I had decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
joining us today is Shilo Niziolek. Shilo's (she/her) cnf book, FEVER, is out from
Querencia Press. Her chapbook, A Thousand Winters In Me, is forthcoming from
Gasher Press. I Am Not An Erosion: Poems Against Decay, a micro chapbook of
collage poetry was part of Ghost City Press’s online summer series 2022. Her work
has appeared in Pork Belly Press, [PANK], Juked, Entropy, Oregon Humanities, HerStry,
among others, and is forthcoming in Phoebe Journal, Crab Creek Review, Literary
Mama, Sunday Mornings at the River and Pumpernickel House. Shilo holds an MFA from New England College
and is Associate Faculty at Clackamas Community College.
Why do you write?
I write primarily creative nonfiction
and poetry, though I dabble a bit in fiction.
How do you celebrate when you finish writing a new book?
After
finishing writing a new book comes all the nitty gritty (editing, researching
presses, submitting) so I usually celebrate by taking a chunk of time off and
just reading some books for fun until I feel replenished enough to return to
the page. A cupcake or two along the way doesn’t hurt.
Describe your book in three words.
Desire. Illness.
Trauma.
Describe your book poorly.
Some chunks of memory.
What is your favorite book from childhood?
I loved The Third Eye by Lois Duncan (author of I Know What You Did Last Summer). I
checked it out from the library so many times. Sometimes while reading it late
at night I would get so freaked out I would throw the book across the room
because I didn’t want it anywhere near me. My love for books is often visceral.
What are you currently reading?
I am a multi-book reader,
so currently I am reading Sinead Gleeson’s cnf book Constellations, Fredrik Backman’s Beartown, S.A. Chakraborty’s The
Kingdom of Copper, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, and I am listening to Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party on audiobook.
What’s the one book someone else wrote that you wish you had written?
I wish I had written Samantha Hunt’s The Seas. It is so dreamy and as I read it I wanted to rip the
pages from the book and consume them or staple them to my wall.
What’s on your literary bucket list?
I want to see the
Library of Trinity College in Dublin. My mom visited there a few years back and
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
Do you read the reviews of your books or do you stay far far away from them, and why?
Because I am such a new and small indie author, I
am still at the stage or reading them all. That is probably because I haven’t
yet got a bad one (most reviews have been written by people who know me, so
they are thankfully kind), but that will probably change when the first bad one
drops.
If you were on death row, what would your last meal be?
I
have a lot of food restrictions because of my autoimmune diseases, so it’d
probably have to be lasagna or ravioli because I haven’t eaten those things in
almost a decade.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A memoir made up of essay fragments, Fever, examines what it is to desire throughout all phases and states of life and being. Niziolek mixes plain language with poetic prose to interrogate trauma from domestic violence and illness, sexuality, and the different ways we can and do love despite these things. All of this comes together to create a keen focus on the many ways one can experience desire and its intersection with love.
"Shilo Niziolek’s Fever is a searing portrait of a kaleidoscopic life. It specifically describes the experiences of illness, grief, and eros and the mysterious ways these three conditions emerge like a Hydra as one. The prose shows how loss of one kind of body gives way to the creation of many new bodies: the dreaming body, the remembering body, the writing body (along with the texts the writing body makes), and the body that encounters the presence of absence most profoundly through feelings of love and desire for what lies just beyond reach, but also beyond her experience of pain. While it might be easy to categorize Fever as prose about illness—that it is, distinctly so—it is also a book about spiritual love and the many ways it manifests in our lives. It makes for a very poignant reading experience."
-Jay Ponteri, author of Someone Told Me
buy a copy here
Fever a book by Shilo Niziolek
No comments:
Post a Comment