Throughout her writing life, Joan Silverman has tuned her ear to the quotidian. Her range of considerations is remarkable: peanut butter, ceiling leaks, cooking competitions, the riot of the natural world, the conditionality of friendship, the inevitability of personal loss. In Someday This Will Fit, she has selected and collected the work of decades and, taken together, her short pieces register shifts in society as well as shifts in an ordinary life.  Kirkus Reviews has called the collection “edgy, whimsical, and poignant.” Silverman has published widely in journals and magazines throughout the country, contributing op-eds, essays, reviews and articles to many publications including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, and Horticulture. – Jane Brox.  

Brox led a conversation with Silverman for The National.

Q: You’ve chosen the pieces for your book from the many hundreds you’ve written over the years. What prompted you to collect the them?

A: I’d been writing short essays for ages, and they had run in various newspapers around the country. There were hundreds of pieces over time, and many of them kept circling around a common set of themes — broadly, slices of daily life. When I started to re-read these essays several years ago, I thought about consolidating them. I wanted to bring them together under one roof — not unlike gathering a bunch of far-flung relatives for a reunion. 

Q: Like a patchwork quilt, Someday This Will Fit possesses its own coherence. How did you decide what to include?

A: Well, that’s the $64,000 question. In one sense, the book was already written, in pieces, over many years, so the task wasn’t the writing, as such. The real work was figuring out how so many disparate pieces could play well together. For example, there’s an essay from 1998, next to one from 2010, alongside another from last year. The pieces were never intended to share a stage — each was a solo performer in its earlier form. But they all share two key elements — namely, my voice and point of view. For better or worse, those have remained constants throughout.

In the initial phase, culling the herd was straightforward. Maybe 200 or so essays were easily disqualified for being too topical, dated, or niche — I was looking for the evergreens that felt as if they were written, broadly, in the present.

The goal wasn’t just to collect the individual essays; it was to reconfigure the pieces as a narrative — a story that would read smoothly from one vignette to the next. Figuring out how to organize the essays was a huge puzzle. I made countless charts and “roadmaps” to help me piece together possible sequences — groupings that made sense. I had strips of paper with the first and last lines of each vignette, in hopes of creating on-ramps and off-ramps among the pieces. I quickly discovered that there was no single correct sequence, but lots of excellent possibilities. It was all a bit crazy-making at times.

Q: You focus on the stuff of daily life.  Can you speak about the challenges and the rewards of writing about post-it notes, Chinese food, old houses?

A: Many of us use Post-its every day. They’re as familiar as the back of our own hands. So, when you sit down to write about them, there’s not much that hasn’t already been said countless times. And that’s precisely the challenge: To find an unfamiliar perspective on something that’s so familiar. And that’s true of the familiar, in general. It’s easy to add more of the same old, same old; much harder to do something that’s in some way fresh or different. At least that’s the goal.

But to your point: It doesn’t matter how scintillating one’s life may be. We all spend a large chunk of our lives in the ordinary and the familiar. To me, exploring that is endlessly interesting.

Q: To write briefly about something, and to also convey a sense of completion is often no easy thing. What do you consider to be the greatest demands of short-form writing?

A:  I suppose the single toughest thing is getting it right, and quickly. In short essays, there’s little room to expand or reiterate — you have to use the time and space concisely. And there are fewer places to hide. I always think of the difference between a woven tablecloth and a placemat. With the tablecloth, there’s ample fabric, so flaws in the stitch or design will often go unnoticed — unless, of course, they’re front and center! A placemat, on the other hand, is right there, under your nose, with no excess material. If there’s a stain or flaw, it’s more likely to be inescapable. I think that analogy basically holds true for long vs short form writing.

As for a sense of completion, I suspect that you and I might approach this issue differently. When one spends months or years on a long-form project, as you do, I’m guessing it’s important to reach conclusions, or an ending that’s fairly definitive. In short forms, I don’t really feel that pressure. By definition, the shorter form often precludes being exhaustive or complete. In my short essays, I aim for a compete slice of something, rather than a complete whole. 

But at bottom, the underlying issues are the same. Language poses the same fundamental challenge for all writers. Unlike, say, music or dance, language is always “about” something; it’s representational. It’s never actually the thing itself.  So there’s always a distance between our words and what those words are trying to convey. We’re always trying to penetrate that distance — and that’s equally true of short and long-form writing.

Q:  You write: “A middle-aged body has a structure and form distinct from that of its younger self.”  So does a middle-aged mind. Did you find yourself thinking differently about some of your conclusions as you went back over your earlier work?  And were you tempted to revise some of the pieces to more closely align them with the way you see things now? 

A:  Luckily, I’ve maintained good relations with my former selves, so this isn’t an issue. I can look at my writing from, say, 20 years ago, and respect its point of view, without needing to revise anything. It stands on its own, even though I may see things differently in the present. I’d say there’s a lot of that duality, or disparity, in the book.

And of course, we all approach things differently at different stages in our lives. For instance, there’s a piece in the book on how we assess the value of things, which was written during my forties. It’s not a piece that I could write today— it has a sort of broody quality, as I read it now. But I can still appreciate the sort of wrestling aspect of it in that younger (mid-forties!) version of myself.

Q:  Could you detect changes in your writing as you went through your work?  Were there times in your life when the tone of the work seemed to change?  I’m thinking in particular of the pieces concerning your mother’s illness and death, which possess a certain gravity of their own.

A:  No question, my writing has gone through different phases, as it might over a long period of time. Interestingly, you raise the question of writing about my mother’s illness and death. She died at a time when I was still working as a feature writer, though increasingly fed up with it. I had been writing profiles — I loved writing about people. But the final straw was a profile I had written about a prominent plant breeder. The piece was about to run, and the editor called and asked if I could write a how-to sidebar for the home gardener. And my feeling was: This is a profile of a scientist who has devoted his entire life to developing a major commercial crop, and I’m supposed to add a user-friendly sidebar for the home gardener?

I left feature writing soon after that. Actually, I left journalism altogether for several years, and took on a variety of editing and consulting projects. When I went back, an editor suggested that I try my hand at essays and commentary. Much to my surprise, I loved these new forms and the freedom they offered. The following couple of years turned out to be the most prolific writing period of my life, as if I was making up for lost time. I also wrote some of my best work during that period, certainly some of the weightiest. And it was the first time I had written about my mother’s death.

Q:  To go back over the work of two decades must have been, among other things, an emotional undertaking.  Did you reevaluate your writing life during the process of completing the book?

A:  So you might think! But, no, there was no sturm und drang, or re-evaluation. Which was probably useful, as it allowed me to edit the book with both a necessary distance and sympathy.

Much as I love to write, I also love not writing. I’ve always found writing intrusive. What I mean is, when I’m actively working on something, the process often entails a sort of hyper-focus that I find slightly obnoxious. It intrudes on other parts of life that are no less important, and often more important. Part of the process is that I don’t allow any piece of writing to leave my desk until it’s fully resolved, with all of the tiny, niggling decisions that make writers pull their hair out. My aim is to leave nothing for editors to “fix.” So, when I finish a piece — an essay, book review, whatever — I’m really finished with it!

But to your point: When I look back at my essays, some of them definitely serve as personal markers along the way. And they absolutely reflect the state of journalism in terms of their timing and frequency, and the cutting of budgets at newspapers everywhere. It’s no coincidence that I changed course and started reviewing books a dozen or so years ago. Of course, I still write essays, though less frequently, with so few outlets these days. All the more reason that I’m delighted to see my book out in the world.

Jane Brox is the author of five books.  Her most recent, Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives, was named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times.