Filling the Silence

Interruptions can be a writer’s bane, but the one that took Ursula Hegi away from her latest novel, “Salt Dancers,” turned out to be a welcome intrusion.

A secondary character in her previous novel--German dwarf Trudi Montag--began knocking about in Hegi’s thoughts, demanding her own story.

So Hegi set “Salt Dancers” aside for more than two years and wrote “Stones From the River,” her acclaimed 1994 bestseller that deals with the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. The story is told primarily from the perspective of Montag, who understands “the agony of being different” and is herself at risk of persecution.

Hegi, who is spending the winter quarter as a visiting writer in the graduate program in writing at UC Irvine, says she wrote “Stones From the River” with an “absolute sense of urgency.”

But the long-simmering “Salt Dancers” benefited from the wait.

“It took me longer than any of my other books, and I think I needed that time of thinking about it and letting it sit,” says the German-born author, who is on the faculty at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Wash.

Based on a single scene Hegi wrote in the early ‘80s but didn’t begin writing in earnest until 1989, “Salt Dancers” (Simon & Schuster; $22) is the story of architect Julia Ives.

When Julia is 9, her mother suddenly vanishes from her and her brother’s lives, and her alcoholic father turns his physical and psychological abuse on her. Julia’s first marriage ends after she refuses to have children. Now 41 and single by choice, she discovers that she’s pregnant by her current lover. Overwhelmed by an unexpected yearning for motherhood, she feels compelled to confront her painful past. She returns to her father’s home in Spokane, which she left at 18 vowing never to return.

Explains Julia: “I was afraid I’d mess up my child’s life if I didn’t sort out before the birth why things had gone so terribly wrong with my family.”

The Los Angeles Times gave “Salt Dancers” a mixed review, calling the writing “strong and confident, [yet] Hegi’s relentless focus on Julia weakens her book.” The New York Times, however, gave it an unqualified rave: “a taut yet lyrical examination of emotional devastation and necessary forgiveness.”

But don’t ask Hegi if she had a particular message in mind when she began writing the novel.

“No! No!” she protests with a laugh during a recent interview. “That’s the last thing I want to do with anything that I write. I don’t set out to convey a message; I don’t set out to develop a theme, and I don’t start out with an idea. Really, it’s characters and the story that develops from them.”

Speaking in a German accent softened by 31 years away from the small Rhine river town near Dusseldorf where she grew up, Hegi, 49, elaborates:

“I don’t know what something is about when I start out, because if I did, I wouldn’t write it. For me, that element of discovery is really important.”

Hegi, who has taught creative writing and contemporary literature at Eastern Washington University since 1984, was invited to be a visiting writer at UCI after giving a reading of “Stones From the River” at the university in 1994.

She drove down from Washington in January, settling into a beachfront duplex in Newport Beach.

A divorced mother of two grown sons, Hegi lives in Nine Mile Falls, a tiny town on the Spokane River where, she says, “geese will cross in front of the post office, and they know you by name at the hardware store.”

Seated in a wood-framed easy chair facing a picture window only steps from the beach, Hegi says she’s on the phone every day to architect Gordon Gagliano, her partner of eight years. She misses Gagliano but not the weather back home, which recently dropped to 20 degrees below zero.

“I do like this,” she says with a grin, her sandaled feet propped up on the windowsill, a parade of bicyclists and joggers passing by on this unseasonably warm morning. “This is ideal, living at the beach and teaching. I go out there in the morning and do my tai chi and go for long walks.”

Hegi spends Monday afternoons conducting the fiction workshop at UCI. Another afternoon is devoted to student conferences, and she attends occasional readings at the university.

But she didn’t forget to pack her computer. It’s set up on a table in the living room, the makeshift work space cluttered with books, baskets stuffed with writing supplies, a soapstone figurine Gagliano gave her and other items she brought from home to give it “a familiar feeling.”

And just as she does at home five to six mornings a week, Hegi is at the computer by 9 for four to six hours of work. “I do honor the writing time the same way I honor the teaching time: I’m there,” she says.

*

As Hegi discusses her writing, one word repeatedly surfaces: “silence.”

It’s a theme that not only has infused three of Hegi’s novels but also her own life growing up in postwar Germany, where silence about the Holocaust was pervasive among the older generation that fought the war.

In “Salt Dancers,” it is the “destructive silence” between a child and a physically abusive parent.

The novel, Hegi says, grew out of a scene she wrote 12 years ago:

“Julia as a child is sitting on a windowsill when her father comes into her room offering her some chocolate. She can smell that he’s drunk, and she refuses the chocolate. He says, ‘Don’t you love me any more?’ She can’t answer because she doesn’t feel that love at the moment, and he says, ‘Say you love me.’ She won’t, and he beats her until she says it. And for her, that’s a real turning point, of course, in her relationship with her father.”

Once she had written that scene, Hegi says, “the rest of the material started to gather itself around, sort of attaching onto that scene. But the book took me a long time to write.”

*

She spent much of her time thinking about the novel’s characters, particularly Julia’s father.

“What I had developed initially was the violent side of him, and I knew that that was not enough,” she says. “I needed to know that character much much deeper, in a much more complex way.”

The novel’s opening scene came to her only in the last year of writing the book: On Julia’s 4th birthday, her father teaches her the salt dance: Sprinkling a line of salt on the living room floor, he positions her bare feet on top of his shoes and, as they dance, he tells her to leave everything she feared or no longer wants behind that line.

“Once I had that scene and could see the father in a really positive, playful and caring way with his children, then it sort of became a window through which to look and see other aspects of that character,” Hegi says.

“All Julia remembers when she returns to Spokane to confront her father is the violence. She has blocked out anything that was good and loving about him. So it’s very important for her to reconnect with a fuller picture of him.”

Hegi says people have come up to her after public readings of “Salt Dancers” and asked her, “How old is your daughter now?”

“They’re sort of shocked when I say, ‘No, I don’t have a daughter,’ ” she says.

But for Hegi, it’s insignificant whether she has experienced something she writes about.

“What’s important is that as I write about the characters, I experience their lives then, and I’m changed as a result of that,” she says.

To write from the point of view of a dwarf woman in “Stones From the River,” for example, she says, “I was about 3 1/2 feet tall when I was writing it, and I’m 5-foot-7 the rest of the time. But I need to go inside the characters.”

Hegi says she has never written a book with such a sense of urgency as “Stones From the River.”

“It was very exciting and scary at times,” she says.

One night, she recalls, “Gordon and I were driving from Portland, Ore., to Spokane, and it was dark, and he was playing Beethoven’s Fifth on the stereo, and I had one idea about Trudi Montag. I started writing in the dark on a yellow lined pad, and I filled most of it. We could feel her presence in the car with us.”

To someone who doesn’t write, Hegi says, “that will sound strange. But people who write know exactly what I mean. I mean, we felt she was living in the house with us. It was incredible. That’s when I just went with it. I bought a tape recorder because the material was coming faster than I could write it down.”

Hegi says she writes anywhere from 50 to 100 drafts of a novel, time spent “developing and discovering the material.”

“With each revision, you discover layers of the characters and their stories,” she says. “It really is a discovery process, and I feel I’m going deeper with each revision. I see that as an essential part of the writing process.”

At the same time, she says, she’s working on the language. As with the poetry she writes, “I really work with each single word. Up to about 12 years ago, I used to write fiction and poetry as something separate, and then they started coming together for me, where now I write fiction as if I were writing poetry.”

Hegi has been writing almost as long as she has been reading.

By age 6 she had decided to become a writer. “It seemed at the time to be the only thing that could possibly be more exciting than reading,” she says. She wrote stories and poems, always feeling odd because she didn’t know anyone else who wrote. She still has some of the “terrible, gloomy teenage poetry” she wrote at 14 and 15 and the “half of a novel” she wrote on lined note paper at 16.

In 1965, at 18, Hegi came to the United States, doing translations and accounting for a German company in Fort Lee, N.J.

“I would have gone anywhere,” she says. “I wanted to get away from Germany. I think part of it had to do with being 18, thinking you can start a new life somewhere else wherever and whenever you decided.”

The other part of it, she says, “was the very oppressive, authoritarian society that I grew up in--very strict, very Catholic. My mother died when I was 13, and I think if she had lived, my family situation would have been very very different. But as a result, it just was not very close, and I really wanted to get away.”

Married at 21, she returned to school at 27 after her sons were born. She earned an undergraduate degree in English and a graduate degree in creative writing at the University of New Hampshire, where she taught in the English department for five years before being hired to teach in the graduate writing program at Eastern Washington.

It wasn’t until “Floating in My Mother’s Palm,” her 1991 novel about a girl growing up in postwar Germany, however, that Hegi first tapped her homeland in her writing.

“It took me a long time to start looking at Germany,” she says.

Hegi, who became an American citizen after her first son was born, says that after arriving in the United States, she was “very uncomfortable with the fact that I came from Germany.”

Born in 1946, she grew up in Germany during “a time when no one talked about the Holocaust, where there was an absolute silence” about it. But once in America, she began learning about the Holocaust, realizing that Americans her age knew much more about it than she did. She remembers feeling “a deep, deep discomfort in coming from a country that had murdered millions and millions of Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and political prisoners.”

*

First with “Floating in My Mother’s Palm” and much more so with “Stones From the River,” Hegi says, she “broke through that silence and started writing about what had happened in Germany through the perspectives of characters.”

From those novels has grown her first book of nonfiction, due next year. Tentatively titled “Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America,” it consists of interviews she has conducted with German-born Americans of her generation.

“I wanted to examine what they’re doing with that silence in their lives, and I’m looking at their whole life stories, so it was a real different book project,” she says. “A lot of them told me, ‘I’ve never told this to anyone before.’ So they gave me some incredible material.”

After moving to the United States, Hegi says, there were many years where she would like to have said she was from Sweden--anyplace but Germany.

“What I’ve done with my writing, especially in the last 10 or 12 years, is to look at it very very closely. And much of it has been very painful. But, on the other hand, I think in looking at something and looking at it very closely is a very important step.”

And Hegi is not finished tapping her German roots in her work. She’s working on a novel dealing with German immigrants in this country that, she says, expresses some of the feelings she has about being an immigrant.

“I think where I am in terms of my own life is I’m much more aware of being connected to two cultures and about the conflicts it has created for me and also the richness it has brought to my life.”