Gloria Spielman

Chatting with Nicki Richesin of The Children's Book Review about mime, writing about Marcel Marceau, silence and the writing life.

 This post was my second guest blog for the Jewish Book Council and appeared on The Forward.

It all started back in March 1999. We'd just got our very first home Internet connection and I was setting off to navigate cyberspace and figure out what exactly was out there in that World Wide Web thing that everyone was going on about. These were the days of the Netscape browser and dial-up internet, which hogged the phone line and meant that you could either surf or make a phone call but not at the same time. My husband had assured me that the Internet would help my writing. I was about to discover he was right.

This post was my third guest blog for the Jewish Book Council and appeared on The Forward.

 One of the upshots of all the reading and thinking I did for “Marcel Marceau: Master of Mime,” was that I ended up doing a lot of thinking about something I’d never thought that much about before — silence and its power.

 It never used to be like this. I wasn’t always on a quest for quiet. An only child, I yearned for noise, for hustle and bustle, a busy house with lots of people and their comings and goings. Who the hell needed quiet? Quiet was boring, unnerving, depressing, threatening even. A void to be filled. So, on went the TV the second I came home, the radio in the kitchen, a favourite tape, anything, as long as there was noise. Anyway, how could you do homework with no music? I had a friend at elementary school, who came from an odd family. They were odd as they had no TV. I remember thinking. What do they do for noise? It must be terrible, all that quiet. (Ironically, we are bringing up five children without a TV, but that’s a tale for another day.)