.
"Hijinks on the page! What is a useful response to the current
crisis we now face on this planet--the mounting evidence of
anthropogenic climate change? Nicole Walker and David Carlin have
elected to do what thinking people do when faced with paralyzing
silence and numbness--to seek company and conversation. These short
essays, organized around the certain and established road of the
Latin alphabet, observe the anomalies, report the weirdness, and
respond to each other. They invent, theorize, rage, and celebrate.
Each tiny essay in The After-Normal offers a manageable bit of the
world that bursts with flavor like a delicately-constructed amuse
bouche. Enter this book and discover engagement, communion, and
solace." --Debra Marquart, author of The Horizontal World: Growing
Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere"In this winning collection of
essays cued to letters in the alphabet, writers Carlin and Walker
exchange personal reflections on the state of the planet today.
[...] Carlin and Walker's enjoyable literary exchange will charm
readers and leave them wondering which topic will pop up next."
--Publishers Weekly"David Carlin and Nicole Walker's short form
alphabetarium is a collection of love letters to each other and to
this world. It's an improvisatory survival guide in a perilous age,
and an ode to what comes next. Playful and keen-witted, open and
inventive, these essays invite us to imagine, not a new normal, but
an altogether necessary 'after-normal, ' in an atmosphere of grief
and wonder, of 'love and change.'" --Mary Cappello, author of Life
Breaks In: A Mood Almanack
"With the daunting, daring, delightful form of this collage (the
art form of this moment and the next moment), Nicole Walker and
David Carlin unhinge the jaw of juxtaposition voraciously with THE
AFTER-NORMAL to masticate and ruminate on the deliciously disparate
and desperate. I am partial to the D's (Dear David, Dear Nicole),
Delta, the estuary of change that these abecedarian essays mine, a
duet, Hermes and Mercury, coaxing the sacred stolen cattle to walk
backwards in their own anti-asemic script, changing the category of
dead animal parts (horn and shell and bone) into the category of
musical instruments (lute and harp and lyre). In this lyrical
conceit of aching anecdote and sympathetic semaphore, yes, the
quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, a quilted, qwerty
calibration of our constant collapse, our post-postal decomposed
compost of correspondences, these dry-eyed, duff-stratified, death
defying dead letters." --Michael Martone, author of The Moon Over
Wapakoneta
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