Meet Nicole York

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nicole York. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nicole below.

Nicole, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

Tow places: failure and family.
Resilience doesn’t exist without failure. Every time I fail and learn that I can pick myself up and keep moving toward my goal, it’s proof that the next mistake, the next hurdle won’t stop me. That gives me the courage to try one more time, and then one more time.
Even that knowledge doesn’t stop failure from hurting, though. That’s when friends and family step in to provide the support that makes dealing with failure more bearable.
I might be able to make it through quite a bit without one of those things and keep going, but not without both. Not for long, anyway.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

If you had to distill me down to a single noun, I would be a creator. I have a deep compulsion to make things, which is great for my mental health but terrible for keeping a clean house, especially when that compulsion results in twelve million hobbies and all the accompanying supplies.
Sometimes we have to clear away the detritus of my most recent fixation just to eat dinner.
But expanding on that, the form of creation that fulfills me the most is telling stories. That lends itself particularly well to being an author and illustrator, so it makes sense that I’ve found myself in those spaces consistently.
Story is the central component of being human. We are the storytelling animal. We make sense of the world and our experiences through stories, we think and remember in stories, and we pass down information in the form of stories.
Everything it means to be what we are is wrapped up in the stories we tell ourselves and others. So what an incredible gift to learn how to craft and share those narratives. As a fiction author, I get to help form the way people imagine their realities and the potential for what their experience of the world–and themselves–could be.
I’m basically a wizard who makes people hallucinate after staring at squiggly lines inked on the carcasses of dead trees. That’s cool as hell.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

It’s always tricky trying to narrow down the factors that impacted your journey. We like to say hindsight is 20/20, but the truth is that our understanding is always clouded because we can only ever see through our own eyes. And that is one of the truest benefits of fiction: the ability to see through eyes wildly different than our own.
So even if I write confidently about what I think, I’m probably wrong to one degree or another. Keep that in mind as I pontificate.
TL:DR–Humans are endlessly capable of growth and adaptation; therefore, I can probably be good at anything I want to do, so I’m willing to try.
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to adapt and change. And humans have mastered unlikely skills, adapted to and thrived in almost every environment, and created things that beggar the imagination. So if something interests me, or if I want to become something new or master a new skill set, I have no reason to believe it isn’t possible.
Which makes me endlessly willing to try. And try. And keep trying. Someone once called it the “how hard could it be” gene, and that resonates deeply with me. Writing a book? I’ll try that. Selling my photos as fine art? I’ll try that. Teaching? Needle felting? Painting? Illustration? Ceramics? Yeah, I’ll try that. Not everything sticks, but skills are incredibly transferable. The patience and hand-eye coordination required to illustrate something transfers to ceramics. So I’m always willing to try, to learn, and to transfer.
It seems wildly simplistic to condense all of that into the Nike slogan but my advice almost always is: just do it. Do the thing. Skills are important, but you’ll learn those as you go. You don’t really know what you’ll need to know until you fail at something, and you can’t get where you’re going until you take the first step, so JUST GO.
Do the thing. You’re a human and infinitely capable, so get going.
Salto Mortali. Take the deadly leap. Your wings will grow on the way down.

How would you spend the next decade if you somehow knew that it was your last?

I don’t believe in gatekeeping, and I also believe that the person who creates value should be the person who benefits most from it. That makes me a square peg trying to fit into a round industry traditionally controlled by a few big capitalist publishers.
I am building my career as an author in a way that flies directly in the face of the framework built by traditional publishing, and that requires loads of effort, both in constructing a new framework through trial and error, and in educating readers that something different is possible.
Doing things differently in publishing means I have to find an initial balance between giving readers what they expect in a way they expect it, like having my books available on places like Amazon, while also building a new pathway leading away from it.
Subscriptions, selling direct, free access, crowdfunding, etc. are all ways I and other authors with this mindset are challenging the status quo, and the struggle–and overwhelm–are very real. But I believe they will be worth it.

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