Chat with Nichole
To add to the world eco-fiction spotlight, I’m so happy to kickstart my focus on words and art from Appalachia this year with Nichole Amber Moss, who I met in the Rewilding our Stories Discord a few years back. I also subscribe to Nichole’s newsletter, Entangled Worlds, and am continually moved by their words and memories. Appalachia has a special place in my heart, and the older I get, the more I seek it. I’m going to jump right in to the conversation between Nichole and me because it’s so in-depth, informative, and beautiful.
Mary: Tell me something, anything about Appalachia. Take me home.
Nichole: Let me tell you about a place. This place is one of the most biologically diverse regions on the entire continent. Among its hills lies old growth rainforests with rare creatures, indescribable vistas, and hidden wonders. In its southern reaches lie cloud forests, so high in elevation they preserve boreal habitats from the last Ice Age. Older than the Atlantic Ocean, these hills hide the fossils of creatures that existed before vertebrae evolved. Over the centuries of human colonization of this place, Indigenous people, Black people, and poor settlers were removed from the land in order to create enclosures. Disenfranchised communities were polluted for the benefit of corrupt local officials and external actors, and an entire country economically benefited off the poisoned people and land here. This resulted in the multi-racial working class strikes that kicked off the modern labor and environmental movement in this country, a movement that still continues to this day.
This place is Appalachia. I know most people would not initially guess that, because the stereotypes of this region are so hard-wired in the American psyche. Trust me, I know. I get these stereotypes thrown at me every time I say where I am from. That’s what I’m trying to change. I want to tell new stories of the Appalachia that I know, stories of fierce beauty and even fiercer land protectors. And with a new story, maybe love will come.
You know, when I was 10 or 11, I became fiercely interested in the endangered amphibians of the Amazon rainforest. I think it was after a presentation by an outside group in the fifth grade (I can’t remember their name, but they had a paper catalogue of rainforest-themed merchandise). I then conducted research projects on tropical amphibian conservation. I raised money for the Rainforest Alliance. And yet, not once in all my time in public schools in Appalachia did I learn about the temperate rainforests of southern Appalachia, the site with the highest biodiversity of salamanders in the world. The stories we choose to tell and the way we tell them shape our reality. If we spoke of Appalachia like the way I first described it above—rare, precious, and fiercely loved—what could its future then be?
Mary: I’m glad you’re breaking down stereotypes; that is needed. Can you talk about growing up there?
Nichole: I’m from a long line of women with generational and personal trauma. My nana was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and came from a long line of Scottish immigrant communities in the Appalachian foothills of the Carolinas. My mom was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, but lived all over the country and world because her father worked as an engineer in the U.S. Airforce. My mom and Nana brought my sister and me to Appalachia when I was three-and-a-half. It was a haven for my family. It protected us, but I failed to return that gift until recently. I failed to see for so long that the land and I shared a history of trauma.
Appalachia is what is known as a sacrifice zone, an area where the external costs of the capitalist system are exported in order for economic prosperity to occur for a few. Capitalism requires the extraction of resources and the disposal of pollution in order to extract value. This burden falls hardest on communities of color, immigrant communities, and communities impacted by homophobia, ableism, and poverty. And the continued exploitation and poisoning of people, land, and wildlife is supported by narratives of disposability. You can only sacrifice a place if the beings living there are inherently disposable. At the out-of-state public ivy where I was a scholarship student, I was told that I ate roadkill, I was inbred, and that I couldn’t read. This university is famous as a place where the powerful career civil servants from the federal government send their children. The most powerful systems in the United States can only exist when value is extracted from sacrifice zones for their benefit. The dehumanizing language and stereotypes serve that continuing exploitation.
But it took me a while to realize what the system was actually doing. For so many years I warred within myself between this negative association that everyone ascribed to me and the deep love for a place that brought me to tears every time the storm clouds got stuck like cotton candy on the ridge. I always reasoned, “Well, my family isn’t even from here. Not really.” Yet, if that was true, where was I from, exactly? I was trying to dispose of Appalachia the same way everyone else was. At the same time that I was uncovering the exploitative history of Appalachia, I was sorting through my own traumatic history. And I began to realize how intertwined societal oppression is with environmental pollution and trauma-based mental and physical illnesses. My DNA and the functioning of my cells has been permanently altered by environmental injustice. If my body has been shaped by the land’s trauma, then can you really separate me and the land? And so, I knew then that my healing and the land’s healing had to go hand-in-hand. One without the other is not possible, and that’s when I allowed myself to love the land like it deserved for so carefully keeping me and my family safe.
Mary: We’ve talked about our childhoods some; what magical outdoor experiences led to your love for nature and your path toward activism?
Nichole: I think what is so unique about my early childhood experiences in nature is that they weren’t in so-called pristine places, though I would argue those don’t really exist nor is that really unique. But you know, most privileged people I work with today in elite scientific institutions have some story about their childhood like, the first time camping in Yosemite or sailing on the Atlantic for the first time. I have some of those, though much later, like traveling to Yosemite when I was 16 for my sister’s high school graduation trip and seeing a massive swarm of yellow butterflies emerge (and I still haven’t found a study about which species this is). But my very earliest experiences are quite different then these grand scenes. I grew up in a rural-suburban neighborhood within sight of the last ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The tree my sister and cousins and I played under was an old apple tree left over from an orchard tended by German POWs from one of the world wars. Before that, it was the site of a Civil War battle; we found bullets in the ground while we played. And my grandmother’s favorite spot to take us to swim on summer days was the beach of the nearby river, polluted from sewage, industry, and agriculture far upstream. To get to the swimming spot, we climbed over the tumbled stone ruins of 19th-century factories. And my very first wildlife photography shoots were with the family’s film camera on the Bradford Pear outside our window, capturing its changes throughout the seasons. I laugh now because I know how invasive this tree is, but I loved it nonetheless. I still love it. I can trace my career in science and environmental communications directly back to my mother putting the family camera in my hands to take photos of that invasive tree. So, as I hope you can see, my earliest experiences with nature were always with landscapes and creatures impacted by scarcity and human activities, often very violent ones. And I realized in only the last few years how much these early experiences shaped my environmental activism. Appalachian poet Wendell Berry said it best: “There are no unsacred places; only sacred places and desecrated places.” Appalachia is considered a sacrifice zone, and yet the land and waters are still beloved by its people. What can the rest of the country learn from this? Everything. And that everything is worth saving.
Mary: This is so true. My mamaw and pappaw lived in a fairly beautiful place, at least to me as a child, but they had what we called a “sewer creek” out front. It wasn’t until we climbed the mountain ranges behind their holler that we noticed the isolation, echoes, yet also profound silence back there—the icicles and pines. And “back there” was also close to mountain removal of coal. Aside from neat experiences and your love for nature, early on you also grew up near a polluted river. Can you talk about that?
Nichole: This is a sideways way of answering your question, but here we go. Growing up in Appalachia, pollution and exploitation are ever-present but invisible. We knew the water tasted weird at school. We drove by the ruins of shuttered factories. My whole sixth grade class got mysterious illnesses. But, it was background noise. Ambience. If the frog has only ever known a boiling pot, does it really know it’s in danger? Besides, there’s an insistent culture in Appalachia that someone always has it worse off than you, and you can’t do anything about it anyway, so why fight? Then, during the pandemic, I grappled with a serious non-COVID illness and, at the same time, was finally able to afford what I call “rich people doctors” in the wealthy county across state lines. This was after years of doctors gaslit me about what was clearly a multi-layered auto-immune disorder in addition to a clear family history and genetic predisposition to it. My new doctors traced back my current Lyme-Disease-level inflammation to a re-activation of my mysterious year-long illness in sixth grade. An illness my family uncovered only years later, in a roundabout way, to be toxic black mold poisoning from my elementary school. Even with this knowledge, it was only after years of working at a well-funded climate research center that I was alerted to data like the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool from the Justice40 Initiative, a program from the Biden Administration to identify and invest in communities burdened by environmental injustice, especially communities of color who have been unduly burdened by pollution (the official tool is down, but it has been saved by plucky citizens on private websites). Once I accessed that data, I was actually able to connect the dots between my lived experiences and the abstract academic conversations around environmental justice that I had been participating in for years. I finally was able to make the connection between my family’s constant health issues and the routine letters about sewage-tainted drinking water. My auto-immune disorders with an under-resourced public school system quietly cleaning up a black mold infestation. The local pollution and poverty levels with the crumbling healthcare and other social welfare systems. I was relieved to have this full understanding of my experience, but I was also full of rage that this data was not easily accessible to my community. I became infuriated that I had to access a place of great privilege after wading through immense socio-economic obstacles in order to have this self-knowledge, knowledge I knew that I was still incredibly privileged to have. And I began to feel that the system was not actually designed for the victims of environmental injustice to hold such self-knowledge. I felt as if I was an anomaly. In Appalachia, we are meant to be the subjects, never the authors, of our stories, our fates. If we were the authors, what marbled columns of power would fall?
Mary: Reading other books gave you some ideas about poisoned land leading to poisoned bodies. Can you discuss those books and what you learned from them?
Nichole: During the pandemic, I rarely left my mother’s house and garden, where I was staying after getting laid off. And with all my auto-immune issues, I was deathly afraid of contracting COVID. So, for years, I spent my days walking around the village full of 18th-century buildings and reading a lot. Two books I read during this time were Braiding Sweetgrass by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer and The Mushroom at the End of the World by Dr. Anna Tsing. The first is a narrative about returning to a reciprocal relationship to the rest of nature and the second is a narrative of more-than-human relationships on the fringes of capitalism. Their amazing scholarship, along with a concurrent exploration of my traumatic and medical history, helped me piece together the oppressive systems that had ruled my life growing up in a sacrifice zone. They helped me make sense of my stubborn love for a land where the decaying ruins of factories tumbled down valleys full of rare spring ephemerals. And they are the ones who showed me the way out of the system that was disposing of it.
Mary: Though we cannot untangle land, water, and air pollution, we can begin to heal. How did you do this?
Nichole: My time away from group nature experiences during the pandemic made me hungry to dive back into Appalachian ecology courses, but I was determined now not to replicate all my previous ecological education that failed to interrogate the issues that plagued western naturalism and that trivialized the sheer joy I felt when interacting with wild creatures. So in the next county or two over, I found a foraging course at a nature center and farm that was rooted in non-appropriative, reciprocity-based land ethics. Week by week, we learned about local plants like spicebush and bloodroot by literally interacting with them. We pruned the spicebush tree so that it could more easily reach the light and then took the pruned twigs home to make a nourishing tea. We moved bloodroot getting buried by road gravel into a habitat it liked near a stream (and they grew the next year! I checked!). We studied the phenology of our region and learned about how the plants and animals changed over the seasons. Every class was dedicated to gradually reweaving our lives into the lives of the creatures around us—carefully, devotionally, and reciprocally. And our teacher, Lacey Walker, was passionate about each student bringing land-based cultural practices from their own ancestry into the class.
This is how we heal the land and ourselves. By forming a kind and empathetic relationship with it. If you are waiting to harvest spicebush for tea, will you really use pesticides in your garden? If you are paying close attention to bloodroot, will you let your local government expand the road near where they grow? This practice also helps us re-focus our attention repeatedly on the abundance around us. When you have a trauma background, repeatedly re-focusing on abundance is a way to rewire the brain’s tendencies away from a hyper-vigilance of threats and toward expansiveness, changing your choices from fear to joy. In a time of rampant ecocide, we must choose to bear witness to the beauty too.
And all of this is only possible with deep community connections and the rematriation of land to Indigenous people. We must become radically dependent on both our human and more-than-human communities, for we always were. We must work to rightfully return the land to the people who carefully tended it for millennia. And, over many lifetimes of this work, we can begin to heal.
Mary: Your young and continuing education about ecosystems and climate change led you to your current work. What do you do, and can you give us some insight on how we fit into the natural world?
Nichole: I consider my work primarily as a writer and as a community environmental activist. But for health insurance (which is tied to employment in the United States), I work as a creative director at a climate research center crafting engaging ways for audiences to learn about natural climate solutions, which is a technocratic way of saying we need to protect and restore critical ecosystems in order to safeguard their carbon cycling.
We have some amazing programs and research where I work, but, unfortunately, there’s an intense pressure in climate work toward technocratic solutionism led by the Global North. At its core, climate change is a symptom of the multi-crises caused by colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. These systems perpetuate exploitation and oppression by separating humans from the natural world around us. You can’t extract value from, and export pollution to, nature if it is made up of your friends and kin. So an extractive system requires a non-reciprocal relationship to nature. The actual solution to this multi-system collapse is a changed relationship to more-than-human nature. But too often the climate solutions that gain the most attention and funding are not actually saving people and places. They are designed to save capitalism. So-called climate solutions kick Indigenous people and other people that depend on the land out of ecologically rich areas to “protect” them for carbon credits that enable corporations and countries to continue to pollute elsewhere. And this solutionism gives something like a tropical rainforest in Brazil more worth in the capitalist system while a rare wetland in Appalachia that may be near a brownfield site (but is otherwise perfectly intact) is made disposable. But each of these places is sacred. Each of these places are entangled with the people who live there. Each of these places are essential to support the life and health of local peoples and wildlife. How we assign worth is arbitrary based on a capitalist ideology. A technocratic system regularly disposes of people and places that are worthy in both a moral and ecological sense. Everything is worth saving.
So my frustration with climate work often fuels my real work writing and community organizing in Appalachia, where my lived experience becomes a valuable tool in communicating about and creating community-based solutions to climate change and ecological health. My local community is currently fighting to save a rare marl wetland and a community’s drinking water. We have about two dozen people working secondary, unpaid jobs. to shut down an industrial project that plans to extract a community’s water, ship it out for profit, and leave a wasteland behind. The reason we are so far successful in this fight is because the community has deep emotional ties to the wetland and the waterways. The farmers have already invested their own money in restoring the wetland. There’s a centuries-old ghost story about a karst spring in the wetland. So the community’s existing relationship to the wetland and their stories about that relationship are helping us overcome any need to scientifically explain to community advocates why a wetland is important to ecological health and functioning or how a wetland is a carbon sink. That information, which has been intuitively observed over time, has already been coded into story and translated into a deep emotional connection. If a community already has deep relationships to their local ecology, there is no need to create technocratic categorization of landscapes for some corporation or country to parcel out funding for its protection. If a community has lost or forgotten that relationship, this is where storytellers come in. Storytellers – whether they are writing activist songs or restoring place-based myths or imagining hopeful futures—can help communities reweave themselves into the more-than-human nature around them. Storytelling doesn’t just happen after the work of community-organizing. Storytelling is the work.
And I need people outside Appalachia to realize how privileged my community is in actually being able to fight—and possibly win. We can actually devote the time. We don’t have to worry about losing our income while fighting. Our local officials are actually listening to us. We have the luxury of knowing how—or learning how—to navigate complex bureaucratic systems. This is rarely the case for communities of color or impoverished communities in Appalachia.
Mary: Your avenue for expression is, at least partially, creative writing. Your newsletter is engaging and beautiful. It brings me “home” to Appalachia and that’s kind of how I found you, though originally it was from the Rewilding our Stories Discord. How can people find you online, and what is it about writing that enables your work?
Nichole: Yes, what a lovely place Rewilding became during the pandemic. What a refuge. Folks can find me at entangled-worlds.ghost.io. I’m on BlueSky at @queermtnhobbit.bsky.social and Instagram at @queermountainhobbit (though I may leave Instagram soon).
I’ll tell you the story about how my newsletter came to be, because it’s an important part of my writing journey and I feel like it’s important for folks who feel they aren’t writers or don’t have enough time to write to hear this. Before the pandemic started, I was commuting three hours a day. My free time seemed to be overtaken by recovering from and preparing for work, so my dream of becoming a writer and novelist felt so far out of reach. Then I read something from an author on Twitter at a stoplight during my commute, how every single one of her books started with 20 minutes of writing a day. Suddenly the inaccessible became much more tangible. So I began to do this, mostly about the sights and smells through my open window and all my twisted emotions while lying there exhausted (in hindsight my auto-immune flare up started here). Then the pandemic came, I was laid off, and I began to walk the old village with my dogs and sit in my mother’s overgrown garden. And I challenged myself to find one new angle or one new thing every day to take a photo of or write about for 20 minutes. It became a practice of freewriting without any judgement of what came out. That practice naturally turned into poetry. Then into longer pieces of poetic prose. I presented some of this writing as a final project for the foraging class I mentioned above, and people kept asking me where they could read more. I had always wanted to write a blog about my nature and conservation experiences or even about eco-fiction worldbuilding, so I set out to create a place to publish some of the outputs from this creativity practice. What surprised me was that when I set up my blog Entangled Worlds, the loose poetic prose very quickly turned into strong environmental justice essays. With the way my entangled trauma, neuroqueerness, and disability have shaped the way I process information, I was finding a more formal writing practice to be a way to explore my lived experiences in ways my memory didn’t naturally do without a little nudge. I call this practice—what evolved from freewriting to poetry to poetic prose to essays—my radical attention practice. My Writing the Wild course teacher, Rowen White, called a practice very similar to it “reverent curiosity,” but it was based in her Akwesasne cultural practices, though she very generously shared them with everyone. Through practices like radical attention, reverent curiosity, or a sit-spot practice, we can re-focus the brain again and again on abundance within scarcity, on beauty in desecration, and begin to re-weave our storytelling back into the poisoned land and realize it was us the entire time, there is no difference. My practice of radical attention directly feeds into my practice of radical imagination (aka fiction writing). Both the minute physical details and abstract concepts in my poetry and poetic prose directly shows up in my fiction. I’m transmuting my experience into story which influences my actions, and, hopefully, shaping the world into one that is more just and more focused on reciprocity with nature. Stories shape our reality, and, if I practice that belief, I make it true. I am teaching myself to dream along with nature.
Mary: You’re also working on a speculative novel. Regardless of how much you can talk about that right now, it seems that fiction is one path for us to travel for finding and healing ourselves, along with reasons to heal our planet. Do you want to talk about novels you read that impacted you as well as the book you’re writing?
Nichole: Actually, films had the earliest and greatest impact on me, and I think I’m a very visual writer due in large part to that. I watched My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki constantly since I was four years old, so much that I memorized the English dub (The Fox Version. If you know, you know.). The film focuses on two young sisters and their magical experiences with a forest spirit. I was also obsessed with Greek myths growing up. My D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths is ragged from use. I especially loved the stories of nymphs like the dryad Daphne, before I realized what her chase by Apollo was actually depicting. There was also a television adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey on the Sci-Fi Channel that I adored. And then when I was 12 or 13, I first watched both Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki’s great semi-historical fantasy epic, and The Fellowship of the Ring, which I saw in theaters at the midnight release, I might add. Someone told me once that the stories you experience at age 12 have a profound impact on your psyche, and that was definitely true for these two films. Such mythic and beautiful stories. After that, I binged all the Tolkien books I could get my hands on, but I loved The Silmarillion most of all. I couldn’t get enough of the mythic storytelling, poetic language, and the minute descriptions of the flora and fauna of a secondary world. Unlike The Lord of the Rings books, The Silmarillion actually features badass heroines, so I was captivated by that as well.
In my early 20s, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” which completely changed what I thought stories could do. It made me feel like I could write stories that I wanted to write and not have to write like the rich white men that crowded my undergraduate English Literature syllabi. But it took me a while longer to expand on that feeling. In the last five or so years, I actually had enough money from my day job to buy any book I wanted. I kind of gave myself that gift when I finally had a small surplus in my income. And that was transformative for my writing, to be able to read any book I found online or suggested on social media, not just the books available at thrift stores or libraries or the local book stores. So about five years ago I began binging N.K. Jemisin, Octavia Butler, and Ursula K. Le Guin, though I’m still working my way through the latter. Not only was the craft on a level I hadn’t really experienced before (they are all superb), but I felt for the first time like I was reading stories that would shape the world I had always wanted to live in. They showed me that escapism in science fiction and fantasy could have a tangible mission: to escape from an unjust world for a time is to begin to build a just one. During this time I also discovered Circe by Madeline Miller. When I was finished with it, I immediately started reading it again. It is a first-person narrative of a powerful witch in the Odyssey. It was superb, but it also left me hungry. So many of these stories are about women trapped in circumstances or systems beyond their control. Circe is literally stuck on an island for most of the book, which is straight from Homer. But I had always wanted to read and see women, non-binary, and queer characters go on adventures, characters like me. Ever since I saw Arwen gallop across the screen to escape Ringwraiths in the film version of Fellowship, I have hungered for more.
That’s a very long way of introducing my work-in-progress! I’m writing an adventure fantasy novel that is a mix of Princess Mononoke and Circe in a secondary world inspired by queer ecology, ecofeminism, and Appalachian environmental justice movements. It’s mythic. It’s poetic. It is full of shapeshifting magic and strange creatures. The imagined world is shimmering with animacy. And, most of all, it’s a story where women, non-binary, and queer people go on an adventure to save the world in the only way you can actually save it: together.
Mary: It’s so weird that we (and it seems a lot of others I know, women especially), share similar beloved earlier stories. I’m currently rewatching some Miyazaki films and have been similarly moved by Tolkien (also watched the midnight showing of the LoTR premiere!) and am fond of Greek myths, like Circe and the sirens—in fact have written weird fiction about those myths but set in a modern world. I have similar interests in Butler, Jemisin, and Le Guin. What subjects are you writing about specifically?
Nichole: Whether it’s my blog or my poetry or my novel, I’m writing about the creative ways humans and the more-than-human are forming communities in the margins of oppressive systems. So things like myco-remediation of a human-made stream. Community organizing for a wetland near a polluted industrial site. Wildflower identification on a nineteenth-century industrial site. Right this very moment, multi-species communities are surviving (dare I say, thriving?) in sacrifice zones. What can we learn from them about the just world we are striving for? These communities are the wildflowers in the cracked asphalt. How do we ensure it becomes a meadow? By writing stories and essays that focus on healing, branching, growing, decomposition, cooperation, caregiving, cleaning, tending to decay, growing, crafting, rest, and intuition—all the things that capitalism pushes to the margins.
At the core of all my work, I’m trying to show that stories can shape reality. The stories we choose to tell, how we tell them, and who tells them. All of this shapes the world we’re building. Dr. Kimmerer outlines it beautifully in her essay “The Language of Animacy,” so please check that out in Braiding Sweetgrass. If our stories treat the environment as merely a backdrop to the adventures of humans, then that is how we will treat our more-than-human kin. But if the environment is animate and sentient, full of entangled wanderings that we cannot possibly imagine with our limited human senses, then we will begin to treat this world with the awe it deserves for being a rare, wriggling jewel in the void of space.
And all of this is a very fancy, academic way of saying that I love waxing poetic about all the creatures I find along my journeys in a scarcity-shaped landscape. How can you see Hemaris thysbe (a hummingbird moth) and not want to write a poem? I actually find it very easy to write when I’m co-authoring with nature. But in an extractive system that continually tells us to separate ourselves from nature and dispose of it, isn’t that poem a revolution?
Mary: I love that, and it’s so true. Your newsletters are refreshing to read. Is there anything else you would like to mention?
Nichole: After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, television and newspaper journalists flocked to my county, because it sits within Appalachia but is also within driving distance of DC newsrooms. One of the news reports I saw talked folks in a run-down diner about why they voted for Tr*mp. Seven miles away, progressive environmental activists were protesting a toxic insulation factory in a town with pride flags in every downtown store. The stories we choose to tell shape our reality. Yes, of course we need to have serious discussions about white supremacy in Appalachia, but those journalists in the diner were not doing that. They were clumsily reinforcing a monolithic image of Appalachia thereby replicating meta-narratives of disposability that directly harm people fighting for different systems within the entire region. That is what I’m trying to support in all my writing, both fiction and non-fiction: the stories of the Appalachians fighting for a better world and the ecology growing in the cracks of exploitation. Stories of public school teachers striking for better pay, poets speaking out against systemic racism, and socialists handing out free food and coats. Stories of Indigenous women leading a fight against a natural gas pipeline, labor and delivery nurses fighting for drinking water, and farmers fighting for wetlands. Stories of spring ephemerals growing on former factory sites and rare wetlands coming back to life after years of abuse. These are the stories I encounter every single day. This is the Appalachia I know. This is what the story of Appalachia can be.
Mary: I agree wholeheartedly. Appalachia is a place of resilience and community as well. Thanks for sharing your story!
About Nichole
Nichole Amber Moss (she/they) is a writer and poet of speculative ecologies. By day, they work as the Creative Director at a climate research organization. By night, they write stories inspired by queer ecology, ecofeminism, and Appalachian environmental justice. Nichole lives in Appalachia (Manahoac, Massawomeck, and Shawnee lands) with her rescue dog, Brodie Baggins. You can find her on Ghost.io and BlueSky.
