Robin Black

I write - fiction and non-fiction both - because it is the best way I have found to work toward some understanding of life. I can't say I'm very far along that path, but I enjoy the intellectual and emotional engagements of trying to grasp important aspects of existence, of social interactions, of loss, survival and much, much more. Language is my chosen medium for this task because I have never come even close to finding a limit to how powerful and beautiful a medium it can be.

A friend often teases me that I only write about "misery and despair" and I always counter "No! I write about the indomitable human spirit." I believe that you can't really illustrate that quality without a healthy supply of miserable events to overcome.

I hope that over time I will develop larger and deeper works through which to observe and interpret that human spirit. My highest goal, whatever the scope of the finished product, is the ring of truth. If I can offer to a reader an insight they have never had, but find compelling and maybe even persuasive then I have succeeded, I believe.

Robin Black has lived in the Philadelphia area for more than 15 years. She first began writing fiction at Sarah Lawrence College in the early 1980s. In the past two years, while working with the Rittenhouse Writers' Group, Robin has devoted increasing time to her writing. Her story "Gaining Ground" was featured in 2002 in the InterAct Theatre series "Writing Aloud," and will appear in the Alaska Quarterly Review this fall. She has reviewed books for The Philadelphia Inquirer and, as a juror for their first annual Readers' Prize, for ELLE magazine. She has also published personal essays. Robin lives in Bala Cynwyd with her husband Richard and three children.
 

The door to what for fifteen years had been their bedroom, now his bedroom, soon to be only her bedroom is pushed almost shut. One definition of loss, she has learned, turns out to be just that: a brutal and somehow primal change of familiar pronouns. Through the open sliver Ginny can see just light. It is a strange and distinct light, seeming to her to have yellowed over these weeks, grown dim itself along with Peter; and this tawny quality of the atmosphere distresses her. At times she imagines the bedside lamp - a refitted trumpet they bought together years ago at a flea market - is leeching Peter's soul, stealing his essence, thickening and darkening the air with him. Other times she thinks she can see evidence of Peter's illness in the souring molecules hanging there. This is deathbed logic, either way, she knows. These are impending widowhood thoughts.

More and more these days Ginny finds herself inventing preposterous explanations for everyday phenomena - like dusky lamplight. Creating hypotheses that only months earlier she could not possibly have posed. How illogical, how untidy, how sentimental and sloppy to think the lamp is stealing Peter's life. How unlike her. She could never have thought such a thing, before.

But now, she understands, she is different. Now her own imaginings, and her actions too are unrecognizable to her. So the lamp is clearly malevolent and the air is obviously sick. Peter is all powerful in his terminal state, altering molecules, changing the nature of electricity. Making his wife envision possibilities, do things (most of all do things) that a year earlier would have caused her to doubt her own sanity.

- from A Very Crowded Room