Katie Hall rides down a street in Italy during the Giro d’Italia. —Photo by Tornanti.cc

It was now several years ago, but Katie Hall remembers the enchantment of her first Giro d’Italia in vivid detail and bright colors.

The “Giro Rosa” as it’s usually known in cycling circles, is essentially the women’s Tour de France. Its competitors endure a brutal but beautiful 600-plus-mile, 10-day stage race through the muted browns and greens of central Italy. But mostly what Hall remembers is the pink.

The race route winds through some of Italy’s most scenic landscapes, landing in bustling  plazas festooned in blush-colored garlands. “It’s beautiful,” Hall says. “You ride through these  ancient town squares with pink ribbons everywhere and pink umbrellas hanging above.” (“Rosa” means pink in Italian; the race gets its name from the pink-papered newspaper that originally sponsored it.)

Although she was a self-described “pretty active kid” who played a lot of sports growing up, Hall’s childhood in Seattle was not one that necessarily foretold achievements in elite athletics like the Giro Rosa. “I was pretty bookish—one would maybe even say nerdy,” she says. And although she learned to ride a bike fairly early on, she didn’t even own one for most of her teenage years. “It wasn’t on my radar at all,” she says.

Nevertheless, Hall eventually found her way to Italy and the world of professional cycling. The competition there was fierce; women’s cycling races are often more intense than men’s because they’re shorter, she says. “There’s a lot of excitement and drama in it; it’s a really beautiful sport.”

Now, she counts her experiences there among her favorite memories in an unlikely but successful career in pro bicycling. After putting aside previous plans to study physical therapy to become a professional cyclist in 2013, Hall pivoted again in 2020 as the world changed around her. Despite being long-listed for the ill-fated Tokyo Olympics, she   made the difficult choice to walk away from a seven-year adventure in pro sports and pursue a   career she sees as more meaningful—one that has redefined her relationship with her body and her community.

Hall majored in chemistry at Pomona and for a while thought she might go into public health research. Her college years were also when bicycles reentered her life, though for the moment in a purely pragmatic role: She rented a house in Seattle with classmates one summer and bicycle-commuted to an internship in Redmond, 25 miles away. But long-distance bicycling didn’t come easily at first. “I would come from work and lie on my living room floor, and people would throw snacks at me,” she says. “I was destroyed.”

After graduation, Hall began a Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley, bike racing on the side in the hope of making friends who shared her interests. After a brief and disastrous stint on a mountain bike—“It was terrifying, and  I was basically last in everything I did”—she found her niche in road races. Here, finally, was something she was good at and loved. She competed in the National Championships her first year.

At the same time that she was discovering cycling, Hall was also learning what she didn’t love: spending all her time in a laboratory. She found the windowless basement workplaces stifling; the slow pace made her antsy. And there were too many steps between her work and the positive impact she hoped to have on society. Searching for a better option, she started observing in physical therapy clinics, a setting where she could work with people face-to-face and see immediately how her work impacted them.

But then, after a stint on the collegiate all-stars biking team, she was offered a professional contract on a team sponsored by the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare. It was a “now or never” opportunity, she thought, an adventure that would get her out of the windowless basement. Why not try it for a year for two?

She never expected to stay for seven.

Katie Hall celebrates her win in the 2018 Colorado Classic. —Photo by Jonathan Devich

One of the best parts of being a professional bicyclist, Hall says, is the free time. A person simply cannot train for 40 hours a week without injury, a limitation that left space for a multitude of hobbies and a leisurely pace. And bicycling brought Hall not just to Italy for the Giro Rosa but all over Europe; her last two years she lived in Spain half time. When she wasn’t training, she could explore, cook, relax. When she was on the clock, she could hone her skills at something she loved, along    with an international coterie of people who cared about the thing she cared about and who were  really, really good at it.

Plus, it felt great to win, and for someone who found the sport relatively late in life, Hall won a lot. She counts her win at the Tour of California on the Women’s World Tour in 2018 as her biggest cycling achievement. She’d already lost narrowly twice in the race, the year before by only a second to the reigning Olympic champion. That made her 2018 victory all the sweeter, a culmination of four years of tough and determined work.

It was work, even if it was also fun. The constant training could be depleting, and she couldn’t let herself have an off day. Being on the road got lonely at times, especially because her husband’s job meant they were separated for long stretches. And the pressure could really get to her. In bicycling, “there are 200 starters and one winner,” Hall says. Not winning meant letting her team down, especially once she took on the role of team leader at UHC. “You have five other people putting their whole heart and soul and faith in you,” she says. “And if you let them down, it feels bad!”

After five years on the team, the highs and lows started to wear on her. She’d won all the major races in America; she’d had her vindicating moment at the Tour of California. Her mind again drifted toward physical therapy. She even applied to some graduate programs.

But then the phone rang again. This time it was Boels-Dolmans, one of the best teams in Europe. European cycling was a rarified world, one she’d been intimidated by until now. Her teammates would be the Olympic champion, the world champion, and their respective runner-ups. Again she took a chance; again she seized the moment. “This is this adventure I’m having right now, and then I’m going to go back and work a job,” she thought to herself. “So, why not ride my bike around the world?”

Like many people, Hall says ruefully, “I had this really nice and tidy plan before pandemic.” She’d trained all year with her new teammates. On a high from her recent successes, she found herself on a long-list for the American Olympic team, slated to compete in Tokyo in August 2020.  The last race of the year would be the World Championships, on September 26. Her physical therapy graduate school program at the University of Washington started on September 29. She’d use that weekend to move to Seattle and start a new life. Easy!

But, as happened with so many 2020 goals, the universe had other plans. Though races started getting canceled in early spring, Hall kept training, never knowing which might go forward and which might not. Then, when she flew home to California for three weeks for a planned trip, she simply never flew back.

Suddenly back in the U.S. and unsure when things might get back to normal, she struggled to keep training at home, fitting in interval sessions and “bikepacking” trips with friends around the more standard baking projects and TV binges. That’s also how she ended up setting a brief world record “Everesting” a hill in her neighborhood—a niche bicycling sport that involves traversing a hill enough times to equal the height of Mount Everest. In this case, that hill was Bonny Doon in Santa Cruz, California; Hall biked up and down it 28 times in just over 10 hours, as part of a fundraiser for COVID-19 relief. Though her record was quickly beaten by other cyclists, she still thinks of the experience as a highlight of 2020. “It felt like something I could do,” she says.

As the pandemic stretched on and professional bicycling didn’t come back to life, Hall had to make a tough choice: Should she keep pushing at training, preparing for eventual races and maybe the Olympics? Or should she finally do what she had always intended and start a new life as a physical therapist? Her announcement that she would retire surprised many in the bicycling world. She seemed to be at the top of her game. How could she walk away now?

But the year, unexpected as it was, had presented an opportunity for reflection, she says.  Living through a global pandemic reminded her of her original goal to help people. She saw that with bicycling shut down, “the world wasn’t worse off. I wanted to have a job where, if we  stop doing it, it matters.”

Walking away from even the possibility of the Olympics was difficult, but Hall downplays what she calls the “slimmest chance” that she might have competed, considering the other cyclists sharing space on the long-list. Instead, what she takes away is the achievement of being included  at all. “It was a huge honor to be on that list and really cool to think about how far I’ve come in  cycling,” she says.

Katie Hall poses with her bike on the campus of the University of Washington.

So it was that Hall packed up her things and became a full-time student at the University of Washington in September 2020, attending in-person classes three days a week. “I’m really grateful for how they’re navigating the COVID measures so far,” she says. “It’s such a physical thing; it’s in the name. It would be really hard to learn entirely online.”

Aside from the changes in career and continent, her biggest challenge has been “transitioning from body to brain,” from several hours a day out in the sunshine to what can feel like eons in front of a computer or buried in books. Now there’s homework to be done and anatomy to be learned; this semester she’s excited to move from the extremities to the spine and trunk. Sometimes if she’s too antsy, she’ll ride her exercise bike while she watches lectures. And she calls spending time in the cadaver lab “mind-blowingly cool.”  (Plus, now she gets to ride her bike purely for the pleasure of it. “It’s a refreshing feeling to not be so tired from training and be excited to get out every single time,” she says.)

Studying physical therapy is also giving her a profound new perspective on bodies—both hers and others’. For seven years, she worked on getting as good as she could at a specific movement, an endeavor that necessitated concentrating deeply on herself. When she wasn’t training, she was thinking about training, or thinking about how to think about training: how to be “1% better at pedaling,” how to organize her workouts, how to recover after difficult sessions.

“It’s a pretty self-centered career,” she says. “To be good, you have to really focus on your recovery, your nutrition, your sleep quality.”  She appreciates that physical therapy will allow her to work and think more about other people and how to help them achieve their goals. “My goals were pretty elite-level movement,” she says, and figuring out how to do that movement without pain. She can apply that to helping even her patients who are just trying to make it through the day.

That’s gotten her started thinking about how she’d like to focus in her future career as well. She came in with the idea that she’d want to work with endurance athletes, drawing on her personal experience to help them reach the top  of their sports. But the more she learns, the more she wants to learn. Maybe acute care could be a good fit; maybe women’s health work would be fulfilling.

She sees this adjustment as just another step  in the flexible, elastic path that’s led her here. Olympics or no Olympics, she says, physical therapy is not a rebound but rather an organic and long-awaited step in a life that’s had its share of unexpected detours. “Cycling was not ever a  career I was going to be able to do forever,” she says. All cyclists, no matter how talented, need  another plan, and this is hers. “I’m really excited about where I am,” she says. “I feel like I’m in  the right place.”

Click click click. Videotape is the focus of Will Voigt’s first job after his 1998 Pomona graduation—collecting it and editing it for the San Antonio Spurs. He is a peon in the kingdom of professional basketball coaching, his only power the dicing and splicing of game tape. Start, stop, rewind, pause, fast-forward—the VCR controls are squares, triangles and hash marks, some of the same symbols coaches use to communicate basketball plays.

That basic code of basketball is something Voigt knows well from competing for his tiny Vermont high school three hours north of the gym where James Naismith invented the sport with peach baskets as goals. In the NBA org chart, the assistant video coordinator is barely listed, but in Voigt’s case, it gives him a seat on the bench where Pomona-grown head coach Gregg Popovich and assistant Mike Budenholzer ’92 held court.

The Spurs gig didn’t turn into a trailer for his own version of Hoosiers. He didn’t move up and around the NBA. Instead, Voigt’s own education and mastery of basketball coaching would be a peculiar string he kept unspooling, to Norway, back to Vermont, California, China, Angola, and even the 2016 Rio Olympics with the Nigerian national team. He’s bounced from continent to continent, most recently landing in Germany at the height of the pandemic to coach the Telekom Baskets Bonn in the Basketball Bundesliga.

If you lose track of where in the world Will Voigt is coaching, you can usually find him on YouTube, sharing the artful ways basketball is played far from the NBA. Now he’s starring in videos instead of taping others, and friends and strangers are watching, backing up, clipping, studying. Trying to get an edge from Will Voigt.

“Will is a little wacky, and his story has played out that way,” said Budenholzer, now head coach of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks. “In San Antonio, he was there anytime for anyone who needed anything, because everyone mattered, from the bottom of the ladder as a video guy to the top. Everyone contributes whatever is needed to the team’s growth. Young coaches can be fascinated with the NBA, but there are only so many teams and jobs, so you have to be willing to go anywhere. Will is the greatest example of taking that advice to new places that are almost unheard of in the NBA.”

Tipoff

Everyone matters in unincorporated Cabot, Vermont.

When Voigt was 5, voters in the city of Burlington, 60 miles west, elected a new mayor named Bernie Sanders. The most famous export is the cows’ milk that’s used to make Cabot cheese, which comes from a local co-op. In 2019, the population was 189. “Indomitable people,” Calvin Coolidge said of Vermonters, “who almost beggared themselves to serve others.”

Voigt practiced shooting to a goal in his family’s barn, where birds would build nests between the net and backboard when Voigt went into soccer and baseball seasons. Every athlete who could play, did. Voigt, a point guard, led his team through state playoffs against Vermont’s smallest schools and graduated valedictorian in a class of 18. He also played piano because his mother, Ellen, who had served as Vermont’s state poet, and his dad, Francis, who had started the New England Culinary Institute, insisted he do something besides sports. When it came to his college, they insisted on strong liberal arts. “They would not budge,” Voigt recalls.

Due east, over the White Mountains and into Maine, is the  town that Bill Swartz had left to become head soccer coach at Pomona-Pitzer. When Voigt reached out, Swartz recalled thinking, “I can definitely take a chance on this guy. I’ve always thought that players from those New England states had qualities that were difficult to put on paper. Will had a good sense of who he was and how he fit in.”

With Voigt as a backup forward on the soccer team, the Sagehens won the 1996 Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. With less fanfare but more foreshadowing, Voigt performed in a mock Congress with Claremont McKenna students, playing independent-minded Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords. “Will was a swing vote, in the middle of everything, talking to both sides and paying attention to everything,” noted Professor of Politics David Menefee-Libey. “It makes sense that he’d become a coach.” Voigt didn’t see it then. When he graduated in 1998 in political science, he expected to go to law school and become a sports agent. Basketball was calling.

First half

Earlier in the century, the sunny beaches of Los Angeles had inspired tire retreader William J. Voit to invent an inflatable rubber ball. He vulcanized it to create the modern basketball. The summer after college, Will Voigt bounced into the Long Beach State Pyramid for the NBA free agent league. He hoped to hang with agents, and one asked Voigt to coach a team led by Duke’s Ricky Price. “The players were trying to shine and show teams what they could do, and Will took it so seriously,” Price said. “He even put in a defense—for a summer league? I thought he was auditioning for a coaching spot for real.” This—plus an internship with the Los Angeles Clippers and Pomona ties—helped him get to the San Antonio Spurs’ sideline.

“Good or bad, I have had a confidence in myself that is generally unjustified,” Voigt said. “Like I have never been afraid of the moment. That helped me in San Antonio, being able to keep it real. I could be myself. If I stopped and thought about being a small-time Vermont kid on the NBA court with one of the best coaches in the history of the game, I would be paralyzed.”

Voigt had ventured into college basketball coaching when a voice from his past opened an unexpected door. His high school coach Steve Pratt, in Chicago to train players for college and the NBA draft, was asked if he knew anyone who could coach a pro team in Norway immediately. Its American coach had decided not to show. “I have the guy,” Pratt said.

Halftime

To say that Voigt, then 27, brought passion to the Ulriken Eagles is incomplete. He also loves arguing. In Oslo, the Eagles were down 26 points to the league’s best team when Voigt got ejected right before halftime. Pratt was visiting, and heard Voigt’s last words to his team: “Screw this! You have nothing to lose. Just go beat their ass!” And they did.

Second half

A vote brought Voigt back to Vermont, when he was elected coach of the Vermont Frost Heaves, a startup in the American Basketball Association. Yes, elected by Vermonters given ballots by team owner and Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff. “Wouldn’t it be great to have someone who was deep into hoop and who can see the larger world out there?” Wolff wondered. The Frost Heaves won two straight ABA championships, which had only been done before once, by the Indiana Pacers.

“My first impression of Will? I got a knock on my door at the Ho Hum Motel in Burlington, and God knows who was going to show up,” said John Bryant, a signee who had just flown in from China, now an assistant coach with the Chicago Bulls. “Will didn’t even look like a player much less a coach. He has that baby face. He couldn’t be the right guy, but he was.” Voigt moved on to five years with the Bakersfield Jam in the NBA D-League, where he left a memorable impression on his team’s Nigerian-American players. When the Nigeria Basketball Federation needed a coach, it picked Voigt, who had just wrapped a gig with the Shanxi Dragons of the Chinese Basketball Association. Voigt coached the Nigerians to the African title and one of only a dozen spots in the 2016 Rio Olympics. Despite winning only one game in Rio, Voigt had sealed his reputation, and the next team to sign him was Nigeria’s fierce rival Angola. In Luanda in 2018, Angola was practicing in the Estadio da Cidadela when a large light fixture fell from the ceiling, barely missing Voigt and nearby players. “At that stage, I had been in Africa so long, that didn’t faze me as much as it should have,” Voigt said.

He tweeted the near-miss with video footage. Just like in San Antonio, the cameras were rolling in Luanda, too. But now Voigt was becoming a more seasoned coach in a setting that was less star-driven, more Cabot-like. Even the international basketball court, at 28 by 15 meters, is slightly smaller. “More ball movement, more people movement,” said Budenholzer. “We all try to do similar things as coaches, but the international coaches and teams buy into it more, and when everybody is touching the ball and moving, it is a more inclusive way of playing.”

African players taught Voigt an intuitive defense that fascinated him. Defending players typically must react in seamless actions when the other team drives to the basket: cover their player, help defend against the ballhandler, rotate to help other defenders, and then recover to their assigned player. The Africans simplified this. When the ballhandler beat the primary defender, the next defender rotated into that gap, leaving a gap that the next defender filled.

Voigt calls this defense the peel switch. “Most of the teams I coach have to be different to find a competitive edge, so when I saw this, I knew it was something different that would help us play to our strengths,” Voigt said. “Teams that do this are really good at communicating, and I liked exploring something new like this rather than doing what we always do.”

Last year, when the pandemic created a gap in his chances to coach, Voigt did a peel switch of his own, turning to teaching this and other basketball strategies online until he got the call from Telekom Baskets Bonn.

Final score

Voigt is now 44, and when he looks back on his vagabond career—the video highlights, if you will—Pomona’s liberal arts training shows in his open-mindedness, critical thinking, engagement in the larger world and appreciation for multiple perspectives. He left campus at the end of one century to embrace a rapidly changing world while hopscotching between rectangular hardwood landing pads. He speaks six languages.

“If you look at all the places I’ve been, it’s hard to imagine any plan that would have taken me on that route,” he said. “I think everyone aspires to be and do what they can at the highest level, and for me that was to be an NBA coach one day. But when you get locked into that, as soon as you go somewhere, you are trying to  get somewhere else. You won’t enjoy yourself, and you won’t give everything you have. I’ve embraced jumping on opportunities when they’ve presented themselves and doing it ‘all in’ and seeing what that leads to next.”

The Voigt video is still rolling, so stay tuned for the next episodes, wherever they’ll be filmed.

Professor of Politics Pierre Englebert has never had any illusions about becoming a rock star. He’s more than content with his day job as a tenured professor at Pomona College. But his on-again, off-again love affair with writing and performing music has been on again for the past couple of years, and the evidence is mounting at a range of free, online music platforms. To understand how a noted scholar of African politics became a veritable one-man rock band, PCM invites you to step briefly into his musical shoes.

Learn a few basic guitar chords from a Scout leader as a Cub Scout in Brussels, Belgium. Get your own guitar for your birthday, and take lessons from a high school student. Ask your parents to have the family piano tuned so you can practice chords.

Start your own band—named Rhapsody for the famous song by Queen—at age 16. Play for the fun of it, but more importantly, to get the attention of girls. Sing in English despite having only an elementary grasp of the language.

Write your first song in high school. In college, form a better band—named (inexplicably) The Ice Creams. Go to lots of rock concerts by bands like The Police and UB40, and play more than 50 gigs, once as the opener for a Tom Robinson concert.

Cut your first and only record at age 20 on a local label and see your music video appear—once—on Belgian TV. As your interest in African politics takes precedence, dissolve the band and drop music almost entirely for the next dozen years or so.

Buy an electric piano with your first paycheck from the World Bank in 1988. Use it sparingly until the mid-1990s, when you resume songwriting as a creative outlet while working on your dissertation. Get an 8-track recorder and sound-engineer your own songs, one track at a time.

Write a few new songs, including one for your wife titled “When You Shave Your Legs.” After getting your Ph.D., lose yourself in work. Store your instruments under the bed, where they will mostly gather dust for more than 20 years.

Notice a flyer for guitar lessons while on sabbatical in 2018. Decide to expand your musical chops by taking guitar lessons. Then take it a step farther by auditing music classes with Pomona professors Tom Flaherty and Eric Lindholm.

Start writing songs again, using software called Guitar Pro. Then with another program called Logic, build them out a track at a time. Send the “pre-mix” to a studio in Los Angeles to be professionally mastered.

Under the moniker “Not a Moment Too Soon,” produce your first album, titled “Back to Plan A.” Post it on SoundCloud. Then sign up with a distributor to post your tracks on a range of platforms, from Apple Music to Spotify.

Post your second album—titled “Well,”(including the comma)—with cover art by Pomona student Sei M’pfunya. Plan to keep sharing your songs as long as you find it rewarding and the songs give people joy.

Both of Englebert’s albums are available free at his website: www.not-a-moment-too-soon.com, and at such online repositories as SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.

Heartthrob
Del Balboa Cafe al Apartheid and Back
By Susana Chávez-Silverman
University of Wisconsin Press | 336 pages | $34.95

Some say Romance Languages and Literature Professor Susana Chávez Silverman has outdone no less than J.R.R. Tolkien. One author points out that while Tolkien invented a number of languages, Chávez Silverman “has turned Spanglish into an astute literary tongue capable of baroque depths.” The International Latino Book Awards literally seconded that—her book recently won second place in the memoir category.

Chávez Silverman is known for seamlessly alternating languages. But that is style. Even more than that, what she does in her new book, Heartthrob (subtitled Del Balboa Cafe al Apartheid and Back), is storytelling. Using her letters and diary entries as a palimpsest, Chávez Silverman chronicles a love affair that is both deep and delicate, fiery and fragile, set against politics and place—and one that takes her from San Francisco to South Africa.

PCM’s Sneha Abraham chatted with Chávez Silverman via Zoom (or as the professor likes to call it: “Zoomba”) about language, love, location and more. This interview has been condensed and edited for space and clarity.

PCM: Tell me a little bit about your family and how language was used in your household.

Chávez Silverman: Well, that’s a very intriguing question because my current project is actually delving into a bit of my family history, particularly on my mom’s side. And that’s something that I haven’t really written much about—my family.

My dad was a Jewish-American Hispanist born in the Bronx, and my mom was a Chicana. She was born in Visalia in California and grew up in San Diego. They met in summer of 1949. It was kind of like a study abroad experience. My mother got a fellowship from the Del Amo Foundation, I think. They were both on a study program in Spain. That’s where they met.

And each of them had apparently a fairly serious paramour. But when they met, it was like a flechazo, like a love-at-first-sight thing. They got married in 1951, much to the disapproval of my dad’s mother in particular. I have my parents’ love letters, which were sent to me a couple of years ago by my youngest sister. She had inherited them when my mother passed. And there are quite a few.

And my mother’s parents were also not in favor of the union, particularly her father. My mother was the granddaughter of two ministers. Her maternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, and her paternal grandfather was a Methodist semi-itinerant preacher. This was in New Mexico. My mother’s parents eventually came around, to the point that my parents’ wedding was on their front lawn, performed by Samuel Van Wagner, my great-grandpa.

We grew up, mainly, English dominant-ish when I was very, very young. However, we were around relatives who spoke different languages. On my dad’s side, it was Yiddish and English. We weren’t too much in connection with my dad’s, but they were all back in New York. But on my mom’s side, we were very, very close to my mom’s parents, to my grandparents, my maternal Chavez grandparents, and they spoke Spanish and English or sometimes code-switched with all my grandmother’s siblings and relatives, etc. We often were there in San Diego with them.

And my dad played with language a lot. My mother did not encourage code-switching, but it has to do with the time that she grew up in, in the ’40s, and the particular prejudice she experienced. It was: You speak correct English or correct Spanish—no mixing! And it was all about assimilation. And my mother retained her Spanish. Her two sisters really did not.

But because my dad was on sabbatical, my first year of school was in Madrid, when I was 4 and 5. I was thrown into a Madrid kindergarten. That was one of my top traumas. I don’t have a lot of memories of my early childhood, but I remember that. That’s a horror because I was very shy, with minimal Spanish at first, and I was terribly bullied at school.

PCM: How does language work in your head? Are your dreams multilingual?

Chávez Silverman: Oh, yeah, very much so. As a matter of fact, dreams form a very crucial foundational kind of intertext. I always think of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, who said that many of the subjects of his stories came from dreams. A little grain or a little seed or even a full scene or images come from my dreams. I have a lot of access to my dreams.

I’m a proselytizer for dreams. I tell my students, “How many of you remember your dreams? If you don’t, here’s how to remember them and keep a dream journal, etc.” Because I think it’s very important.

But I dream in both Spanish and English, sometimes Italian, sometimes Afrikaans. And I also dream in languages that I don’t speak. Like, I wake up, and I know I was speaking German, which I don’t—I have a slight understanding, but not much. I don’t speak it.

PCM: When you write letters or crónicas, are you conscious of their potential of being published?

Chávez Silverman: Oh, yeah. Well, let’s see, initially, I wasn’t, as a matter of fact. This whole transformation or process started—I can date it very clearly to 2000, when I had won an NEH Fellowship to Argentina, and I had been living in Buenos Aires for a good part of a year. I would be there a total of 13 months.

And I was writing and emailing. I’ve always been a correspondent. Without my journals, which I recopied as letters, and letters that people returned to me and emails, my recent book, Heartthrob, could not have been written. I started sending these emails home from Argentina. I was meant to be writing a scholarly book on poetry, which I was working on.

But when I got back to the U.S., pretty soon, within a couple of weeks, I think, 9/11 hit. So, this is 2001. And I had a teenage son—he was 14 and started acting out. And I just felt very disoriented between 9/11 and reentry shock of being back after living abroad for a year.

And my editor himself said, “You know what? I can’t think that a book on Argentine poetry is going to be a big hit or a bestseller.” I mean, academic publishing was already starting to struggle. It was 20 years ago.

I had begun to send these—I had deliberately called them crónicas—and send them along with my letters to people. “How many of those do you have?” I said, “I don’t know—20, 30.” He said, “That’s your book.” So it was really Raphael Kadushin, my former editor at University of Wisconsin Press, who identified the work I was doing as publishable writing, as literature.

PCM: Heartthrob is very intimate. How is it to write to the bone?

Chávez Silverman: But I don’t, my darling. I mean, I’m really very glad that it gives that impression. But I actually consider myself to be a rather close-to-the-vest person. However, I know that my writing gives people the impression that I’m spilling my guts.

In my author’s note in Heartthrob, I’m citing the writer Wyatt Mason about Linn Ullmann, who is a Norwegian writer. And he writes, “She was not looking for reportorial evidence, even if she was writing a scene based in what she could recall. She allowed herself to see with the imagination. She gave herself the freedom to imagine what had been forgotten, not in an attempt to establish fact, but to find the truth.”

I thought that was brilliant. That quote kind of gets at that tension that comes out in my epigraph between truth and reality. So I’m very aware. I’m always negotiating when I’m writing—how much to share and how much to leave out.

Publishing and truth, you spilling out your whole guts, they don’t always go together. It’s about a process of negotiation. And I’m very aware of that.

PCM: This book takes you across the world. Can you talk a little bit about place and love and how one impacts the other?

Chávez Silverman: I had the sense—it’s hard for me to know what kind of wisdom comes with hindsight, but it’s a lot, you know. But even at the time, in the ’80s, I ended the relationship, but not because I didn’t love him or he didn’t love me. I was finding the place, South Africa, impossible for me. I was very politicized throughout my 20s, especially. It didn’t stop but it morphed—elements of practicality and motherhood and other things came in.

I don’t want to say I had a death wish, but it was pretty ridiculous to throw myself off that cliff and move to South Africa under apartheid, considering my political beliefs and the family that I grew up in and everything.          But I hate that. The heart wants what it wants.

I mean, it was love at first—it was a major flechazo, similar to my parents, ironically. My parents, by the way, met the Roland Fraser character in San Francisco. And both of them liked him. My mother was very fond of him. I’ve just discovered both he and my mother share a moon in Capricorn. Yes. I’m very into astrology as my friends, readers and students all know.

But it’s as if I felt something fundamentally shift between us. I’ve written that he got swallowed by the underworld, the undertow, not exactly of apartheid per se; he was very progressive for a privileged, white English South African at that time. But it wasn’t that. It was between the familial and sort of the societal structures and expectations of the northern suburbs of Joburg. He was the eldest of six, and the family expectations on him, and also his own double Capricorn personality—we were screwed, kind of, by the place, by the effect of the place on us.

And yet, as I also write in the book, it was almost as if upon sacrificing that relationship, which was really my true love, I became myself: a writer. And that’s how I see my writing really. I started thinking of myself as a writer in my mid-20s in South Africa.

We revisited our love story and saw that the feeling is the same, or it’s there still. And yet, for me, it’s still impossible. I don’t want to make a life in South Africa. It’s something that has inherent tensions and impossibilities that make it very powerfully seductive and also impossible. I tried to capture that in the book’s final sentence.

PCM: Love is not enough. Right? 

Chávez Silverman: Right.

PCM: With love, there’s an intensity and there’s also a breakability. Does that change over time?

Chávez Silverman: I have a tension between the heart and the head. So you can chalk it up to the stars, or chalk it up to the personality or whatever. Probably the signature word that a lot of people would apply to me would be “freedom.” People have said that I’m very iconoclastic in many ways.

And so, there was some part of me that railed against … I don’t think love, passion and domesticity go together very well, for example. So that wasn’t going to go over well in that South African mundo, which was going over to his parents’ for barbecue for lunch every Sunday and so on.

No. But we didn’t have any way of seeing that ourselves, madly in love in San Francisco, in New Orleans. You know, I couldn’t see that until I actually went there. I’m not at all sorry because, paradoxically, going there to South Africa also made me who I am in many ways. But as far as love, I mean, I can’t tell you anything except this: I have a very romantic heart, and I’m also intractably rebellious or freedom-oriented.