Fluid States (2019), selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, as well as several poetry collections, including Conjoining (2017) and Self-Portrait as Bettie Page (2013). She is also the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets (2015), and a senior editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She lives and teaches in Minneapolis for the University of Minnesota, Normandale Community College, and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
Czerwiec's new book, co-edited with Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, is The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay: Insights and Prompts from Contemporary Writers and Teachers.
Recently I asked Czerwiec about what she was reading. Her reply:
I’m usually reading for several different purposes, so this grouping reflects that. Because I got in the habit of doing mini-reviews of booksLearn more about the book at the publisher's website.that I paired with perfume on Twitter, I’m going to continue that practice here.
I recently heard Aisha Sabatini Sloan read, and while I loved Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, I hadn’t read her newest, Borealis: An Essay, so I grabbed a copy. It’s a magical, funny, thoughtful book-length lyric essay about a Black, queer body moving through White spaces—in this case, the expansive glacial landscape of Alaska. I would pair this with Zoologist’s Snowy Owl, which smells cold: a woodsy base, but the icy notes of iris, mint, and green galbanum lend an austere beauty.
Because I’ll be teaching it this fall, I’m reading Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. It’s ostensibly a memoir of growing up mixed-race in apartheid South Africa when his very existence demonstrated that racial purity is a lie, but his narrative becomes more a portrait of his Xhosa mother—a fierce force of love, faith, and rebellion who raises him during this violent era. Paired with Robert Piguet’s Bandit, whose name also suggests a crime, and whose scent wallops you with its sharp green and dry leather, all discipline up front and yet eventually softens to a floral the longer it stays with you. Also, the perfume was created by the most rebellious woman in the business.
For pleasure, I’ve just started my friend Maya Jewell Zeller’s Raised by Ferns, also a memoir of an unconventional upbringing, a feral childhood in precarity among the Pacific Northwest forests. I’m not far along, but I love the lush language and the scavenged collage of materials—housing policies, fire danger warnings, math word problems, poetic forms—all woven with lyric personal reflections. Paired with CB I Hate Perfume’s Black March, a scent that smells like wet ground awaking after winter, with notes of rain, green buds, sharp sap, and muddy earth.
And finally, for my own research and writing on mycelium, I’m…reading? perusing? marveling at?...a bizarre ‘zine called Mushroom People(there were only ever 2 volumes created) that’s a compendium of ephemera by writers, artists, scientists, folklorists, and fungi enthusiasts. I’ll pair this with Aftelier’s wonderfully weird Cepes & Tuberose, which foils a big white floral against an earthy fungal funk.
Visit Heidi Czerwiec's website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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