Today we’d like to introduce you to Shilo Niziolek.
Hi Shilo, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I started writing in high school during a period when I was in a really bad place. I was at the height of an abusive relationship that lasted 4 years, and during that time, I wrote some truly terrible rhyming angsty poetry. In the back of my mind, I knew that I wanted to write a memoir about that time period. I even had a few false starts at it, but it wasn’t until years later, at 24, when I began my college journey, that I rediscovered it. I initially signed up for a humanities certification program. At the time, I was applying for disability, and I didn’t have much hopes or plans for my future. I was looking to fill time until I got sicker and died. This is truly what I imagined for my life, but I signed up for a graphic memoir class at Clackamas Community College as an elective. The instructor for that course singled me out pretty quickly and basically, in different words, asked what I was doing and why I wasn’t signed up for an English degree. By winter term of that first year, I was enrolled fully in literature and writing classes.
After that, things lined up pretty quickly. It was like coming home. In my house, we were avid readers. My mom worked a lot, raising three children on her own until my stepdad, who would later adopt us, came into the picture. She worked two jobs but still found time to read us stories a few nights a week. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had library cards and that is almost the same thing as being rich. Once enrolled in these classes, I began writing more seriously. I took a class that read submissions and puts together an anthology each year called The Clackamas Literary Review. Taking that course showed me that on the other side of these literary journals were people arguing passionately for pieces they thought should be published, and sometimes those pieces we loved made it out into the world. That’s when I started submitting my work and shortly after got my first publication with an essay titled “The Art of Leaving” in the Broad River Review. Following Clackamas Community College, I transferred to Marylhurst University. Upon entering, I received the Binford Creative Writing Scholarship, and from there, I graduated with honors with a bachelor’s in creative writing and English literature. I was accepted into the MFA at New England College in New Hampshire with the first 25 pages of Fever.
After graduating, I quickly became an adjunct faculty at Clackamas Community College, the same place where it all started coming together for me. During all this time, I had been submitting small pieces of writing: essays, short stories, and poetry; I was getting published with pretty decent regularity. I had finished working on Fever before finishing my MFA and had been submitting that around as well, with some almost success with my full-length manuscript. It was first runner-up in Red Hen Press’s Quill Prose Prize, a finalist in Zone 3 Press’s 2021 CNF Award, and was the only manuscript to make it through Buckman Publishing’s open reading period for creative nonfiction, although after meeting with one of their editors and talking about my future plans for Fever, we discovered that it wasn’t going to be the best fit, though that time spent talking with the editor was invaluable, as it helped me find a new ending for the book. Within that same time period, a new indie-women-run press, Querencia Press, reached out to me and offered a contract. From there, things happened pretty quickly, and during that time, I had an 8-page micro-chapbook of collage poetry published with Ghost City Press titled I Am Not An Erosion: Poems Against Decay, and a chapbook of essays, this one closer to 60 pages, accepted for publication by Gasher Press, due out this December and titled A Thousand Winters In Me. And now Fever is out in the world, hopefully finding people who need it.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Nothing about my life’s journey has been smooth up until recently, when I got hired out of my MFA for a teaching position with almost shockingly relative ease. But even that was due to the struggling and striving I did during my years at the community college as a student, and a testament to the relationships I formed with the English instructors during my time there. I shouldn’t say nothing has been smooth though, because there were a few things that were: I learned to read pretty quickly and had advanced reading levels at a young age, I was a great swimmer as a child, and school came to me quite easily, up until high school when I found myself deep in the throws of a bad relationship that left me reaching for self-medicating forces and at which time I dropped out of high school and got my GED. The way I finally got out of that relationship was an incredibly hasty way to exit. I had an ectopic rupture pregnancy which caused me to bleed out for days on end before I finally fainted in my parents’ home late one night. They rushed me to the emergency room in Portland after a bad false start at our local small town hospital, where we were treated poorly and incorrectly diagnosed though my blood count was at dangerous levels and I kept passing in and out of lucidity. I needed 4 quarts of blood transfusions, and if you are thinking that seems like a lot, it is because it is. I had been internally hemorrhaging for more days than I can imagine. After recovering from my life-saving surgery, during which time my parents dragged a twin-size bed next to the fireplace, as it was December in the Pacific Northwest and I was anemic and frighteningly cold all the time, they took turns alternating sleeping on the living room floor and staying home from work to make sure I stayed alive, I ran away to Texas to live with my eldest brother and his little family. While in Texas for a little over a year, I got increasingly sicker, diagnosed with thyroid problems, IBS, and Lupus. I got sicker and sicker, by then living with a boyfriend and some coworkers, and eventually had to return home to Oregon, incredibly weak and ready to apply for disability because I couldn’t work full-time anymore, couldn’t afford my medications on my own, and everything was spiraling quickly downhill, not to mention that following my ectopic rupture, I became plagued by panic attacks whenever my chest felt remote as it had that night, which unfortunately for me with severe gastrointestinal issues, it often did.
Once I returned to school and showed that I could maintain a 4.0 with 3 classes, I was denied disability in one of the most scathing and brutal letters myself or my mom has ever received, shredding our character, calling us liars, even though their very own expert testified that with the above-listed health problems, along with a few others, that I wouldn’t be able to, long-term, work full-time in the type of work available to me, which were minimum wage jobs. There were a few major and minor health scares during my near 9-year journey in college. During my 6th year and nearing graduating from Marylhurst, I became violently ill from food, all food, and lost 30 pounds in a weeks time, eventually diagnosed with a small intestinal bacteria overgrowth, which 4 years later I still have bouts with. During my MFA, the pandemic hit, and I holed up with my partner and our dogs in our house, terrified and high risk. It was during that time that I also had fast-growing pre-cancerous cell lesions scare, of which I had successfully removed, and in April of 2021, I found a blood clot in my outer right calve and rushed myself to the emergency room. It’s been a wild ride, to say the least, and I expect more to come because that’s life. Sometimes I wonder if my energetic and chaotic personality needs disquiet, but more and more, I think believing things like this is simply a trauma response to try and make meaning and sense of things that simply do not make sense.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I received my MFA in creative writing with a primary focus in creative nonfiction and a secondary focus in fiction. What I really should have gotten my secondary in is poetry, which was the first form of writing I fell in love with, and which I have been writing in exceedingly more frequent amounts. However, creative nonfiction is my home, and even my poetry is just another place for me to put these things, and my fiction is, unsurprisingly, heavily auto-fictionalized accounts of things I’ve lived through. Writing creative nonfiction feels like the place where I can breathe best, where I can experiment, where I can play with the confines and rules of being a human, and mess with narrative arcs. Fever is a book-length essay of fragments, meant to mimic the cyclical and non-linear way that traumatic memory functions. A Thousand Winters in Me, my forthcoming chapbook, is lyric and fragmented essay that examine grief and use nature as the mirror to access it. Even my micro-chapbook I Am Not An Erosion: Poems Against Decay is a combination of poems written about being more than my disabilities overlaid over images of myself in collage format. I think of this series as self-portraiture. I’ve been getting drawn more into the world of collage lately, as it seems less high-stakes than some of the other work I create, but I think that is mostly because once it’s made it can’t be edited or altered. Which is, of course, not true. I could cover it up, I could add to it, but there is something freeing about making it and allowing it to exist in its first carnation. I am really proud of all the work I’ve done, even smaller works that appeared in journals where maybe only a few people read them, because they all contribute to the mosaic of my life and my work. I do feel that teaching offers me an opportunity to give back, and hopefully inspire a few students along the way who love learning as much as I do to pursue it more passionately. I don’t like to think of what sets me or us apart. There are so many other people, especially other queers, women, or people of color (not to be reductive of the many different people) out there doing this important grief unraveling work. I am interested in connection. We have our differences, but what connects us and how can we use these connections to support one another? To heal? To access joy?
What are your plans for the future?
I am currently working multiple jobs: writer, adjunct college instructor, and floor manager at a local small movie theater. The illness itself feels like another full-time job, so make it four. My main goals right now are to keep on teaching, squeeze in time to write, and hopefully be able to leave the theater within the year. My biggest career goal, other than to continue making good and bad art, is to teach in a low-residency MFA like the one I was in. I was only able to go to three of my six 10-day intensive residencies because of the pandemic, but those 3 spent in community with others who love writing and reading as much as I do are some of my best memories. Meanwhile, the six-month gaps between those working intensely with one mentor were incredibly impactful and I’d love to be on the other side of that. I’m not even really picky about where it is. I just want to be able to leave my life twice a year and spend those days in communion with other scribblers, then return home and spend months reading and responding to the work of upcoming writers and help support them in the journey the way I felt supported in mine. We are each other’s keepers, and I’d like to hold other writers’ stories in my hands.
Contact Info:
- Website: shiloniziolek.com/
- Instagram: instagram.com/shiloniziolek
- Twitter: twitter.com/shiloniziolek
- Other: linktr.ee/shiloniz
