The Silent Hen follows the lives of a fearless Virginia spy and a young Jewish girl as they navigate the complexities of WWII and the aftermath of 9/11, in a poignant story of love, bravery, and the resilience of the human spirit. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

During WWII my mother and father both served in OSS, the forerunner to the CIA. Like the characters, Lucy and Gordon, they married in Cairo, Egypt. I was born shortly after the war, and my younger brothers and I picked up on our parents’ interests in foreign relations. Although they kept secrets about their wartime service, our dinner table conversations were often about strategies for promoting civil rights and foreign and domestic justice. It was not unusual for refugees from different parts of the world to stay in our home while they looked for places to resettle. I took the thread of one of my mother’s rare stories, that of a little girl she befriended in Cairo, and decided to blend that with the testimony of a Holocaust survivor who had been helped by a Muslim family. The story at the beginning of The Silent Hen of Lucy taking a trolley into Washington, DC, and getting in an Army truck to sneak back to her hometown for OSS training is something that happened to my mother.

The characters of Lucy and Bella are both captivating and complex. How did you develop their personalities throughout the novel?

That’s a good question. My main career was as a psychiatrist, and I have never been able to stop myself from trying to understand people. I ask my characters the same kinds of questions I tried to teach my patients to ask themselves.

The theme of resilience amid adversity is a powerful aspect of The Silent Hen. How did you balance the novel’s darker themes of loss and sorrow with threads of hope and idealism?

I guess that’s Pandora’s box, isn’t it? There was a time when my field, psychiatry, emphasized uncovering primitive emotions, which would be the equivalent to opening a box of traumas. In psychotherapy, bringing unconscious darkness to consciousness was never enough to sustain recovery. As in the Greek myth, in which the last thing to fly out of Pandora’s box was hope, recovery from trauma requires hope. I suppose these ideas work their way into my writing, especially in these current times of international conflict that so much resemble the times in my book. If individuals persist in caring for one another despite our conflicts and failings, I think we have a chance. One of my brothers has worked trying to promote reconciliation between Christian and Muslim groups in a war-torn area, and I wanted to write a novel that captured that spirit calmly enough that people could take it in.

What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?

Another good question. I’m working on a mystery novel set in Tidewater, Virginia, about a woman psychiatrist, her foster daughter, and the problems that ensue when they run afoul of a militaristic NGO located nearby. I’m not sure when I’ll be done, but I have other projects going on at the same time.

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