The After-Normal

Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet

by David Carlin and Nicole Walker

“A” is for Australia and “A” is for Arizona, over 9,000 miles apart but sharing the same Earth. In this eccentric, intimate compendium of short environmental and personal essays, David Carlin (in Melbourne) and Nicole Walker (in Flagstaff) engage in a long-distance dialogue between two writers, creating an improvisational subversion of the encyclopedia, a witty-yet-serious send-up of the concept of a survival guide. In this era of interconnected ecological, political, and human rights catastrophes, these two whimsical, elegiac, and intellectually questing voices contemplate the role of the individual in the midst of increasingly inescapable collective action crises that call the very concept of survival into question. Refusing equally to find solace in false hopes and to give in to murky despair, Carlin and Walker deftly use the flash nonfiction form to wonder and worry their way through the alphabet in search of a path forward. With meditations on topics ranging from bitumen to plasmodia, elephants to xeric, The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet collects an A to Z of people, places, and phenomena to marvel at, to kick against, to let go, and to fight for.

Published by Rose Metal Press

“Hijinks on the page! […] 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. […] 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

“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. [...] 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

“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