interview with shilo niziolek

february love letter to storytellers

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2023 newsletter plans

We’re all storytellers, in some way or another. I write stories to connect with others, but it’s easy to feel alone in any creative journey. It’s easy to struggle, to doubt, to be full of imposter syndrome, and to wonder why we’re doing this in the first place. In love letters to storytellers this year and always, I want to remind myself and others of the foundation: a love of story and passionate belief in the power of story in our lives and others’. For 2023, this means:

• I’m getting back to featured storytellers, with a focus on indie authors and authors local to me (Winnipeg, MB/Treaty 1). We’re all about the underrated, small, cozy communities here.

• I want to continue to reflect on what it means to be an “emerging writer” and write through the ups and downs. We’re about feeling less alone.

• this is a love story: poems and essays on friendship, love, and mental health releases April 2023! I want to continue to keep you updated on release news and other projects, while giving you first looks and sneak peeks. (News below!)

• If you missed it last month, I put together a meditation (written and audio) for creatives who get stuck in their head like me. There were a few times in the past month that I was caught in a cloud of self-doubt and negative self-talk about writing (I literally wrote in my notes app, “I hate art.”) I remembered some of the things I wrote for myself in the meditation and was able to ride the wave a little easier. I hope it can help you too, wherever you may be in your journey.

Now, onto the meaty stuff!!

featured storyteller: shilo niziolek

I am very excited this month to be returning to storyteller love letters, with an interview with Oregon-based writer Shilo Niziolek. Some of her projects include A Thousand Winters in Me, a collection of essays on grief and survival, her memoir Fever, made up of essays fragments on desire and its interconnection with love, interrogating “trauma from domestic violence and illness, sexuality, and the different ways we can and do love despite these things.” She also has a micro chapbook of collage poetry called I Am Not an Erosion. Since I first stumbled across Shilo on Instagram, I’ve been fascinated by her work and approach to writing, as well as her commentary on disability and illness in publishing. I’ve also enjoyed seeing on her stories eerie pictures of nature, her eclectic-ly decorated office, and dog cuddles. In this interview, Shilo talks about why she tells the stories she does, access issues in publishing for disabled and chronically ill writers, and why she loves indie presses.

Tell me briefly about your history of writing. How did you get into it and end up where you are today?

I came to writing the way I figure most everyone does--through a love of reading--which for me was fostered by my mom who also loved reading, and who now, in her 50s, has two book contracts for two separate cozy mystery series coming out in 2024. The women in my family, at least on my mother's side, read voraciously. In high school I wrote some very bad poetry, a form I have only returned to in the last few years.

When I returned to college just a few short months before turning 24 I rediscovered this passion and the nagging idea I had in the back of my head that I needed to write a book about the trauma I endured during an abusive relationship I sustained throughout my teenage years and the aftermath of it, along with the various health issues I developed. As it turns out, the book, Fever out through Querencia Press, turned out to be an entirely different book from what I had in my mind back then.

It is very difficult to write about trauma linearly. Before I started Fever, I wrote a lot of essays on or around that relationship and my medical problems, and some of those essays became my chapbook A Thousand Winters In Me, out through Gasher Press. In the meantime, and throughout my undergrad and graduate degrees, I've also written a handful of short stories, and now two poetry collections, alongside the longer collection of essays written over the years which include the essays from Winters, all of which I am currently shopping around. 

Why do you tell stories?

I tell stories because I have to. For me, writing is truly integral to processing and making sense of my life, my experiences, and the world around me. All of my work despite the genre is heavily autobiographical, except, unfortunately, at the end of the story I don't turn into a bird or a fox, like in some of my fiction works. 

Can you speak a bit about your books and how telling those stories have impacted your life?

Fever is a memoir written in fragments. I think of the themes that run through it like a pendulum. We swing out and away from the ideas only to have them come back and knock us over if we turned our head too far in the other direction.

The conception of Fever was that I wanted to follow the idea of desire around, as if desire was a person and I was on its back, peering around at its conversations, looking through its ears toward its dreams. What ended up being created is about desire, of course, but it is also about trauma, illness, love, and how we build ourselves around the holes created in our lives by these things. I love the idea of the white space in fragmented writing being a physical place holder for something.

A Thousand Winters In Me, my chapbook of essays, is more focused on grief. Winter is a very heavy time of year for so many of us. For me in particular, on top of seasonal affective disorder, winter is a time where I experienced some of my most difficult and intense traumas. It is the time of year when I met my first love who would become my abuser, when the boy I loved and his other girlfriend had their child while I was also still with him, when I had an ectopic rupture pregnancy when I almost died, when I've had other major health scares, when old friends have died from cancer or overdoses. But grief is so much smaller than that, in so many ways. That is what I wanted to capture in this collection.

Telling these stories have, outwardly, changed remarkably little for me, but releasing them in to the world has given me a strange sense of freedom, though there is also a bit of fear in there too. Fear of judgment, whether by strangers or by people you wrote about, can be insipid if allowed to grow too large. Despite putting these books out, I still find myself drawn to these themes, drawn to the page to further investigate them, though hopefully in new and different ways. 

What themes are you drawn to in your writing and why are you drawn to those themes?

I've kind of already answered this a bit above, but my themes are repeated across genres: trauma, abuse, love, desire, grief, illness. The way I write about these things is often through the lens of nature. I am obsessed with nature as a mirror, a reflection, or even a refraction of our humanness. Aren't we too wild, animalistic? Don't we follow urges and intuition and hunger? I'm drawn to these themes because they are my themes, they are what builds the walls of my entire life. I suffer from PTSD, anxiety and panic disorder, and multiple chronic illnesses and chronic pain. To suffer is to live, but so is to love. I am fascinated by the way these things hold us together and tear us apart. 

You write about chronic illness, disability, and trauma, among other things. There are still a lot of access issues in publishing. What do you think is missing in the way we approach disability and illness in publishing and writing? 

Oh geez, this is a loaded question! I don't want to get too on my soapbox here (or pill box, as it were) but there are so many access issues when it comes to being disabled and ill in the publishing and creative writing world. I will just speak briefly on a few areas. Publishers, presses, and literary magazines: so often I see free submissions for marginalized groups (which is amazing!) but very few times do I see those granted for disabled writers (guys, we literally can't often work full time) and worse, I sometimes see calls for work about illness, medicine, health, etc. with huge reading fees (again, we don't have the money for these!)

Another big issue I have is with presses, poetry presses especially, printing their books in tiny font. I get it, you are trying to make the lines fit correctly to how the author envisioned them, if that's the case, make your pages wider, not the print smaller. I can't tell you how often I have to set aside a poetry collection after only reading a couple poems because if I focus on small print too long it will trigger a migraine.

Another major problem I have is in local literary scenes, book stores, and the like. I live in Portland, Oregon and there is a pretty massive literary scene here. I mean, we do boast one of the biggest bookstores, Powell's City of Books. But time and time again I see the same people featured, the same people getting reading opportunities, the same people getting the opportunities to run workshops or seminars. There are inner cliques, just as in any other scenario in life, and when you are someone like me who can't often leave the house, who can't attend the events as often as I'd like, who can't go into these spaces or go to the bars for the late-night readings, who can't foster or build community in this way, then the opportunities pass us by because we aren't out there building the connections. Another area where this has been a problem for me is with bookstores. As a new writer, a lot of bookstores will only carry books on consignment, and I don't have the finances to buy my own books and go peddle them around to bookstores and other small shops. If my books aren't in bookstores, how are people supposed to find them? See, look, I already went on for way longer than I wanted to, but I feel so passionate about this, in part because my own livelihood is at stake here. 

How do you want to connect with others in your writing life and in your work? How have you made connections?

For me so much of the connection happens inside the page. Whether it is my own pages, or other authors’ pages. So often since my books come out, I've read other books that I feel kindred with. I feel as if their book and my book are friends, even if they don't know me or my work. And inside my books, I often refer to other works. Writing is a conversation between the reader and the writer, but it is also a conversation between the writer and other books. We are influenced by the voices of others, whether we want to acknowledge this or not. And connection for me because of my books have also come, more than anything, from the private messages readers have sent to me through social media, telling me how seen they feel. Writing is brilliant in this way because we can connect with someone we've never even met, probably never will, and we become part of their inner vernacular. It feels like a secret language we are all speaking, but its not secret really. Just look toward your shelves. 

Indie authors have unique challenges with publishing and getting their work to people, but all your books are published with small indie presses, even ones that are fairly new and still getting established. Still, you say you "are proud of all the work I've done because they all contribute to the mosaic of my life and work." Why pursue the indie author life with all its challenges, and how does that fit with your goals as a writer and storyteller? How do you get to the point of being proud of everything you've done?

I love indie presses. They are the lifeblood of this industry and I feel they are doing the work of the people. They are championing works that get overlooked by the Big Five. Obscure works, experimental works, works by marginalized peoples, works that otherwise might not see the light of day. Indie presses are almost exclusively run by other writers. These are people who are like us: working multiple jobs, writing in between, but they love and care about the craft so much that they are (so often, assuming they aren't vanity presses) barely scraping by just so they can help others get their work out there. That is not to say there aren't shady small presses out there, because there definitely are, but they aren't the majority.

I think this sense of being proud of all my work comes from having lived a very hard life and the sense of knowing that each of these pieces are a part of me, were me at one point or another, even the embarrassing parts, even the dark parts, even the parts that others might not want to see. My therapist has been using the term radical acceptance in our recent meetings when talking about my healing from trauma journey. I want to jump ahead to the part where I am healed. Just the same way I'd like to jump ahead to the part of my career (writing and teaching) where I am more financially stable, but for writing I never have that sense that I need to get where I am going. Writing itself is the destination. As long as I keep doing that, sending my work out there, trying to connect with just one person at a time, I've already reached where I was trying to go. 

Shilo Niziolek's (she/her) cnf book, FEVER, is out from Querencia Press. Her chapbook, A Thousand Winters In Me, is out 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 West Trade Review, Phoebe Journal, Crab Creek Review, Alice Says Go Fuck Yourself, Wishbone Words, Sunday Mornings at the River and Pumpernickel House. Shilo holds an MFA from New England College and is Associate Faculty at Clackamas Community College.

Shilo’s website | Shilo’s Instagram

updates

• I am seeking ARC readers! An ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) is an uncorrected proof that goes out to early reviewers to read, review, and generate buzz for a book’s release. Reviews are essential to help get authors’ work in front of more readers and show up in algorithms! I am going to be giving away 10-20 free copies of this is a love story randomly on February 15 to anyone who commits to reviewing by April 30, 2023, and signs up at this link HERE.

• In case you missed it, read the first piece of this is a love story HERE.

• Download your subscriber exclusive meditation for the struggling creative HERE.

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Happy February!

Alyssa