Eva Silverfine

From living above her parents' hardware store in Brooklyn to living a mile down a gravel road in semi-rural Texas with her husband, two sons, and the local wildlife, Eva Silverfine has explored a variety of urban to rural landscapes. On that journey, she earned two degrees in the environmental sciences, worked in a research lab, and eventually retooled as a copyeditor. She freelances for several academic presses and writes personal narrative and fiction in the in-between spaces. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of journals; she has published a collection of essays, "Elastic Walls"; and her novels, "How to Bury Your Dog" and "Ephemeral Wings," have been published by Black Rose Writing.

Elastic Walls: From Brooklyn to Texas and Points in Between

Memoir

“Seemingly fixed, the walls of a house are really elastic, accommodating all sorts of things inside.” This collection of personal narratives, a memoir-in-vignettes, travels across time and place, reflecting on homes, family, relationships, pursuits, religion, and loss. From a childhood living above her parents’ hardware store in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn in the 1960s; to an adolescence in the beach community of Rockaway, where the shifting sands mirrored her mother’s departure; to a young adulthood studying science until she remembered earlier aspirations of being a writer; to a parenthood raising two sons one mile down a gravel road in the Hill Country of Central Texas, Eva Silverfine explores that which is enduring among life’s impermanent experiences.

How to Bury Your Dog

General Fiction

Lizzy has largely retreated from the world: she tends her adopted strays and goes to work, but she has forsaken lifelong pastimes and declines invitations from old friends. On the day she buries Happy, the abandoned basset hound she adopted years before, she learns a real estate developer is threatening the heart of her rural community—a tranquil pond and a relict stand of hemlocks. For Lizzy this is a magical place, hidden from the modern world.

Coaxed by an old friend to join a group fighting the development, Lizzy is reluctant—she wants to avoid both hope and him. But she realizes she can no longer keep the outside world at bay. As the battle over the development unfolds, Lizzy opens herself to two young neighbors who share her love of the natural environment—an awkward sixteen-year-old and an inquisitive ten-year-old. And as Happy’s elements return to the earth, the three neighbors experience their own extra-ordinary transformations.

Ephemeral Wings

Fantasy

Like many of us, Maggie is navigating her path through a complex world—except, her world is the stream.

Having lost her home to changes in the current, Maggie, a mayfly, is searching the stream for the richest of foods with which to nourish her brief flight in the world of air. But the stream, with its ever-changing currents, seems a confusing array of possibilities. Where are the richest of foods? How might she find them? And what are the qualities that makes one’s forage truly rich?

As Maggie travels the stream, she meets other streamlings—some malevolent, some benign—who offer her advice based on their own experiences within the stream. Through these meetings—from a midge who seeks to understand the stream by classifying the minute grains of the streambed to a water scorpion who tells Maggie her only value is as fish food—Maggie, unsure of herself, must define her own vision or risk missing the fulfillment that she seeks.