An Oracular Voice: Remembering Martha Silano

The last time I saw Marty—Martha Silano—in person, it was fall during a week of wildfire smoke and we decided to visit a local sunflower farm in my neighborhood of Woodinville, Washington. We got lucky—the haze lifted for a few hours, the air quality wasn’t too terrible, and the temperatures had dropped enough for us to be comfortable outside. We met at my house for a quick catch-up chat, snacks, and wine, and I noticed that she hadn’t eaten or drunk very much. I think the beginnings of her swallowing problems—her first ALS symptom—were already happening, though she didn’t complain about a thing that day. I have a picture of us smiling among red and yellow sunflowers, the sky blue but slightly hazy above us. She told me how glad she was to be able to get out into nature again, without the pervasive wildfire smoke. Soon afterward, she was diagnosed with ALS and such outings would become impossible. I am so glad to have the memory of that day, now.

Marty and I met 20 years ago, when my debut, Becoming the Villainess, and her second collection, Blue Positive, were accepted at the same time by the same new press, Steel Toe Books. We arranged a reading together at a local writing center, the Hugo House, which was then housed in a former funeral home (trust me, much cooler than it sounds). When she came in to read, I was immediately impressed by her bright smile and the way she radiated energy and confidence in her tank top, jeans, and cowboy boots. I recall being particularly struck by the feisty spirit of her poem “If You Want a Girl to Grow Up Gentle, Lace Her Tight.” Marty was a little older than me and already had two kids and a job teaching at a local community college. We had some friends in common, but I didn’t know then how much else we had in common. We were both transplants to Seattle from the other side of the United States; we both got our MFAs in our early 30s; we both had fathers who were science professors, and, perhaps because of that, we both had a deep and abiding interest in science. Later in life, we would both experience the disorientation of being diagnosed with neurological disorders (I have multiple sclerosis).

Marty was outdoorsy and on social media she’d often post pictures of herself on top of a mountain, at a remote lake, or paddleboarding in Lake Washington. A mutual friend, Kelli Russell Agodon (with whom Marty co-wrote The Daily Poet, a popular poetry exercise book), recalls the time they spent together outdoors, and how, shortly before her diagnosis, the two of them swapped out a writing date for a day on the water—paddleboarding on the Hood Canal. Kelli recalls that after her diagnosis Marty would tell people “Kelli knew what I needed—that was my last paddle.”

A loyal friend, Marty appeared at every one of my birthday parties and book launches, including the summer launch of Flare, Corona at a local bookstore with no air conditioning in 90-degree weather. When my health troubles were overwhelming (one year I was wrongly diagnosed with liver cancer and incorrectly told I had six months to live; later that same year I was diagnosed with MS), she showed up at my house to talk, after confirming she wasn’t infectious and checking to make sure I felt all right for visitors. She was compassionate and supportive in a way that most people will never be.

She was also a devoted member of our poetry community—supporting local bookstores like Seattle’s poetry-only Open Books and Elliot Bay Books, starting a reading series called Beacon Bards in an underserved part of town, and working as an editor at the local literary magazine Crab Creek Review. At a launch party at Open Books for one of her books, Marty made a generous offer to buy an extra book from the store for every copy sold at the event.

Marty greeted her diagnosis with remarkable toughness and grit, determined to write and publish as much as possible in the time she had left. She didn’t want to talk about her illness as much as she wanted to see her new manuscripts get published. She took a writing residency on a nearby island right after her diagnosis, while she was still able to climb over rocks without too much aid, finishing one poetry manuscript, and then another, all while reading voraciously. According to her publisher, she completed several of the 35 new poems in her final collection, Last Train to Paradise: New and Selected Poems, in the last few weeks of her life.

From her very first book, Marty’s poetry reveals deep intelligence and a curiosity about the natural world—evident in titles like Gravity Assist. In the months following her diagnosis, she took to reading physics books about dark matter, black holes, quarks, particle theory, a passion she likely inherited from her father. Knowing Marty, she may have been trying to see the universe from the atom’s point of view. This interest in the sciences and metaphysics permeates almost every one of her seven (soon to be eight) books, as does her concern for the environment, which is a focus of This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2024 Blue Lynx Prize for poetry, where section titles are named for seasons in a time of climate crisis, such as “Yearly 1,000-year Floods, 60,000 Wildfires, Fear of Heat Dome, Bacterial Lake Closure Season [formerly summer].” The voice in this book is oracular, warning of coming disaster while celebrating nature’s fleeting pleasures.

Terminal Surreal (Acre Books), takes all her themes and ups the ante—with Marty addressing her ALS diagnosis head-on, describing both the toll the ALS takes on her body, and the joys she nevertheless finds in being alive. Her humor and skill with word play are also on display, as in this excerpt from “Self Elegies”:

A little closer to no more Polish polkas,
no impromptu kitchen waltzing. To not feeling fine.

Maybe I was stained with mercury and malathion.
Maybe that time I ran through the fog of mosquito
repellent wasn’t the best idea, though we all did it,
didn’t we?

I find myself unwilling to stop working on this essay out of the feeling that it brings me closer to her. But I hope that what I’ve written encourages others to look up her work and experience it for themselves.

To honor Marty’s memory, I hope to follow her example in literary citizenship, her passion for our ecology, and her advocacy for those with disability and chronic illness. And, of course, I hope to try and see the universe from the atom’s point of view.