Out of Silence Come the Writer’s Great Works

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 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, 1995) 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.”

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. 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. “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.”

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 anymore?’ 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.”

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 to Spokane, and it was dark, and he was playing Beethoven’s Fifth [Symphony] 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.”

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 ad 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 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.

First with “Floating in My Mother’s Palm” and much more so with “Stones From the River,” Hegi “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 with German-born Americans of her generation.

“What I’ve done with my writing 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.”