Olga Zilberbourg’s collection of stories Like Water, transports readers across the globe with stories set in San Francisco, Russia, and several places in between. Each story is independent from one another though they work together to tell a cohesive tale about family, immigration, and what it means to be a mother. Zilberbourg has previously published other works, but Like Water is her first English-language collection. When reading through these stories, it becomes easier and easier to slip between the lines of writing and feel yourself experiencing each event as if it happened to you personally. A gifted writer, Zilberbourg spent three years writing and cultivating stories for Like Water and was aided by the repeated attendance of a writing workshop to help shape her routine.

Through the pages of Like Water, we are introduced to unforgettable characters and beautifully detailed settings. In the humorous, thought-provoking ‘Dandelion’ we imagine what it would be like to pack and ship a child as if they were a newly finished novel. In ‘Cream and Sugar’ we are left wondering how our perspective of natural habits vary from those observing these habits from an outside lens. Each story in Like Water leaves you with a sense of wonder and contemplation, as Zilberbourg artfully poses questions without asking them out loud.

I had the immense pleasure and privilege of speaking with Olga via email about Like Water and discovered what inspired her to delve deeper into the themes of immigration and motherhood, and what drew her to a place at San Francisco University.

In your artist statement at the beginning of ‘Like Water’, you wrote that a “finished story is a kind of fiction”. Were you ever tempted to transform any of the stories in this collection into a complete novel? Or were you satisfied with leaving everything in its “unfinished” form?

“Doctor Sveta” is one of a few stories in this collection that I thought could be a novel. Here’s a young doctor with a degree from Leningrad who returns to Minsk to practice medicine and works hard to establish her reputation as a capable surgeon. Then, suddenly, her naval command summons her to Leningrad. There, she’s dispatched on board a ship, headed for a secret destination. Once the ship clears the Baltics, the crew is told: we’re heading to Cuba. (At this point, a reader savvy in history recognizes that we’re in the middle of the Caribbean Missile Crisis.) After some weeks of travel, the ship lands in Cuba. Doctor Sveta and her shipmates help build a hospital there, train the locals to run it. She falls in love—with a man, or, perhaps, a woman? —but then must return back to the USSR. Doctor Sveta is a spunky enough character that when she has to obey orders of the Soviet command, it would be easy to show the tragedy of the personal sacrifice she’s asked to make. I could definitely see this story developed into a novel with Doctor Sveta as a protagonist.

Each of your characters feels like a real person when reading the collection, and the first-person narratives make the stories even more convincing. Is there any part of yourself reflected in these characters, or are their thoughts and words entirely fictionalized?

There are lots of versions of me in this book. One of the most personal—by which I mean the least crafted—stories in this collection might be “Practice a Relaxing Bedtime Ritual,” about a mother watching her son thrash in his crib after she’s given him an albuterol inhaler for his asthma. This piece started its life as a Facebook post, I believe.

A few of the pieces—for instance, “Clock,” about a granddaughter and grandmother’s relationship—could’ve been personal essays. Unlike “Practice a Relaxing Bedtime Ritual,” “Clock” is highly crafted, and a lot of the work that I did there was selecting and heightening certain images that would work on the background of the relationship story to reinforce the underlying theme of time marching on.

To expand slightly on the last question—your characters and descriptions are so detailed and lifelike without being overly described—how do you achieve that balance in your writing? Does it come naturally, or do you have to stop yourself from describing something too much?

I look for opportunities to break the logic of a description, to use specific details but also those that might be slightly at a tangent to what’s being described. In “Helen More’s Suicide,” for instance, I set the story in an apartment converted from a pillow factory—in the hope that a reader might get a sense of spaciousness from this image but also thinks of the dust, feathers, and perhaps, feels a certain desolation.

When writing about the Soviet Union or post-Soviet characters in English, I’m always conscious of needing to account for certain stereotypes. Evoking stereotypes can be useful. In “Her Turn,” I quickly establish Oskana as a mail-order bride. Most people think they know what mail-order brides look like, so I don’t need to describe her. I can move forward quickly and look for ways to complicate that picture for the reader. I zero in on a detail: her feet, the way she wears her flip-flops, her pedicure. These are some of the ways Oskana expresses herself, and they are personal, unique to her. This combination of what’s expected and what’s unique helps me then to move the plot.

In ‘Dandelion’, you have a brilliant quote from a fictive agent who says to always leave one obvious flaw in a book for the publisher to edit since this will prevent the publisher from meddling with the parts you care about most. Did you leave any obvious flaws in the initial versions of ‘Like Water’ to throw your publishers off the scent?

I highly recommend submitting to independent press contests and open calls! In my experience, an editor of an independent press is much more likely to treat the book as a finished product.

That said, my editor did recommend taking out a story from the collection that depended too heavily on references to rock music: I hadn’t considered the small matter of copyright. After she pointed that out, I looked at the rest of the manuscript, cleaning up more music references. It was interesting to discover how foundational music is to what I do, how music allows me to comprehend and express emotion.

I read in your author bio that you grew up in the USSR before studying in Germany and then in San Francisco, where you have since built your home with your husband and children. What drew you to San Francisco State University and what compelled you to stay in the area? Did you ever want to return to Russia to live again, or do you feel like you were fulfilled by your childhood experiences there?

I got my MA in Comparative Literature at San Francisco State University. Later, I learned that Comparative Literature is one of those majors that many contemporary English-speaking fiction writers love to hate. Chip in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, for example, is a comparatist and, as such, a butt of many jokes.

I loved Comparative Literature. I loved my program and the people I met there and the opportunity it gave me to study languages and cultures—I worked most deeply with German while I was at SF State—and to read books from across the globe, preferably in the language of the original. Many of my friends from the program went on to get their PhDs and moved away from San Francisco, but many stayed, doing activism and working in tech and writing fiction and poetry and criticism. I wanted to stay here, in a very large part, because of these relationships and because of the ways the post-colonial, feminist, eco-critical thinking that we studied had resonance outside of the program, in the conversations I got to have at parties and readings around town. The queer and counterculture communities, the local activists and writers—these are the people who make this city for me.

That, and also, the weather is quite perfect in San Francisco. The average temperature is 60F and something’s always blooming.

I was moved by the part in ‘Cream and Sugar’ when the Russian mother states that she cannot believe how self-indulgent Americans are after witnessing a woman using up the free milk and sugar provided at an airport coffee shop. Given the current perception of immigrants in America, it felt refreshing to read a story that reflected the ways in which Americans are perceived by people from other countries. Do you feel as though you are able to view the large and small things in life from a neutral perspective since you grew up in the USSR and then chose to make your home in America?

I love fiction because of how many perspectives and points of view it can accommodate at once. That particular story is told by a daughter, who’s judging the mother for judging other people. The mother is visiting from Odessa, but the daughter lives in the US, and the daughter’s loyalty is to those Americans in the coffee shop, whom, she feels, her mother judges unfairly. The story is the daughter’s, and yet I do give quite a bit of room to the mother’s point of view—more so than to the daughter’s, actually. The mother’s observations only mimic neutrality—they come from a very particular emotional state. The daughter, I believe, disagrees strongly but doesn’t ever express this directly. She doesn’t quite know how to react on an emotional level, how to process the negativity of her mother’s observations. She listens to her and then moves on.

Though I’ve been raised in Petersburg and can report to you that in Petersburg most people drink their tea plain, without milk, I often struggle to distinguish what in my perspective of the world is personal, what comes from my family, what comes from my childhood and youth in Petersburg, and what comes from things I’ve learned living in San Francisco. For example, recently I read in an essay somewhere that Russians put jam in their tea. My first thought was, well, this is dumb. I’ve never seen anybody put jam in their tea! In fact, there’s a special dish that’s part of a typical table setting, bliudechko a tiny plate that can be used as serving dish for jam that you then eat with a spoon, alternating that with sips of tea. (The word “saucer” exists in English, but I don’t hear it used in San Francisco.)

But I assume the writer didn’t make up this detail. So, maybe they put jam in their tea in Moscow? In other parts of the country? Perhaps, people do this in Petersburg, too, and I forget? People might put jam in their tea in desperation, I suppose, if they’ve run out of sugar. Living in the US has broadened my perspective in so many ways that perhaps I, too, soon might try putting jam into my tea. Maybe not, though.

The beautiful thing about writing fiction is that I don’t need to worry about the things that I don’t know or don’t remember. My characters can be just as confused as I am about all the ways people are different.

Do you ever feel like your dual perspective hinders your writing process? It seems to serve as a strength from a reader’s perspective, but I was curious about how you viewed the subject.

Yes and no. It often slows me down—if I’m working on a draft of a story that has Russian-speaking characters, I often need to draft parts of that story in Russian. Language affects the inner logic of dialogue or progression of events in a story. So, I try to imagine or draft the exchanges in Russian, and then transcribe them in English. The result is usually more creative, more memorable than when I write something straight in English.

For example, in “Broken Violin,” a story set in Moscow, Lida’s friends ask her to play something on the violin. She doesn’t want to, and when I originally drafted the story, I think she simply said “No.” But as I thought through the exchange deeper, the line transformed into: “I don’t play on the street; it might harm the instrument.” Not only does this reflect the culture better, but also it communicates something about the character that Lida can’t communicate about herself: She’s afraid of her friends, she thinks they might harm her in some way.

I was wondering if you could take us through your writing process—it took approximately three years to complete ‘Like Water’, were you writing that entire time? Did every story you wrote over that span of time make it into the final collection, or were there some stories that were left behind?

I did write most of the stories in the collection in the last three years, but once I had the bulk of the manuscript ready, I went back to some of my earlier material and decided to include a few of the older stories that fit thematically and provided historical background to some of the newer pieces. “My Mother at the Shooting Range,” “The Swallow,” “We Were Geniuses” are some of the older pieces, and “Rubicon” and “Like Water” are the most recent.

Circa 2008, I started attending the San Francisco Writers Workshop, which is a public workshop that meets at a bookstore once a week and where we read up to six pages of writing to each other out loud. I used to take a lot of pride in bringing something to read to the group every week, and so, inadvertently, I’ve taught myself to write these six-page stories. Sometimes I think a six-page story is my unit of thought. Some people keep diaries, and the six-page story is like my diary entry. If I don’t take precautions, every time I sit down to write, another six-page story emerges. Sometimes, I try to break free of the format and write longer stuff. Often, I give in and have as much fun as I can in six pages.

Olga Zilberbourg is the author of LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press, 2019) and three Russian-language collections of stories. Her English-language fiction and essays have appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative Magazine, World Literature Today, Scoundrel Time, Tin House’s The Open Bar, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She is a co-founder of a feminist blog about post-Soviet Literature, Punctured Lines, and serves as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Her website is https://zilberbourg.com/