Many thanks to Renée Nicholson for guest-blogging this month and sharing her exciting work with us. Renée and I met at the WV Writers Conference in 2024 and hit it off immediately. She has been quite gracious to me with her time and talents, and I’m honored to call her friend. Check out all three of her great books and watch for great new work coming in the next year or so with her debut novel! She’s fiercely talented and never fails to amaze and impress me with her body of knowledge and authorly stamina!
Chrissie
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On Feverdream from the Road
A Guest Post by Renée K. Nicholson
I am so grateful to Chrissie for having me here. Writing this feels a bit like sitting down at a friend’s kitchen table with a good cup of coffee. And, after the month I just had, is exactly what I need.
The Concept Behind Feverdream
I am so excited about publishing my third full-length collection of poetry this year. When people ask me what Feverdream is about, I usually say that it’s a book that helped me use what I learned from studying and working in narrative medicine to help me deal with the loss of my younger brother and only sibling, Nate. The collection is organized into five sections — Home, Body, Loss, Seasons, and Glow — and it moves through difficult losses and griefs, the kind that don’t announce themselves cleanly, toward something I can only describe as restitution. Writing these poems was, in many ways, how I survived some of the hardest years of my life.
Feverdream also features original artwork by Morgantown-based artist Sally Jane Brown, whose work brings a beautiful visual layer to the emotional landscape of the poems. It’s deeply rooted in West Virginia, the place where I write, where I live, and where my family goes back generations. Those two things feel like vital aspects of the book. Sally continues to be a trusted collaborator and a dear friend. I lived a long time as part of the Appalachian diaspora and now have lived in West Virginia longer than any other place.
If I had to choose a favorite poem—and that’s always a nearly impossible ask—I’d say it was one of two poems. “Floats,” is one, in which the speaker makes root beer floats for her brother at three in the morning when he can no longer tell day from night. It’s a quiet poem. It doesn’t try to explain grief. It just sits inside it. The second is “Rings of Saturn,” where the speaker contemplates life and death on a walk with the dog in the snow. Saturn was bright in the December sky this past year and plays a role in this poem that allows it to be a quiet contemplation. It feels lighter to me than the subject matter might indicate, and I think writing this collection led me to this place of acceptance. It’s the last poem in the “Glow” section, and it does resonate with the idea of light inside oneself. As to favorites, well, every poem in Feverdream felt necessary to me, and maybe that’s why this book felt so important to publish and share.
Narrative Medicine
People sometimes look a little puzzled when I describe a portion of my work as “narrative medicine,” so let me try to explain what this work is, exactly. Narrative medicine is an integrated approach to healthcare that uses the tools of storytelling, such as close reading, reflective writing, careful attention to language, to support patient wellbeing, to deepen empathy, and to improve doctor-patient communication. It was developed at Columbia University, where I trained and earned my Certificate of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine.
I came to the work of narrative medicine through my own experience: as a chronic illness patient, as a writing coach to patient with ALS writing a memoir, as the sister of a younger brother who lost his life to cancer, and as someone who has always believed that stories are how we make sense of what the body does to us. I’ve worked with WVU Medicine, the University of Colorado, and others, lectured at Columbia and East Carolina University Medicine, among others. One of the projects I’m most proud of is a two-year grant-funded research study in WVU’s Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Clinic, in which I used expressive writing to help more than seventy rural cancer patients tell their personal stories. It was one of the first narrative medicine research projects ever conducted with rural patients, as well as the first of its kind in Appalachia. I also serve as Series Editor for Connective Tissue: A Health Humanities and Narrative Medicine Series at WVU Press, which publishes work at the intersection of healthcare, the humanities, and the fine arts. I really love the work of narrative medicine, and it feels like an important part of my work and writing lives.
Feverdream is, in many ways, the poetry collection I couldn’t have written without narrative medicine. The practice taught me how to pay attention differently to the body, to language, and to the stories we tell about suffering and survival.
The Prince Poem
Here’s a thing I’ve done in every book to date: there is always a reference to Prince! I can’t entirely explain it, except to say that Prince, his music, his genius, his sheer devotion to his craft has always been a part of my writing life. He’s my favorite musical artist, and that devotion keeps finding its way into my work. But my next book is historical fiction, set well before Prince was ever born, and set in Belle Époque France. I’m a little sad the streak will end (though exceptionally grateful to publish a début novel).
In Feverdream, my Prince poem is called “Midlife Run On.” The entire poem is essentially one long, breathless sentence, which is very much the point. It begins with a needle skipping on a record at a very specific moment in his hit song, “Kiss” and a revelation about being a woman in midlife. There’s a reference to Prince’s song “1999,” too. It’s a funny poem on the surface, but underneath the humor is genuinely tender. It’s really about carrying a younger self inside the body you have now, and what it means to love a version of yourself, and all the selves across the distance of time.
Redhawk Publications
Feverdream is published by Redhawk Publications, and I am genuinely proud to be part of their catalog. I met Patty Thompson, the editor I worked with at Redhawk at the West Virginia Writers, Inc. Spring Conference in June 2025. Patty and I really hit it off at the conference, and I felt she really understood my connection to narrative medicine, and how this book was part of that work. We continued the conversation and began working on the book soon after. Patty was just amazing to work with and helped me think about how I might incorporate Sally Brown’s artwork into the book, which made it a stronger, better, and more interesting collection. I can say with no hesitation that Redhawk is a press that takes its authors seriously and treats the work with real care. Launching a book into the world is always a vulnerable act, and having a publisher who is a true partner in that process matters enormously. I’m grateful to them, and especially Patty Thompson. They’ve got many terrific titles, so I hope you’ll check them out.
Four Weeks on the Road for National Poetry Month
April nearly did me in, but in the very best way.
I spent four consecutive weeks on the road during National Poetry Month, presenting at conferences and promoting Feverdream in places I both knew and venues that were new to me. Every April, I also commit to writing a poem a day for the entire month, a practice that keeps me honest and keeps the writing muscles from going stiff, and this year, I added a weekly Substack newsletter to the mix, each one featuring poems by other poets I love and want to celebrate, all while traveling every week.
I started the month by reading just down the road, at Fairmont’s Stumptown Ales Taproom. Reading close to home and in a relaxed environment was the perfect warm up to a busy month on the road. I traveled to Indianapolis, Indiana, where I did a presentation at Butler University, my undergraduate alma mater. Over 40 students came out, and we talked, and I read a bit from Feverdream. I’ve even been in contact with a few of those students. The Butler event was wedged in a trip that brought me to the Health Humanities Consortium Annual Conference, where I both got to read as a part of a panel, and met another Butler Alumna, the novelist Jane Hartsock (check out her wildly fun novel, Fan Base).
The next week, I taught a poetry workshop at the ever popular and wonderful one-day conference, Conversations & Connections, sponsored by Barrelhouse in collaboration with American University’s MFA program. It was great to meet up with old friends and to make new ones. And thanks to those folks who bought a copy of Feverdream from the pop-up bookstore.
I rounded out travel with a workshop on book proposals for the Midwest Physician Writers Retreat. I met some really wonderful physicians who are also writers, and an old friend from the Columbia narrative medicine program, Dr. Bruce Campbell. I was so glad to help share what I know about publishing with these folks, and just really enjoyed the warm energy of this talented group. And while in Madison, where the retreat was held, I got to see two young professional women who are both sisters, living in Madison. One I instructed in ballet and the other I mentored in writing, and I just loved spending time with them and seeing how rich and exciting their work and lives have become. And I might have had the single best French toast of my life at a cute restaurant called Marigold Kitchen.
It was a lot. I won’t pretend otherwise. There were moments on the road where I wondered what I had gotten myself into, sitting in unfamiliar hotel rooms with a poem to write and a newsletter to finish and an early conference session the next morning. But there were also moments that reminded me exactly why I do this work: a reader who told me a poem in Feverdream spoke to her. A workshop participant who said the day kicked off right with my poetry workshop. A conversation with another poet at a conference reception that I’m still turning over in my mind. A writer who is exploring book options he never would have before I deconstructed the process. All these things remind me that the writing life is a good one, full of unexpected connections, friendships, and a shared sense that words on the page make a difference.
And my tips for travel? Pack light, don’t sweat the small stuff, find a few meaningful souvenirs, always take the picture. Oh, and KEEP HYDRATED!
A Little About Me
Renée K. Nicholson is a writer whose work spans poetry, essays, fiction, criticism and other forms. She holds a B.A. in English from Butler University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from West Virginia University. The author of six books and a début novel under contract, her most recent is the poetry collection Feverdream; her other titles include the memoir-in-essays Fierce and Delicate. Her writing has appeared in over 100 publications, including The Gettysburg Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, and River Teeth. A voting member of the National Book Critics Circle and a 2026 Artist-in-Residence at the Château d’Orquevaux in France, she has a long-standing fascination with stories of resilience and reinvention. In 2024, she left a long career in academia to write full time and now lives in Morgantown, West Virginia.
How to Order Feverdream
Feverdream is available directly from Redhawk Publications, on Amazon, or through your local independent bookstore and via Bookshop.org where your purchase supports indie booksellers. If your bookstore doesn’t have it on the shelf, they can order it for you. I’m a firm believer in keeping local bookstores alive, so if you have one nearby, please start there.
Thank you, Chrissie, for this space, and for your friendship, which means the world to me.
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