Some of the characters are me.
Some are mere reflections.
Some arrive on their own.
They all have a story to tell.
Nikki Bodie
WRITER · WANDERER · DREAMER · ARTIST · STORYTELLER
The Host
Anybody seems ordinary until you know their story.
Everything does, too.
People. Places. Houses with histories trapped in their walls. Objects that have passed through a hundred hands. Legends polished smooth by generations of retelling. The person history remembered incorrectly. The person it forgot altogether.
Nikki has always been interested in what gets overlooked.
She is a writer, traveler, collector of oddities, and compulsive explorer of whatever lies beneath the obvious. She has never met much of a stranger. Give her an empty seat beside someone in an airport, a bartender with time to talk, an old bookstore, an unmarked road, a peculiar artifact, or a local legend that begins with people around here say... and there is a reasonable chance she will disappear for a while.
She may come back with a friend.
She will almost certainly come back with a story.
Curiosity has carried her around the world and into the lives of people she might otherwise never have known. She is fascinated by what people love, what they fear, what they believe, what they remember, and what they would rather forget. But she is equally interested in the things that cannot speak for themselves.
Giving voice to the voiceless has become the quiet obsession beneath her work.
Sometimes the voiceless are people whose stories were erased, dismissed, misunderstood, or told by someone with more power than they had. Sometimes they are the villains of stories no one thought to question. Sometimes they are places altered beyond recognition, histories reduced to footnotes, or legends repeated for so long that no one remembers where the truth ended and the telling began.
And sometimes the voiceless thing is a house.
Nikki writes across genres because she follows the story wherever it wants to go. Her fiction wanders through literary and psychological fiction, Southern Gothic, folklore, history, the speculative, and the uncanny. She is drawn to memory and identity, love and grief, belief and doubt, the stories people inherit, and the uncomfortable distance between what happened and what everyone agrees happened.
There is usually something hiding beneath the first version.
She likes to dig.
Long before writing became the place where all those questions converged, Nikki was already collecting perspectives. She studied Psychology at Clemson University and began her professional life as an airline pilot. Aviation later took her into military service as a pilot before eventually bringing her back to the airlines. She went on to earn an MBA with a concentration in Aviation Management from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and is pursuing a DBA focused on International Business and Nonprofit Leadership and Management.
It is an unusual résumé.
It is also probably the least interesting thing about her.
Nikki would rather tell you about the place she found that wasn't on the itinerary. The stranger who became a friend. The strange object she brought home because leaving it behind felt somehow wrong. The obscure piece of history that kept bothering her until three hours of research became three days. The story someone told her once that she has never quite forgotten.
She has a big heart, an unruly curiosity, and very little resistance to wonder. She travels because the world is enormous. She talks to strangers because everyone knows something she doesn't. She collects oddities because objects remember things in their own way. And she writes because paying attention has convinced her of something:
Nothing is ordinary once you know its story.
A life can be misunderstood.
A place can be forgotten.
A truth can be buried.
But stories have a peculiar habit of surviving.
Sometimes all they need is someone willing to listen.
I've been renovated a few times. The bones are original.
The House
Some stories begin in the mind.
Others begin much lower.
In the tightening of a chest.
The drop of a stomach.
A held breath.
A memory that arrives first as sensation and only later as language.
NBodied Writing House was built for those stories.
The name is deliberate.
N. Bodie. NBodied. Embodied.
A play on Nikki Bodie's name, yes, but also on the practice of embodied writing: writing rooted not only in thought, but in the body itself. In sensation. Texture. Movement. Breath. Memory. The physical experience of having lived through something before ever trying to explain it.
Embodied writing begins with presence.
It asks the writer to notice what the body already knows.
The tension in a jaw before anger has been named. The weight behind the ribs before grief becomes a sentence. The sudden warmth of recognition. The instinct to step closer. The instinct to run.
It pays attention to the world in the same way: the temperature of a room, the scrape of fabric against skin, rain against glass, salt in the air, the rhythm of footsteps, the silence after someone says the wrong thing.
These details are not decoration.
They are where the story lives.
At NBodied Writing House, writing is approached as something experienced rather than merely constructed. A draft does not always begin with an outline. Sometimes it begins with a walk. A voice note. A fragment scribbled before it disappears. A physical reaction that makes no intellectual sense yet. A memory that refuses to arrive in chronological order.
The body supplies the raw material.
The page gives it form.
That process can become fiction, memoir, essay, poetry, or something that refuses a tidy category altogether. It can also offer a way of approaching experiences that are difficult to hold directly.
Some memories arrive fractured. Some emotions resist explanation. Some experiences remain in the body long after the mind has learned how to explain them.
Writing can create another way in.
Not by forcing meaning onto what happened.
Not by making pain beautiful for the sake of an audience.
But by allowing sensation, memory, imagination, and language to meet on the page until something previously shapeless begins to take form.
A character may carry what the writer cannot yet say in first person.
A house may remember.
A landscape may grieve.
A monster may inherit a fear.
An object may become a witness.
A fictional life may reveal something true precisely because it never happened.
This is also why NBodied Writing House is drawn to stories without an obvious voice.
The forgotten. The overlooked. The misunderstood. The person whose story was told by someone else. The place reduced to a footnote. The object everyone handled but no one considered. The history buried beneath the version that survived.
Everyone has a story worth telling. Everything does, too.
Sometimes speaking begins with writing.
Sometimes listening begins with reading.
NBodied Writing House exists at that intersection: between body and language, memory and imagination, what happened and what it felt like, the story we are living and the one embedded in our bones.
Because writing is not always about getting something out of your head.
Sometimes it is about discovering what has been buried in your body all along.
And bringing it to life on the page.
The Library
Stories told here. Some finished. Some still shuffling around in the attic. Some buried deep out back. You might find them, if you know where to dig.
The Nonlocal Self Series
Your brain is a radio. You've spent your whole life tuned to one station. What happens if you press seek?
The Margins
Notes written beside the work rather than inside it.
The Windows
Some rooms look outward. Open one.
The Mailbox
If you have a story, an object, or a question that will not leave you alone, leave it here.
Or write directlypapertrail@nikkibodie.com