NATIVE SEEDS SPAWN 'GARDEN'.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

Robin Romm has an enviable problem. As a new author, she landed a book contract with one of the country's top publishers for her first nonfiction project. But the 31-year-old Eugene native is having trouble finding time to write.

"There's so much excitement right now," she explained in a phone interview this week. By excitement, Romm means national buzz over "The Mother Garden," her debut collection of short stories that Scribner bought at the same time as the nonfiction book.

There's nothing enviable, however, about the excruciating event that inspired both.

Romm's crisp, compelling fiction, like the memoir in progress, is rooted in the cancer death of her mother, Eugene attorney Jacquelyn Romm. Loss saturates these vivid, succinct stories.

"My mother's going to die," Romm's narrator says in the opening words of the first short story in her book. "This is fact. And there are things that must be done. Last week she instructed us to donate her retirement savings. My father hedged and I cried, but she remained firm. ... Now she's furious. After glancing at the list, she's decided we're ready to bury her."

Later, in "The Tilt," another protagonist muses that her mother's death "was in every absence - in the quiet of the air when the phone didn't ring, the emptiness of a white wall, the sleeping moments of the cat."

Even in "Lost and Found," which focuses on a daughter's magical discovery of her crude, never-known father, a never-mentioned mother inhabits the story like negative space in a sculpture: How could the woman who raised this daughter have connected with this man?

In the New York Times Book Review last month, Gregory Cowles called Romm "a close-up magician" and her short stories "an impressive collection."

"At their smartest and most striking, these stories are less about death than about the characters' defensive crouch in the face of it," he wrote, praising Romm's "ordinary incantation of words and stories to help us navigate the darkness and finally - for all that this impressive collection protests otherwise - to hold the end at bay."

"Mother Garden" has also been touted in Vanity Fair, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky. It will be the lead review in The Miami Herald this weekend.

But Romm, now of Berkeley, Calif., hasn't forgotten the hometown where she first put words to paper.

Her book tour kicks off this week with a reading and signing at Eugene Barnes & Noble on Saturday night.

Romm found early support here for her interest in writing, beginning with Margaret Linder, a teacher in her Willagillespie Elementary School Talented and Gifted program.

"I still remember that she told my mother, 'She's really good at writing dialogue,' ' Romm recounted. "I was really excited by that."

She also was nurtured by high school teachers such as Mike Helm and Leslie Skelton before graduating from South Eugene in 1994. She went on to Brown University, where she studied English literature and creative writing.

After college, uncertain she had "enough cachet to be a writer," she teetered between a graduate program in writing or the more secure path of law school. It was her mother - then deep in battle with cancer - who nudged her to follow her heart.

"She said, `Just risk it. You're young. Try it. If you don't like it, you can always go to law school next year,' ' Romm recalled.

She liked it. She graduated from San Francisco State University's creative writing program in 2005, the spring after her mother died in November 2004.

Jacquelyn Romm's breast cancer was first diagnosed when her daughter was a freshman at Brown.

"I don't even remember it all that well - I was only 19," Robin Romm said.

But when she looks back now at her writing then, "I can already see some of the magical realism, some of the bizarre streams and some of the preoccupation with loss and illness" so evident in her work today.

"I think I was already approximating what felt overwhelming about loss through metaphor," she said.

She remembers vividly, however, the cancer's recurrence a year later - and all that portended.

"She was sick for nine years," Romm said. "After college I came back to the West Coast partly because I missed it, but also because of my mom."

Her father, cardiologist Richard Romm, still lives in Eugene, as does her maternal grandfather, Sam Romm.

"I am still very close with a number of my mother's friends," she said, including two "aunts" - Jacquelyn Romm's former law partners Suzanne Chanti and Martha Walters, who was appointed last year to the Oregon Supreme Court.

Romm dedicated the new book to her mother, who had read early drafts of "about half" of the stories before her death.

"She was proud," Romm said. "I wish that she could have read the whole thing."

HOMETOWN STOP

Acclaimed new author Robin Romm, who grew up in Eugene, makes a tour appearance here

Book: The Mother Garden (Scribner, 191 pages, $22)

Event: Reading and signing

When: 7 p.m. Saturday

Where: Eugene Barnes & Noble Booksellers,

1193 Valley River Drive