Writer by calling, editor by experience, biologist by training,
and mother by the seat of my pants.
Like the protagonist of my first novel, I have wandered.
I enjoyed an idyllic childhood in the provincial county of Brooklyn: listening to the sound of the el train screeching past our windows; at night exiting through gates that guarded my parents’ hardware store (we lived in the apartment above); in the morning strategizing on how to avoid the high school girls who would shake me down for money on my way to school.
It was in those early years that three themes emerged: a love for nonurban landscapes; a sense of the transitory nature of experiences; and a love of the intimate world between writer and reader.
By seventeen I fledged and started a tour of the USA via college. At that point, as much as I wanted to be a writer–philosopher, my more pragmatic side directed me to study biology. Four schools and two degrees later, however, I remembered that I really had wanted to be a writer. They say you should write what you know, so while working as a research assistant, I turned my Master’s research on stream-dwelling insects into a novel.
Eventually, looking for a means of support closer to writing, I reinvented myself as an editor of manuscripts in the biological sciences. During this transition I started a family; soon after my husband’s job brought us to the Hill Country of Texas.
My two boys have grown up on a quiet gravel road where snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, and giant centipedes are viewed with curiosity. Here I remain a stranger in a stranger land, but I go to sleep hearing the sound of the chuck-will’s-widow in the quiet night.
Eva Silverfine 