Ellen Walker

LITERARY ARTIST

I grew up, the eldest of four children, in Washington, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, California, on an island in British Columbia, and on four acres outside of Idaho Falls, Idaho. My father was an engineer and nuclear physicist whom we fondly referred to as the absent-minded professor. My mother read aloud to us every night, and I have loved books and reading for as long as I can remember, and horses almost that long. I came to Utah to go to college, met my husband here, and didn't want to leave. We came to Spring City because we wanted to live in a quiet rural area where we could have horses and a big garden. We raised two boys here, I taught (all the grades from third through junior college, mostly English and math), and my husband started his custom boot business. Currently I am teaching on-line for Utah's Electronic High School.

I began writing when I was ten or eleven. I have published poetry, articles and essays, and am looking for a publisher for my first young adult novel (a fantasy) and working on a second YA novel (contemporary realistic fiction). I still read widely - children's and young adult books, as well as adult fiction (though I have an abiding distrust of best-sellers), historical fiction, mysteries, fantasy, science fiction and non-fiction, especially topics related to sciences, horses, nature and medicine. Some of my favorite authors are Robin McKinley, Barbara Kingsolver (well, OK, some bestsellers are good!), Annie Dillard, Cynthia Voigt, Chris Crutcher, Patricia McKillip, John McPhee, Tolkien, Barbara Hambly, and Orson Scott Card.

Ellen and Her Horse Sophie
Portrait by Spring City Artist Lee Udall Bennion

I also dabble in the fabric arts (marbling, hand-dying and quilting), play the guitar, garden, trail ride, train dressage horses, volunteer as a 4-H horsemanship instructor, square dance, bake, and only under extreme duress do house work.

Ellen Nicholson Walker
Teacher, Utah's Electronic High School
Editor, HHAA newsletter

"Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly." - Arnold Edinborough

"Every game ever invented by mankind is a way of making things hard for the fun of it." - John Ciardi

Website: www.walkercustomboots.com
Email: [email protected]

Samples of Ellen's Writings / Poems

 My collection of poetry, Moving Water, is now available on Amazon as either a paperback or Kindle book.Moving Water: Collected Poems      Moving Water: Collected PoemsAmazon.com: Moving Water: Collected Poems (9781508678151): Ellen Nicholson Walker: Books
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After Surgery, January 94
In rose catalogs, hardy
Means the plant is likely to survive the winter
In a gentler climate
Than mine;
In those places roses need pruning
In summer to cut out diseased
Wood and in winter to remove excess growth
So next season’s flowers will be bigger,
Or long-stemmed like these
Half-dozen sent to me the day
I came home,
Classic buds, six different colors
(only the yellow one fragrant).  None
Could have grown here in my garden where
Winter prunes the roses
Or kills them, and in spring I kneel
Next each plant, searching
For branches spared, still inhabited
By some green waking spirit, and I cut away
Only what is proven dead.

I had a tooth pulled when I was six.
As the nurse clamped the ether mask over my face,
She said it would smell like roses.
Someone laughed, in that time long past, when
I woke and asked when the tooth would come out.
Still now at forty, what I dreaded most was
That measureless dark.
The night before, I lay
Awake to savor the way the minutes
Pass one after the other, whole and holy
On the breath of God.

Naked and shivering under the thin gown,
I was wheeled into surgery.
When I asked, the doctor told me
People under anesthesia don’t shiver.
The night after,
After that time of neither time
Nor light
Again I feel no wish to sleep, only
To lie in the partial darkness
Rocking in the river of time
Washed in oxygen and nitrogen
And listen to the minutes pattering by just perceptibly;
In the refrigerator, six buds open slowly.
I wonder if the rose bushes, naked
But not shivering under their skiff of snow, know
Even now the world is tilting back toward spring
While my body remembers
To breathe
And remembers to breathe
And remembers again to breathe.

~ Ellen Nicholson Walker

Kyuquot Sound

At Farewell Bend the road begins to climb
Through sage-clad hills above the windy Snake
Where ponderosas crown the round-topped Blues.
We’ve driven that same road each time we take
The trip away from roads to rocky shores
To where the massive cedars, yew and fir,

Salal about their feet, grow at the road’s end.
For five remembered summers as a child
We lived between the forest and the tide,
We dug for clams and fished and picked the wild
Red huckleberries from the mossy log.
But now above Kyuquot Sound the hills 

Are stripped of logs from highest ridge to beach.
Among the massive stumps the seedlings fill
Not nurseries, but an orphanage so vast
It stretches from the tropics to the poles.
The salmon and the whale spirits turn their backs,
And mountain lions turn, at bay, to kill.

            ~ Ellen Nicholson Walker

(Wordsworth had daffodils)

My neighbor sprays
her dandelions every spring.
I’m sure she casts
an exasperated eye my way
(upwind)
each June when the yellow blooms
dot my lawn,
turn to fairy fluff
and take wing.
I remember walking to high school
through Newman’s cow pasture in late spring
when anything
is possible, and the long green field
glowed with golden dandelions and yellow
breasted meadowlarks singing
from the weathered fenceposts.

~ Ellen Nicholson Walker