Life & Work with Nicole Winters

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicole Winters.  

Hi Nicole, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
I’ve always been passionate about writing and creating art – though I never really anticipated that being what I actually did for a living. I knew I would always have the practice of both forms of creative expression because they have been an integral part of my being for as long as I can remember, but I never expected to have the opportunity to build careers from them. I was very fortunate in that my parents have always unconditionally supported me chasing my passions – they didn’t blink an eye when I declared a double major in Creative Writing and Studio Art. But even as I grew as both a writer and an artist throughout school, it was a while before I truly felt confident enough to pursue either seriously. 

The first Creative Writing course I ever took was in college, and it was pretty life-altering. I had already been very into fiction, but I fully fell in love with poetry in that class. I love the process of learning all the rules and then breaking them, of looking at and implementing language in new and captivating ways to essentially create an experience for the reader. And I love the ways in which it allows you to filter your own life experience in a way that it becomes almost universally relatable depending on the lens the reader brings to the page. When it came to decide on a concentration though, I still couldn’t choose between poetry and fiction, so I pursued both, ending my undergraduate career with short chapbooks and novella drafts. That chapbook was the beginning of my debut collection, brackish, which is currently available for pre-order through Finishing Line Press (until July 1st) and is set to be published in August. 

After I graduated, I kept writing. Not necessarily all that consistently, but once poetry took its hold, it continued to spring out of me. A few years later, I realized I basically had a whole book living on my laptop and set myself to the task of editing and sequencing it. A few months later, I closed my eyes and started blasting the entire collection out on Submittable. Despite the shotgun fire of submissions to open reading periods and first book contests, I didn’t really ever expect brackish to get picked up for publication. But, a few months later, I received the acceptance email from FLP and all but spit out the coffee I was sipping. I then realized, with some prompting from my college advisor, that I had kind of gone about the whole process backward by not having submitted any individual poems for publication ahead of the manuscript. But the acceptance had given me the ounce of validation and confidence that I was looking for, and over the next year, I kept writing furiously, accumulating a few acceptances and a whole lot of rejections. Once thing I learned majoring in two incredibly subjective fields was that you need have tough skin. Not everyone is going to like your work, or understand it. But there are people out there who will, you just have to find them. And finding them requires not giving up after the 15th or 25th or 50th form rejection. Though I don’t have all that many acceptances under my belt, I do have another almost 200 pages of in-progress poems on my laptop waiting to be finishing and bound into the next collection. 

Pottery comprises the other half of my story. Art has always been hugely essential for me, but I didn’t dive into ceramics until my sophomore year of college – and I was instantly hooked by the messiness and earthiness of the medium. I also got really attached to the capacity to make functional objects that could be used daily. There’s something intimate about functional pottery, in the energy, poured into it and the way that it can be used for generations to come. I am hugely into the fact that once it’s fired, clay is permanent and lives for centuries. After I graduated, I continued working out of community studios and selling my work on Etsy, until I was able to set up my own home studio in my garage after moving out here to California. After about a year of working from my own studio, business was going well enough for me to graduate from Etsy to my own website and now I just run everything myself and am a full-time working artist. 

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I don’t think anything is ever really a smooth road, especially when it comes to making art – plus — what’s life without a few obstacles? One of my larger struggles, though, was actually taking myself seriously as a working artist. I think we grow up learning and hearing that being an artist or a writer isn’t a “real job” unless there’s quantitative validation. So, it took me a while to unlearn some of that internalized judgment and to actually instill the belief in myself that I can actually do this for a living. 

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’ve always kind of written a little bit of everything, but I’ve been on a fairly significant poetry kick for several years now. I’ve got the start of a novel laying pretty dormant on my laptop, but my passion for writing has blossomed mostly on the poetry side of things lately. I’m fascinated with the process of taking a raw, stream of consciousness emotion or experience and stripping it down to the bones in a way that allows it to be more universally relatable. I get hyper fixated on the language and line breaks, and on organizing pieces on the page in a way that they also have a visual impact as well as a written one. 

As for my ceramic work, I make mostly coffee mugs/drinking vessels. I love the intimacy of making items that get used every day, and I also just really love coffee, so I’m particularly drawn to making mugs – though I am working on expanding my product base a bit this year. All my pieces are wheel-thrown, and then for the surface, I implement a technique called sgraffito, which involves carving through a layer of material (in my case, underglaze) to reveal the clay underneath. Like my poetry, my ceramic work is hugely inspired by my experiences out in nature, and I love translating those experiences into the landscapes that decorate my pieces in a way that allows others to connect their own life experience to them as well. 

Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Just keep making art. And make work that you’re passionate about versus just focusing on what you think will sell. If you don’t love what you’re doing and the process of it, what’s the point? Creative expression is a vital part of who I am as a human, so chasing after that and making it my goal to be a successful artist and poet felt very natural, once I started to accept the vulnerability it requires and started chipping away at the feelings of imposter syndrome. Adding to that — don’t be afraid to take risks, and find a balance of work/life that works for you. You’ve got to prioritize your art and own it. Not everyone is going to vibe with your work, and that’s okay. The important thing is that you’re putting it out there and allowing yourself the freedom to be creative. 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nicolebethunewinters.com & www.omshakahandmade.com
• Instagram: wwww.instagram.com/nicolee.winters & www.instagram.com/omshaka.handmade
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nicole.bethune/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/nicoleewinters

Image Credits
Colton Zobel