Q&A with Roberta Silman

 

 

 

Roberta Silman is the author of the new story collection Heart-work. Her other books include the novel Summer Lightning. She lives in Massachusetts.

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the stories in Heart-work?

 

A: In order to answer your question properly, I need to give you a little background. I got married four days after graduating from Cornell in 1956 and after my husband served six months in the Army we came back to New York and I got a job as a secretary to the assistant publisher of The Saturday Review magazine in 1957. 

 

In a few months I was promoted to assistant to the science dditor and began writing pieces on my own. But although I learned a lot at that job, I soon realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in journalism; no, I wanted to write fiction. 

 

So when my first child was born in 1961, I left The Saturday Review and made a plan: while bringing up our little girl I would try my hand at fiction. Two more children came along in 1966 and 1968 and life got extremely busy. But by then I had written several stories and sent them out and was beginning to get handwritten rejections.

 

Then, when a friend called in the spring of 1972 to tell me she was going back to school to get her master’s in social work, I was overcome by an unfamiliar feeling of jealousy. I remember sitting down with my husband that very night and asking him what I was going to do with the rest of my life. 

 

Although we were only in our 30s, he was very wise. He had started his own structural engineering consulting business in 1966 and knew a lot more about the world than I did. Moreover, besides the editors who were rejecting my stories he was also my only reader. 

 

So when he said, “Maybe it’s time to send your work to someone else,” it sounded sensible. Then he reminded me that we had both read recently that Sarah Lawrence, which was only 20 minutes from where we lived in Westchester, had just started a graduate program in writing. “Send them a few stories and see what happens,” was his advice. So I did.

 

I was accepted for the fall of 1972 and my teacher would be Grace Paley, who was one of the first teachers in that program.  We met once a week for three hours and talked about my work and her work and writers we both loved. 

 

Her deal was that we would work on my stories and not try to sell anything until the end of that first year. She was a wonderful teacher and became a good friend. At the end of that first year, she said it was time to send some stories out to magazines. The New Yorker bought one — “A Bad Baby” — and published it in July of 1973. 

 

I continued to go Sarah Lawrence and got my MFA in 1975 and sold some more stories. By the time I graduated, I had enough stories to approach a publisher. 

 

The Atlantic Monthly Press/Little Brown published Blood Relations, which was essentially my naster’s thesis, in 1977. It won Honorable Mention for the PEN Hemingway Prize in 1978 and also Honorable Mention for the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize that year.

 

But publishers like novels better than short stories. So I embarked on my first novel, Boundaries, which was published in 1979. And there have been five more novels since then. 

 

However, I have always loved short stories and while I was working on the novels and bringing up the children, I would get an idea for a story and take time off from whatever novel I was working on to complete it. That is the wonderful thing about stories — you can see the end. 

 

And after they were completed I would send them off to the magazines during a time when there were a lot more magazines buying stories than there are now. 

 

Heart-work is a compilation of a lot of those stories, written since the late 1970s until the last one, “Bed and Breakfast” which I wrote during the Covid pandemic. 

Q: How was the collection’s title — also the title of one of the stories in the book — chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: Both Blood Relations and Heart-work have threads of my autobiography. About half of the stories in each collection are based on my birth family and the family Bob and I had after we married in 1956. 

 

The story “Heart-work” is based on my experience when my father was dying in 1982. He was around 80 — we never knew quite when he was born in Eastern Europe — and very sick at Columbia Presbyterian with cancer that had spread to the brain. 

 

I would visit him almost every day and often read to him from his favorite newspapers — The New York Times and The Jerusalem Post. One day I was reading from the Times Book Review when I came across a quotation from Rilke:

 

                   work of seeing is done, now 

                       go and do heart-work

                       on all the images imprisoned within you; for you

                       overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them.

 

I read it to him and he smiled, but I wasn’t really sure he had heard it. I learned in the coming days that he had not only heard it, but had thought about it and sometimes confused it with “hard work.” 

 

That got me thinking, and after his death, as I was wrestling with how to write about this person I had loved so much, I realized that heart-work is what we do every day of our lives — to connect to those we love, to comfort them and help them maneuver through life as best we all can. 

 

And that even though our lives are filled with moments of insight — “the images imprisoned within” in Rilke’s words — we have to work to understand those moments as our lives unfold and we try to live the best life that we can. 

 

Heart-work seemed to fit in with the motto by which I have lived: I first read it in Saul Bellow’s Herzog and was delighted when Anne Sexton used it for the title of her first book of poems, Live or Die. It is: “Live or die, but don’t poison everything.” 

 

Implied in that is the command to live with generosity of spirit and kindness and optimism. Which we certainly need at this moment in our country’s history.

 

Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the book said, “Silman navigates the core of being human, with an authentic, captivating message — to hold out for love in the end.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: I think it hits the mark. And here’s an interesting thing: After I read that in PW recently, I went back to that Rilke poem called “Turning Point” which contains the lines about heart-work. 

 

The few lines before those are:

 

        For there is a boundary to looking.

        And the world that is looked at so deeply

        wants to flourish in love.

 

That also hits the mark. Believing in love as the connector among human beings is a form of optimism which I have been lucky enough to have as a bastion of my life. 

 

The last sentence in my last novel, Summer Lightning, which we talked about in 2022, is: “For people live on after they die, and love is more than a madness: It is the protection against all that awaits us, our only defense against the hurts and truths of this uncertain, clamorous world.” 

 

So, yes, I think that to love and be loved is the richest experience one can have.

 

Q: As someone who writes both novels and stories, do you have a preference?

 

A: No. But when sitting down to write my novels I always remembered what Grace Paley said when we would talk about the difference between novels and stories. And remember that she wrote only stories. But she gave me some really wonderful advice when she said, “Think of a novel as a series of stories, then, hopefully, it won’t be so hard.” 

 

For me my novels have been a series of scenes, or stories, and I think there are stories that take much longer and need stories within stories to tell the whole narrative. 

 

A lot of my favorite authors — Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Bellow, Katharine Anne Porter, Shirley Anne Grau, William Trevor, Nabokov — all wrote stories and novels. So did Tolstoy.

 

And some of my favorite writers — like Raymond Carver and Delmore Schwartz and Grace — only wrote stories. The last two also wrote poems. 

 

I think they all have value and remember loving short stories especially when I was a young mother and feeling triumphant when I could read a story or two before dropping off to much-needed sleep. And I love the online publications that are now publishing stories. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: When I was at Cornell I audited the courses Nabokov taught on world literature and Russian literature. My adviser wouldn’t let me take them for credit because Nabokov didn’t have a Ph.D. (This was before Lolita.) 

 

And although I am not a fan of Lolita, I love a lot of Nabokov’s work, especially Speak, Memory. I also love the poems of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, which have meant more and more to me as I grow older. 

 

So I am working on a novel which is about those poets as they intersected with Nabokov’s father, V.D. Nabokov. He was a great statesman and journalist who wanted Russia to be a democracy in the early part of the 20th century. 

 

My novel begins at the 300th celebration of the Romanov Dynasty in 1913 and ends in the early 1920s; its protagonist is a young journalist named Sybil Levin who is working for the International Herald Tribune in St. Petersburg. It is called The Russian Lesson.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I thank you for the opportunity to reach out to readers and want to remind everyone reading this that although the doomsayers are forever predicting the end of books, they continue to hold their own, with the help of people like you. Happily they are here to stay — as they always have been.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Roberta Silman.