Nick Oliveri pushes boundaries with his novels

Fourth-year Nicholas Oliveri won’t be attending his graduation ceremony from Cal State Monterey Bay, because he’ll be in Southern California on the day of the ceremony, signing books. He published his debut novel, The Conjurer, at the age of 21. Now, there are three books in the Stories of Shadow and Flame series with an untitled fourth book on the way.

Oliveri was named after Mykolaiv, the small fishing town in Ukraine where he was born. He moved out of Ukraine as a small child and grew up in North Andover, Massachusetts.

“I think I’ve always been writing in so many capacities,” said Oliveri. “I taught myself how to read and write at 2 years old when I came over from Ukraine. I was born there. And ever since then I’ve just been making up fun stories on my own or doing handwritten books on computer paper.”

But writing hasn’t been Oliveri’s only career option. “I took a different route with finance and business and startups into, like, my late teens, early 20s. But I’ve always been writing, I’ve always been creating and I’ve always been communicating. And so I found, even when I co-founded a startup, that I was leaned on a lot just to communicate with investors with my writing and make memorandum for us.”

Oliveri would eventually leave this startup and pursue a career as an author. In March 2022, he did his first-ever book signing at Coalesce, an independent bookstore in San Luis Obispo’s Morro Bay region.

According to Oliveri, The Conjurer was never meant to be a series. It was originally intended to be a standalone novel about Mikalla, a storyteller from the kingdom of Idaza. However, Nick was convinced to write a sequel. Today, he is on what his agent calls a “trilogy tour,” promoting the Conjurer series.

“I’ve already done eighteen-plus signings on this tour since December,” he said. His tour has made stops in New England, California, Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey. His biggest book signing to date will be at the famous Grove Bookstore in West Hollywood on June 1. Following this event, his tour will return to the East Coast.

Oliveri’s biggest advice for new writers is to simply get started and go. No first draft needs to be perfect. “Writers have this tendency, because it’s such a cerebral pursuit, of getting too far into their heads and second-guessing their work. And I say, you can’t edit a blank page, and you can’t publish words that are not there; so just get started.”

He credits multiple authors as his inspiration, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson and especially Vladimir Nabokov.

“Groff, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf … in no denigration to the university I’m currently attending and graduating from, those were my greatest teachers, professors ever. Because if you want to learn how to write well, you gotta read, and you gotta write.”

In addition to Stories of Shadow and Flame, Nick has written other novels as well as poetry books. Among them are Monsters in my Mind, a novel about mental health that is meant to be emotionally raw and, in his words, “make you crazier in a world where so many things are already kind of trying to take you there.” He also wrote A Genocide Too Small, the title of which is abrasive on purpose. It follows a businesswoman and a king whose kingdom she wants to drill for oil.

Aside from writing, Oliveri is working to build his own press company, the Ita Volui Corporation. He aims to give authors more of a voice when it comes to their writing, and to favor authors who deviate from the norm and push boundaries. The company’s name, Ita Volui, means I Willed It Thus or Therefore I Wanted. It has become a mantra in Oliveri’s life.