Pursuing a life in the performing arts is a personal, sacred path that is as unique to each person as their own fingerprint. In My Life as a Dog, Nicole Farmer creatively and bravely confronts her relationship to herself, her family, and to her life in the theatre. It is an equally excruciating and joyful account of discovering, and accepting the challenges of, who you are within all you desire.
Laura Linney, actress
Nicole Farmer has published three books of poetry: Wet Underbelly Wind (Finishing Line Press, 2022), HONEST SONNETS (Kelsay Books, 2023), and OPEN HEART (Kelsay Books, 2025). Her poems have been published in Wisconsin Review, Suisun Valley Review, Apricity, Wild Roof Journal, Poetry South, Drunk Monkeys, Kakalak, and many other journals.
When she’s not reading or gazing at the night sky you can find her at the Asheville Art Museum where she gets paid to contemplate fine art and remind people not to touch. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her actor husband and their stubborn terrier. If you would like to see show photos of the author during her years as an actress and director, click the links below.
Paperback: 194 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (October 20, 2026)
I read this mesmerizing poetic memoir in one sitting. Nicole Farmer beautifully and poignantly reflects on her life as an actress and a writer, vividly recounting all of the passion, the dreams, the disappointments, the rewards, the revelations and the heartbreak she’s experienced along the way. I couldn’t put it down.
Jeanne Tripplehorn, actress
Available at Kelsay Books or Amazon
Wet Underbelly Wind
by Nicole Farmer
“In these poems, Nicole Farmer travels not only the intimate geography of the heart and body, but the lines that connect to parents where secrets are revealed, and to daughters where there are questions impossible to ask. Filled with sensuality and sorrows and wild animal joy.”
–Steve Adams, Pushcart Prize winner, writing coach and editor, and author of the forthcoming novel, Remember This, from The University of Wisconsin Press.
“Nicole Farmer’s poetry is luminous, her landscape remarkably familiar and yet foreign at the same time, provoking a thought, a feeling, a glimpse into her complex inner life.”
–Susan M. Steadman, Ph.D., internationally produced playwright, author of Dramatic Re-Visions
“To spend the afternoon immersed in the poems of Wet Underbelly Wind is to give yourself over to a swift and powerful current of loss and longing. Yet Nicole Farmer’s poems also have a compelling joy and fierceness, a kind of charged nostalgia that celebrates lives come and gone as well as lives in the midst of living. A pleasure in every way, Wet Underbelly Wind leaves the reader deeply moved, wanting nothing but more.”
–Tommy Hays, author of The Pleasure Was Mine and In the Family Way