Hope's Story: "Maybe It Wasn’t a Coincidence After All."

“I remember talking to the trees and the forest. And I would talk to the insects falling into the barrel of rainwater. I was creating live stories for them.” 

Hope Silver, the pen name of Nadezhda Serebrennikova, has always brought the magic of her reality to life through writing. 

Writing became her way of processing life. “I think our Siberian childhood gave me a lot of inspiration… I was surrounded by forest, and it just felt so different. It was more human connection back then. And all my life I moved around a lot too, so it felt like I had several lives in one.”

Her father left when she was three, and not long after, her mother moved to St. Petersburg, leaving Hope in Siberia with her grandmother. 

Her parents are poets. “They’re interesting parents,” she says of creatives. “But they’re not, like, stable all the time… Not stereotypical parents.” 

As a child and even later as an adult, she often imagined inanimate things as living beings. 

“Maybe that’s why I wrote this collection about inanimate objects,” she reflects—referring to Curious Thinkers, a book of 60 flash fiction stories that bring mundane objects like tables, bicycles, and teabags to life.

Her curious mind and vivid imagination have followed Hope throughout her life. Every moment, every hardship, every milestone becomes an adventure, a new story, a new work of art.

Now an award-winning author of fantasy and children’s literature, Hope has spent her life turning personal moments into stories. She started as a journalist in Russia, wrote her first novel in the Czech Republic, and moved to California in 2013 after winning the green card lottery.

Her professional writing career began with a seemingly magical, unexpected turn of events. While working in a newspaper’s design department, she began digging into a family mystery: rumors that her mother had been adopted. To gain access to a local archive, she offered to write a story. 

“So, I went to this place thinking that my mom was born there. And they let me open this huge archive. I searched through books to see if her name was there, but it was not.”

Though she didn’t find the information she was looking for, it became her first published piece—at just 19 years old.

“I tried and I tried. I failed twice… and then I cracked open my grandmother. Who was very, you know, like a Soviet type of person… And then I was the one who made her speak.”

After lots of digging, Hope eventually discovered her mother had been adopted and that her biological grandmother was Jewish. “I think my grandmother kept it in secret because attitude toward Jewish people earlier in Russia was questionable.”

Later, she found her grandmother’s grave in a Jewish cemetery in St. Petersburg. “It was such an incredible feeling to see a person whose picture was exactly like my face.”

The discovery shifted her sense of identity. “I just felt like I’m a part of something much bigger… And I was the one who revealed it.”

One day, a colleague told her she was meant to write books. At the time, she dismissed it. 

“Write a book? What can I write about? I was puzzled,” she remembers. “I started writing something, which I didn’t like. I just put it in a trashcan.” 

But three years later, the idea for a novel came to her in a dream. Born–Against All Odds follows the soul of an unborn child as he watches his future mother’s life unfold, trying to become her son. The idea was rooted in her own personal hardship.

At 22, she had an abortion after her boyfriend opposed her pregnancy—a choice that left her with a deep sense of sadness and loss. She couldn’t continue in that relationship.

Years later, when she discovered she was pregnant again, the timing shocked her. “The situation was really similar to that one. And when I found out the test was positive, and I looked at the calendar, it was exactly the same date I had an abortion three years ago.”

“For me, this was magic. The soul of the baby, just three years later, came back to me. And now, it’s a novel about kids’ souls choosing their parents… and a 22-year-old talented young man — my son.”

The novel became her debut book, winning “Best Fantasy Book of the Year” at an international Russian writers’ competition in Germany (2015). She recently adapted it into a screenplay titled To Be Born.

Hope reflects, “So many interesting coincidences in life and magical moments we just don’t notice… But there’s just magic on every step, really.”

She doesn’t force anything in life. Hope will go months at a time without writing, and then an idea floats into her head.

“You don’t have time to sit down and write… but then, when an idea is really yours, in my case, it feels like an urge. Like just scratching inside of you—just go, go to the notebook. And I sit down, and I never know how it’s gonna end.”

In Russian, she says, there’s a concept of being in the space between inspiration and creation. “It carries you.”

“Ideas are floating around. An idea goes to you, but you don’t pick it up. It waits for a little bit and goes to another person… and then you see something you could do, but you lost your chance.”

For Hope, moving through the world keeps her creative ideas in motion. “I can’t live without traveling,” she adds. “It helps me find inspiration and time to write.”

“When people are just sitting, living in one place and don’t let themselves travel, they’re just stealing from themselves,” she says. “They could see so much more.”  

Hope supports herself and sustains her love of movement by driving for Uber. But for her, it’s more than a job—it’s a creative outlet. When riders open the app and see “Hope is on the way,” the message carries a deeper meaning. She asks every passenger the same question: “What is your hope?”

That question became the heart of her first documentary, Hope is on the Way, built around the meaningful conversations they share in her car. In the film, she says:

“This is not just a job for me. It is my life. It gives me freedom. It gives me new friends. It gives me the illusion I’m traveling every day—meeting good people, listening to their stories, telling my own sometimes.”

She reflects on what she’d tell her younger self. “Believe in yourself… I was too shy and I lost one really good chance… You need to knock on all the doors, and eventually one will open for you… That’s my lesson from childhood. Don’t leave. Knock the doors.”

That spirit shines through in one of her favorite stories—how she met her husband. 

“I was divorced twice and had two little kids. I remember I was going to the nightclub with friends, and before going, I had this intention: ‘I’m gonna meet someone tonight…’” That night she jokingly posed in her sister’s wedding dress and posted the photos on social media. “People started asking questions, ‘Did you get married?’ I said, ‘Not yet! Wait!’ And that same night, I met my husband. We’ve been together for more than 15 years,” she laughs.

“And somehow, it looks like the universe saw me in that wedding dress. My intention was to finally have a family—a good father for my kids—and it just happened. All on the same day after trying this wedding dress on.”

Like all of us, Hope’s life hasn’t been all happiness and ease. But she finds magic at every crossroad—turning hardship into healing, and coincidence into meaning. 

She holds close the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky: “To live without hope is to cease to live.”

We can all strive to notice the extraordinary—in the everyday, in the mundane, and in the devastating.