Lizi Gilad Silver: “I’ve lived my life feeling out of place geographically as well as physically, perpetually searching and asking where and what is home. The answer I’ve come to, over and over again, is literature. This is where I feel most at home. I find shelter in books and writing. A place beyond body, God, and land; my home is the written word.”
The first time I spoke with Lizi Gilad Silver (’14) was in early 2012. I’d just read her application to the MFA program and found myself in tears. In the course of an hour, reading her entrance essays, her poems, and her nonfiction, a picture began to develop of a woman who understood well that this tangible life is at best fleeting, that what matters ultimately is what we leave behind and that there is no greater legacy than the love we give, in whatever form. Because the quote above came from Lizi’s statement of personal history, which told the bold truth: that her time here was short, due to cystic fibrosis, and that she wanted to put it on the page. “I don’t want to be a great writer despite the challenges I’ve faced,” Lizi wrote. “Living in the fringes provides a better vantage point with which to observe life and drives me to write it down.” There was an immediacy in her words that made me pick up the phone, to tell her that I’d be lucky to teach her here at UCR, that we could help her, that we could give her a community of like-minded writers who would give her that sense of home, that sense of belonging, she seemed to desperately crave.
I remember it was the late afternoon when I dialed her number. When we hung up, two hours later, it was dark outside. We’d talked about everything – her writing, her illness, her life, her family’s journey to this country, her faith, which we shared, her dreams, her fears – and we laughed an awful lot. She also asked me probing questions about her work and what I saw in it. What I landed on that night – and what I land on now, over a decade in the dust, thumbing through her files on my computer – was that Lizi Gilad Silver’s writing was fierce. Uncompromising. Passionate. Empathetic. But above all else: Fierce.
She was also gentle and kind and compassionate. And as I got to know her and her work over the next two years….and then over the next several years, as she published her work, and eventually returned to the program to lead a seminar…what I found was that Lizi saw the world differently than anyone I’d ever known, that she had an easy way of talking to emerging writers, that she calmed them in a remarkable way, and also inspired vulnerability. Here was a person who wrote with such profound lucidity about the twists toward the end of life, the ones she kept managing to avoid, all the while knowing they were coming along at some turn, somewhere soon. In my memory, I can see her in the seminar she led, her tiny frame at the front of the room, the audience rapt, and thinking: This is her element. Though I was wrong, it turns out. Her element was in the act of being present, wherever she was. You found yourself in her presence, you had her, in full.
It's funny the things you remember when a person is gone. What I can tell you is that one of the last times we spoke she told me she wasn’t writing much anymore, because she didn’t know how much time she had left and she didn’t want to spend her time sitting alone. But believe me when I tell you, she was a writer, no matter how often her fingers touched a keyboard or put pen to paper.
“Your body is a magician for the way it heals. It’s also a magician for tricking you into believing in the everlasting strength and health of the moment,” Lizi wrote in one of her early essays. I’ve come back to it many time since Lizi passed away in June of 2023. “There will come a day when the curtain will lift and you’ll see your body for what it truly is: fragile, miraculous, momentary.” Lizi’s moment lasted for 45 years. Too brief by any measure. In her wake she left a beautiful family, dear friends, and so many words, including two amazing collections of poetry – Hyperion (Big Lucks) and Drip, Drip (Boatt Press) – and countless essays. And for those of us lucky to have known her, we have her memory, which is indeed a blessing.
And now, thanks to the profound generosity of a donor, we are pleased to announce the Lizi Gilad Silver Memorial Scholarship, to be given to a new or continuing student studying poetry or nonfiction. This annual scholarship in the amount of $10,000 will be awarded to a student who best represents the values, the determination, the compassion, the kindness, and above all else, the transcendent talent of Lizi Gilad Silver. Applications for the scholarship will be available October 15th.
It is hard for me to think of Lizi now without thinking of that first conversation we had, twelve years ago. We were both so young then and all things seemed innately possible and infinite. I suppose that’s the gem of youth. You think you’ll have forever for everything. But the remarkable thing is that Lizi will always be here now, her words will be discovered, fresh and vibrant and needed, with every student who walks this path with us. And those students will learn of a fierce woman who believed passionately in the power, the sanctity, and the safety of the written world.
About Lizi Gilad Silver:
Lizi Gilad Silver was the award-winning author of two collections of poetry, Hyperion and Drip, Drip. Her nonfiction appeared in The Rumpus and the Literary Bohemian, among many others. She graduated from the Low Residency MFA @ UC Riverside in 2014. She lived in Southern California with her husband and daughter.
About the Low Residency MFA:
Founded in 2008, the Low Residency MFA @ UC Riverside is the premier Low Residency MFA program in the nation and the #1 ranked low residency screenwriting program (Movie Maker Magazine). Housed in the Palm Desert Center, the Low Residency MFA offers majors in fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, and playwriting and minors in each, as well as poetry. Faculty include: Mickey Birnbaum, Elizabeth Crane, Alex Espinoza, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Tod Goldberg (Director), Gabino Iglesias, Joshua Malkin, Ivy Pochoda, Wlliam Rabkin, Rob Roberge, John Schimmel, Mark Haskell Smith, & David Ulin.