An Interview with Uvi Poznansky

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An Interview with Uvi Poznansky

Author of

My Own Voice, The White Piano, and The Music of Us

What inspired you to write the series, Still Life with Memories?

Natasha, the renowned pianist suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's in my book Apart from Love (volume I and II of the series, woven together) kept coming back to haunt me. Her character was not an easy one to develop. The primary challenge is that she has no voice. She is utterly silent, which makes her son Ben hope��at first��that she can be reached, that he can 'save' her.

��There is no way to tell if she has heard me. Her gaze is fixed, as steadily as before, on the same small pane of glass, through which the sun is blazing; which makes it hard to figure out what she sees out there.

I push forward, aiming to view it, somehow, from her angle, which at first, is too hard to imagine:

In my mind I try, I see a map, the entire map of her travels around the world. A whole history. It has been folded over and again, collapsed like a thin tissue, into a square; which is suspended there��right in front of her��a tiny, obscure dot on that window.

And inside that dot, the path of her journey crisscrosses itself in intricate patterns, stacked in so many papery layers. And the names of the places, in which she performed back then, in the past��London, Paris, Jerusalem, San Petersburg, New York, Tokyo��have become scrambled, illegible even, because by now, she can no longer look past that thing, that dot. She cannot see out of herself.

She is, I suppose, confined.��

My new novel, The Music of Us (volume III in the series) gives voice to her.

��Once I find my way back, my confusion will dissipate, somehow. I will sit down in front of my instrument, raise my hand, and let it hover, touching-not-touching the black and white keys. In turn they will start their dance, rising and sinking under my fingers. Music will come back, as it always does, flowing through my flesh, making my skin tingle. It will reverberate not only through my body but also through the air, glancing off every surface, making walls vanish, allowing my mind to soar.

Then I will stop asking myself, Where am I, because the answer will present itself at once. This is home. This, my bench. The dent in its leather cushion has my shape. Here I am, at times turbulent, at times serene. I am ready to play. I am music.��

This novel starts out at 1970, when she starts to succumb to her illness, and goes a generation back, to 1941, the time that she and Lenny first fell in love. This is their story.

Any hobbies or interests that you enjoy in your spare time?

In addition to being an author and a poet I am also an artist. For me, the visual aspects of my craft go hand-in-hand with the literary aspects. I paint with my pen and write with my paintbrush, which means that when I write, I strive to describe the scene, as seen through my character��s eyes, as vividly as I now how, and when I paint, there is always a story revealing itself on my canvas.

My art includes ceramic and bronze sculptures, paper engineering projects, watercolors, oil paintings, and mixed media. To see it go to my art site or to my blog.

Do you see yourself in any of your characters, or do any of them have traits you wish you had?

At first I decided to model Anita, the girl in the center of a firestorm of passion in My Own Voice (volume I) and The White Piano (volume II) as the-opposite-of-me. Her use of language would be atrocious. She talks in sentences laden with 'like' and the dreaded double-negatives. Anita would become a bold and spontaneous spirit, anything but repressed. She would be promiscuous. Her voice would be shockingly direct.

"In my defense I have this to say: When men notice me, when the lusty glint appears in their eyes, which betrays how, in their heads, they��re stripping me naked��it��s me they accuse of being indecent.

Problem is, men notice me all the time.

How can a girl like me ever claim to be innocent? Even if I haven��t done nothing wrong, I��m already soiled, simply because of their dirty thoughts."

I do not even know how it happened, but once Anita started talking in my mind��which she did for nearly a year��I started to like her more and more. I asked myself, how would she play against Ben, who is a complex character, hesitant, highly sophisticated? How would she play against Lenny, a would-be author who is so proud of his refined expressions, when her background is so different from his? How would she measure up against his ex-wife, Natasha, the renowned pianist suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's?

Tell us about your blog. What will readers find there?

My blog is the heart of my drive to reach out to my readers and listeners. A post may include a poem, an excerpt from one of my books, the back story of what inspired a particular passage, a few art pieces by masters from different time period that illustrated to me different points of views about a particular moment of history, which in turn enriched my story about it. Please check out my bog, and come back often, there is something new every day!

What do you enjoy the most as an indie author that you imagine you wouldn��t if you were traditionally published? If you had a choice would you still go indie?

I take great pleasure in the direct contact with readers and listeners from around the globe. I am in daily contact with them, using a variety of social networks, and find this immediacy highly rewarding.

Also I enjoy the ease with which I can control every aspect of the publishing process. I create my own book covers, often based on my art. I format my own paperback editions and publish to Amazon, Barnes&Noble and iTunes by myself. I also invite narrators to submit audiobook auditions and I work together with them to create the audiobooks. Each one of these activities is a pleasure for me and I cannot imagine not being involved in every aspect of the creative process.