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WORK TITLE: The Island Dwellers
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.jensilverman.com/
CITY:
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
https://stagebuddy.com/theater/theater-feature/interview-jen-silverman-female-visibility-power-gripping-new-play-moorsinterview-jen-silverman-on-female-visibility-and-power-in-her-gripping-new-play-the-moors https://pwcenter.org/news/interview-jen-silverman-0
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Simsbury, CT.
EDUCATION:Educated at Juilliard and Brown University. University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Playwright and writer.
AWARDS:MacDowell fellowship; Yale Drama Series Award, for Still; Lilly Award; Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award; Helen Merrill Fund Award, 2015; and the PoNY Fellowship, 2016-17.
WRITINGS
Writer of plays, including The Astonishing and Dangerous History of Mazefield the Frog, Still, The Moors, The Roommate, Phoebe in Winter, All the Roads Home, Wondrous Strange, and Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties.
SIDELIGHTS
Jen Silverman is a New York-based playwright and writer. Born in Connecticut, she was raised in many countries, including Japan, Sweden, Italy, New Zealand, and Canada. Speaking four languages, she says this nomadic existence helped her to ask questions and learn about each new place. Silverman has written numerous plays, including The Moors, which was a Susan Smith Blackburn finalist; Still, which earned a Yale Drama Series Award; and Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties. Her plays have been produced in New York, across the United States, and in Australia, China, and London. In Diep Tran’s article online at American Theatre, Woolly Mammoth artistic director Howard Shalwitz described Silverman: “She’s not a mainstream, American-realism kind of playwright…Jen’s plays, every one of them, ask the audience to come into a somewhat odd world—to step over some sort of threshold that might be uncomfortable.”
Silverman is a member of New Dramatists, a core writer at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, an affiliated artist with SPACE on Ryder Farm, and has developed work with the O’Neill, New York Theatre Workshop, Ground Floor Residency at Berkeley Rep, and the Royal Court in London. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop.
In 2018, Silverman published the short-story collection, The Island Dwellers: Stories, in which eleven stories blend issues of identity, sexuality, reinvention, and family. Set in a variety of locations, such as New York, Iowa, Tokyo, and Yokohama, the stories are personal narratives of people in transition, lost, escaping violence, or trying violence for the first time. The characters that permeate the stories are a passive-aggressive couple in the midst of a divorce, a Russian migrant in Tokyo with a boyfriend in the Yakuza, a professor in Iowa who has an affair with her teaching assistant, and a recent college graduate who takes on the task of writing a script for a production company. Characters reappear in other stories, giving the tales a sense of community. “In a book filled with memorable characters, Silverman’s sharp sense of place, her eye for telling detail, and her pitch-perfect dialogue tumble these stories through their interlocking narratives with great brio,” according to a Kirkus Reviews critic.
Online at Powells, Silverman explained the themes in the stories and how she came to write them: “When you live in a different country, you meet a lot of people who radiate the palpable fact of running from something. You, yourself, begin to radiate that fact. For me, these stories are about intimacy first and foremost—how we navigate it, how we resist it, how desperately we require it, and how we reach for it across languages, across all boundaries.” In the stories “We are asked about how we make sense of home and our relationships to others around us,” declared a writer online at Utopia State of Mind.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted: “These narratives can stand alone but take on deeper significance together, depicting people living on literal and metaphorical islands of isolation.” In a review in Booklist, Leah Strauss observed: “Silverman’s assured debut collection showcases flawed characters at personal crossroads, grappling with unrequited love, deteriorating relationships,” along with the desire for autonomy. Pia Cortez said on the Lambda Literary website that the stories “are raw, intense in their longing, and tender in the most unexpected ways. Each one a light on its own, in spite of the violence and darkness that they hold. While some can elicit a chuckle or two, these stories also emanate fear, fury.” Julie Orringer online at New York Times Book Review remarked that the stories “are irresistible, delivering a portrait of contemporary relationships that, although bleak, is shot through with veins of real connection.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2018, Leah Strauss, review of The Island Dwellers: Stories, p. 61.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of The Island Dwellers.
Publishers Weekly, April 2, 2018, review of The Island Dwellers, p. 2.
ONLINE
American Theatre, https://www.americantheatre.org/(September 8, 2016), Diep Tran, author interview.
Lambda Literary, https://www.lambdaliterary.org/(July 4, 2018), Pia Cortez, review of The Island Dwellers.
New York Times Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com/ (June 22, 2018), Julie Orringer, review of The Island Dwellers.
Powells, http://www.powells.com/ (May 10, 2018), author interview.
Utopia State of Mind, https://utopia-state-of-mind.com/ (April 23, 2018), review of The Island Dwellers.
Jen Silverman is a playwright and writer. Born in the U.S., she was raised across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Her plays have been produced in New York, regionally across the U.S., and internationally in Australia, China, and upcoming in London. She is a two-time MacDowell fellow, winner of the Yale Drama Series Award for her play STILL, and Susan Smith Blackburn finalist for THE MOORS. Her plays THE MOORS, THE ROOMMATE, and COLLECTIVE RAGE: A PLAY IN FIVE BETTIES are forthcoming with Samuel French (US, 2017) and Oberon Books (UK, 2018). Her book of interlinked stories, THE ISLAND DWELLERS, is forthcoming with Random House in May 2018. Education: Brown University, University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop (MFA), Juilliard.
People | September 2016 September 8, 2016 0 Comments
The Many Lives of Jen Silverman
The playwright’s work is funny, form-breaking, feminist—and everywhere on U.S. stages.
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By Diep Tran
Jen Silverman always thought she would become a novelist. And you can’t blame her: Silverman’s life is one that lends itself well to travelogues and memoirs of self-discovery in exotic locations. She grew up, literally, all over the world. “I think I was 15 months old when we moved to Japan,” she recalls. She was born in Simsbury, Conn., the child of a physicist and chemist. “We were in and out of Japan two times in my childhood, in and out of France four to five times…” By the time she was 13, she had also lived in Finland, Sweden, Italy, New Zealand, and Canada. She moved to Japan again after undergrad. And she speaks four languages.
It’s this nomadic existence—the continuing process of asking questions and learning about every new place she visited, every new person she met—that has influenced the way Silverman writes plays. “It’s the feeling of constantly being a little bit outside of it and being a little bit new to it,” Silverman explained over a cup of tea at New Dramatists in New York City. “I just ask questions a lot and nobody answers them for me, so I explore them in plays and still don’t have any answers.”
To use a familiar traveling metaphor, it’s about the journey, not the destination. And in Silverman’s plays, what journeys they are. Much as she has herself, Silverman’s plays span the entire world, from two white women going through a midlife crises in Iowa (The Roommate), to black queer women speaking up against rape in South Africa (The Dangerous House of Pretty Mbane), to a Japanese-American woman mourning her deceased brother in Tokyo (Crane Story), to four women finding their voice while living in Victorian England (The Moors).
If you aren’t familiar with Silverman’s work, that will change soon. The New York-based playwright has been produced locally since 2011, but it was The Roommate at the 2015 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Kentucky’s Actors Theatre of Louisville that put her on the larger national map. Productions at Yale Repertory Theatre (The Moors) and InterAct Theatre Company (The Dangerous House of Pretty Mbane) followed.
This season, Silverman is racking up her frequent-flier miles. The Roommate will be produced at Everyman Theatre in Baltimore (Oct. 26-Nov. 27), California’s South Coast Repertory (Jan. 3-22, 2017), and San Francisco Playhouse (May 23-July 1, 2017). Washington, D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company is producing the world premiere of Collective Rage: A Play in Five Boops (Sept. 12-Oct. 9); Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park will premiere All the Roads Home (March 25-April 23, 2017); and Off-Broadway’s Playwrights Realm is mounting The Moors (Feb. 27-March 25, 2017).
That’s not even counting the works Silverman has in development. On the day of our interview, Silverman was getting ready to leave for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where she is developing My Father the Speeding Bullet: Nincest for the theatre’s Ground Floor program. It’s a play-with-songs about Anaïs Nin that features Pig Iron cofounder Dito van Reigersberg as the writer.
“She’s not a mainstream, American-realism kind of playwright,” says Howard Shalwitz, artistic director of Woolly Mammoth, who says he was moved to tears by Collective Rage when he read it. “Jen’s plays, every one of them, ask the audience to come into a somewhat odd world—to step over some sort of threshold that might be uncomfortable.”
Still, one might say that her current popularity is long overdue. Silverman has been listed on the Kilroys’ list of underproduced female playwrights for three years in a row, this year with two plays (Wink and Collective Rage). And she is the 2016-17 recipient of the prestigious Playwrights of New York (PoNY) Fellowship, which provides $100,000 worth of artistic support (including a free apartment for a year). The latter allowed her to quit her day job teaching.
In short, this is the year of Silverman. “She’s so goddamn prolific,” exclaims Kimberly Colburn, literary director at South Coast Rep, who has recommended Silverman for the Kilroys list twice. The two met last year when Colburn dramaturg’d The Roommate at Humana. “In all of her work, she’s got something to say; she’s not writing for the sake of writing. I think that might be the defining facet of her writing: It feels like she is the origin point. She finds a point of inspiration, or a new way of looking at the world, and chooses to harness that by writing about it in a play.”
Tasha Lawrence and Margaret Daly in “The Roommate” by Jen Silverman at the 2015 Humana Festival of New American Plays. (Photo by Bill Brymer)
Silverman wasn’t a theatre kid growing up, but she knew from an early age, while going through her parents’ extensive library, that she was going to be a storyteller. Her reading list included The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rølvaag, and The Kalevala, the Finnish epic poem by Elias Lönnrot. “My parents just let me read whatever the hell I wanted,” she recalls. “I read Lolita when I was 10, 11, 12—somewhere in that range.” She adds with a giggle, “People are horrified by this.”
Silverman majored in comparative literature at Brown University, and that’s when she saw her first play and started taking playwriting classes, including one with Paula Vogel in her senior year. She also avidly consumed plays by female writers—Caryl Churchill, Naomi Iizuka, Naomi Wallace, and most important, Sarah Kane. She didn’t pay attention to the male canon until later (“I didn’t read an Ibsen play until grad school” at Iowa Writers’ Workshop).
“My early exposure to theatre was almost entirely female writers,” she explains. “I didn’t have the feeling of, ‘Is there a seat at the table for me?’ In my mind there was this table full of super-bold, outrageous, strong, political women. I looked at them and I was like, ‘Oh! Yes, please! Me too! I want to talk!’”
She hasn’t lost that fearlessness. Though the writer is short and petite, with a heart-shaped face, her pixie cut is buzzed on both sides, and she’s got a tattoo on each arm. And she’s possessed of a probing intelligence that can quickly detect bullshit.
“As someone who looks younger than I am, as a queer woman, I am aware that there is a certain way in which, often, men perceive me before they have read the work,” she says. “I have watched men talk to me one way and then read and encounter my work, and talk to me differently after that.”
They underestimate her? “Absolutely,” she says. “I think that young men are seen as being very promising, and potentially the next big thing. And young women are seen as a little bit naïve and they’ve got a long way to go.” That is also why she declined to state her age for this article.
How women are perceived is what led Silverman to write Collective Rage: A Play in Five Boops. (The full title might give you some insight into Silverman’s ambitious aesthetic, not to mention her sense of humor: Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Boops; In Essence, a Queer and Occasionally Hazardous Exploration; Do You Remember When You Were in Middle School and You Read About Shackleton and How He Explored the Arctic?; Imagine the Arctic as a Pussy and It’s Sort of Like That.)
The play imagines five different Betty Boops coming together to discuss their vaginas while staging Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And they don’t all look like the hypersexual, coquettish Boop of pin-up fame; there are also Boops who are butch lesbians and Boops who are multiethnic.
Silverman wrote the first draft within a week, not because she expected it would be produced but because she felt driven to respond to being constantly catcalled on New York City streets, and more broadly to the idea of socialization—the conditioning that teaches women to be beautiful, kind, and apologetic, not loud and angry.
“Women can push back to this degree, but no further,” she explains, putting her hand up in a “stop” sign. “Once it gets too aggressive, it’s not pretty anymore, so stop. I really wanted to write a play in which the women were allowed to have an unapologetic conversation about, Who are we, versus who are we being told that we are, versus who do we want to be?”
For Silverman, Collective Rage was a way to tap into “the energy that happens when you get these women who are really questioning and overturning in the same space together. The energy builds on itself and feeds itself in a way I think is really dangerous.” She then slyly adds, “And to me, really sexy.”
It’s not Silverman’s only unapologetically feminist play. All the Roads Home, The Moors, and The Roommate all explore themes of women pushing against limitations placed upon them. Silverman wrote The Roommate to address the lack of roles for middle-aged actresses, and it accordingly shows how the 50s can be as sexy and fruitful for a woman as any time in her life. In a cultural conversation in which strong female characters are still controversial (see the backlash against the Ghostbusters reboot) and Beyoncé’s Lemonade is considered groundbreaking for its portrayal of female anger, Silverman is keeping her fingers on the pulse of that conversation.
“I am really interested in narratives for both queer characters and female characters that are way more complicated and way more authentic than the real estate that’s usually given to us,” says Silverman. “I feel like queer characters are permitted to come out, as long as they take the whole play to do it and feel conflicted about it. And women are allowed to be onstage as long as they’re talking about their husband. I’m interested in the territories that these exceptions are taking up and being part of that conversation. And that to me feels personally and politically and artistically important.”
For frequent collaborator Mike Donahue, Silverman’s work claims even bigger territory. “She’s very interested in power structures, and in class, and in hierarchy,” says Donahue, who directed her Phoebe in Winter at Off-Off-Broadway’s Clubbed Thumb in 2013, as well as the world premiere of The Roommate; he’ll also helm Collective Rage at Woolly Mammoth and The Moors at the Playwrights Realm. “She’s very interested in gender and performance of gender—the boxes we get put in and how we become aware of those boxes. She’s fundamentally interested in transformation and in the ability of people to powerfully transform themselves.”
Aime Donna Kelly and Lynnette Freeman in “The Dangerous House of Pretty Mbane” at Interact Theatre. (Photo by Kate Raines / Plate 3 Photography)
In her spare time Silverman doodles—in particular, she draws suicidal penguins and pandas eating glue or carrying dynamite; she posts her work on Instagram under This Panda Is Sad. Though these characters haven’t appeared in any of her plays (yet), this side project isn’t that surprising. It’s an apt metaphor for Silverman’s plays, which aren’t just feminist; they subvert expectations.
Just take The Moors, which opens up in the style of a Brontë novel, with a governess showing up at an English manor, expecting to find her Mr. Rochester. Instead, it’s a house of women and she falls for the lady of the house, giving this Victorian setting a queer edge. The play also features a talking dog and moor hen.
And Silverman won’t write the same play twice. While The Roommate is what Silverman calls “naturalism on speed,” Collective Rage takes place in a cartoonish world of multiple Betty Boops, and Phoebe in Winter opens up in a living room that gradually becomes a literal war zone (think Sarah Kane’s Blasted but funny). But don’t expect her to write any of the following: an autobiographical play, a naturalistic play, or a play about a queer kid coming out.
“It’s really important for me to try to do something different with every play,” she says. “When I’m writing a new play, if I find that I’m retreading territory too easily, I’ll just throw it out and I’ll start over.”
If she’s allergic to repeating herself, she’s also intent on not boring her audience. As Adam Greenfield, associate artistic director of New York’s Playwrights Horizons, puts it, “I think that her interest veers toward these large-scale, epic, fabulous stories that tend to be episodic rather than climactic,” he says. Greenfield has directed workshop presentations of All the Roads Home and Angel Bones. “She wants to tell us a good yarn and fill the stage and have it be big enough to warrant it being on a stage. I love that her plays feel like they’re bursting at the seams; there’s such an explosive energy.”
Explosive is right: Even though Silverman has already written more plays than can be mentioned in one article, she’s just getting started. After all, she’s lived multiple lives and has a world’s worth of stories to tell. There are more journeys to take, more questions to ask, and more theatrical spaces to explode. She just turned in a theatre-for-young-audiences commission for InterAct Theatre, but it sounds very Jen Silverman: It’s a riff on Ubu Roi that features Hillary Clinton. Because who says a children’s show can’t be political?
“Right now, I’m really interested in just destroying everything,” Silverman concludes. “I think it’s so fucking useful for us as humans to undergo the practice of thinking we know what something is, and then watching that thing be deconstructed in such a way that we no longer can make the assumptions we were making. I think it’s useful for us to do that in theatre, where it’s safe.”
Jen Silverman
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Jen Silverman is an American playwright and writer born in the United States. She grew up living and traveling in Scandinavia, Asia, and Europe as well as the United States.[1] She completed a BA in comparative literature at Brown University,[2][3] a MFA in playwriting at the University of Iowa,[2] and also studied at Juilliard.[4][better source needed] She is the author of upcoming book The Island Dwellers, an interlinked story collection published by Random House.
Contents [hide]
1
Background
2
Works
3
Awards
4
References
Background[edit]
Silverman speaks multiple languages.[citation needed] She has taught theatre and playwriting classes at the University of Iowa, Playwrights Horizons Theatre School (NYU) and ESPA (at Primary Stages). Silverman completed residencies at MacDowell (two-time fellow), New Harmony, Hedgebrook, the Millay Colony, and SPACE on Ryder Farm among others.[2]
Works[edit]
"The Astonishing and Dangerous History of Mazefield the Frog" (a one-act)
Crane Story[5][6]
Wink[7]
Still
Phoebe In Winter[6]
All the Roads Home
The Moors[6][8][9]
The Roommate[9][10]
Wondrous Strange[11]
"Collective Rage: A Play In 5 Betties; In Essence, A Queer And Occasionally Hazardous Exploration; Do You Remember When You Were In Middle School And You Read About Shackleton And How He Explored The Antarctic?; Imagine The Antarctic As A Pussy And It’s Sort Of Like That" [12][2][4]
Awards[edit]
Silverman has won multiple awards for her work such as the Yale Drama Series Award,[3] Lilly Award,[13] Kennedy Center's Paula Vogel Playwriting Award,[13] MacDowell Fellow,[13] the Helen Merrill Fund Award in 2015,[3][4] and the PoNY Fellowship (2016-2017).[6]
Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer. Born in the U.S., she was raised across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Her theatre work includes THE MOORS (Yale Repertory Theatre premiere, off-Broadway with The Playwrights Realm, Susan Smith Blackburn finalist); THE ROOMMATE (Actor’s Theatre of Louisville Humana world premiere, multiple regional productions including South Coast Rep, SF Playhouse and Williamstown Theatre Festival, upcoming at Steppenwolf); PHOEBE IN WINTER (Off-off Broadway with Clubbed Thumb); COLLECTIVE RAGE: A PLAY IN 5 BETTIES (Woolly Mammoth premiere); and ALL THE ROADS HOME, a play with songs (Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park premiere).
Jen is a member of New Dramatists, a Core Writer at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, an affiliated artist with SPACE on Ryder Farm, and has developed work with the O’Neill, New York Theatre Workshop, Playpenn, Portland Center Stage, The Ground Floor Residency at Berkeley Rep, and the Royal Court in London among other places. She’s a two-time MacDowell fellow, recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Helen Merrill Award, an LMCC Fellowship, and the Yale Drama Series Award. She was the 2016-2017 Playwrights of New York (PoNY) Fellow at the Lark. Jen has a two-book deal with Random House for a collection of stories (THE ISLAND DWELLERS, pub date May 1, 2018) and a novel. Education: Brown, Iowa Playwrights Workshop, Juilliard. More info: www.jensilverman.com
Powell's Q&A: Jen Silverman, Author of 'The Island Dwellers'
by Jen Silverman, May 10, 2018 10:35 AM
Describe your latest book.
The Island Dwellers is a collection of interlinked stories, set half in the US and half in Japan. It’s a book about nomads, travelers, people caught between the known and the deeply unfamiliar — in their relationships, their geographies, and their identities.
I wrote some of the stories while I was living in Japan, and some after I’d returned to the US and was in a limbo state, sleeping on friends’ couches and reassembling a life here. When you live in a different country, you meet a lot of people who radiate the palpable fact of running from something. You, yourself, begin to radiate that fact.
For me, these stories are about intimacy first and foremost — how we navigate it, how we resist it, how desperately we require it, and how we reach for it across languages, across all boundaries.
What was your favorite book as a child?
I loved the Moomin series by Tove Jansson. If I had to pick just one, maybe Moominland Midwinter, but I would never pick just one. Even though kids love them, they’re actually weirdly adult books about loneliness, family, curiosity, adventure, and surrender to the universe.
When did you know you were a writer?
I never thought of being anything else. I’ve also worked as a playwright for the past decade, so my relationship to story shifts and changes as I move between media, but I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing something or other.
What does your writing workspace look like?
I’ve been traveling a lot lately, so I’ve gotten to be very adaptable. I write in airports, subways, bars, and cafés. But when I’m in one place for a while, or even at home, I like to have a very wide writing table and a lot of light. I was fortunate to receive the Playwrights of New York (PoNY) Fellowship last year. Fellows get a yearlong apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, among other things. By the end of that year, all of the walls were covered in pages — some stories, some plays. I’d just wander around the room, rewriting things with a sharpie. My partner finally told me that our home had become a weird facsimile of living inside my brain. It doesn’t usually get that bad though.
What do you care about more than most people around you?
I want people to feel like they’ve been heard and their feelings matter. It’s not that the people around me don’t care about these things — I tend to surround myself with people who do. It’s just that sometimes I get pulled in by the “how you feel” part, and sort of overlook the “what are you doing” part. The other day I was in a Lyft, and, in the middle of the ride, the driver pulled the car over to do something that highly resembled a drug deal. I didn’t get out because he’d just been telling me about his complicated relationship with his mom. I felt bad being like, “Oh, your mom doesn’t love you as much as your brother? Cool, so, bye.” Then I told a friend about the whole thing, and she was horrified. She was like, “I don’t care what you guys were talking about, get out of the car!” So. My new life philosophy is: Fuck your feelings! (Just kidding.)
Share an interesting experience you've had with one of your readers.
Part of being a playwright is that you interact with your audience a lot. You are not in the dark, to any degree, about what an audience responds to or doesn’t respond to. And every audience is different. You have to know what you want to make and then just make it, regardless of anybody else’s tastes, because there’s just too much feedback otherwise. If you’re trying to rewrite to make people happy, you’re already doomed.
I had this amazing interaction after a show one time. An older audience member walked right up to me and said, “I don’t like your play.” I asked her what she didn’t like, and we ended up having a fascinating conversation which boiled down to the fact that one of the character's choices made her deeply uncomfortable. This character's values had thrown hers into question in a way that she was a little bit angry about. The more we talked, the less angry she was: “I mean, I liked some of it.” I didn’t know how to articulate to her that she didn’t have to backtrack; the conversation we were having was the value of the experience. In this country, it’s such a big deal whether or not we like something — characters have to be likable, we always have to be having fun. Sometimes I just find all of that completely beside the point. We can get to more fascinating and complex places when we aren’t being held at likability-gunpoint.
Introduce one other author you think people should read and suggest a good book with which to start.
I’m obsessed with the poet Kaveh Akbar right now. Calling a Wolf a Wolf is his most recent book. I can’t stop reading it. In terms of fiction though, I couldn’t be more excited about Jess Arndt’s story collection Large Animals. Sometimes you read things that feel as close and personal to you as if you’d written them, and yet alien and astonishing, like gifts from the universe. This is how I feel about Large Animals.
Besides your personal library, do you have any beloved collections?
I will draw on any surface, with any material. Everything from story drafts to scripts to doctor bills get covered in doodles — mostly of sad pandas. I’ve started keeping a small collection on Instagram (@this_panda_is_sad). If we’re in a meeting and you’re giving me particularly uninformed and ludicrous notes about what you think I should change, and it looks like I am vigorously writing down all of your suggestions, be warned: I am drawing a depressed panda.
Describe a recurring dream.
I’m writing on a TV show right now, and it’s the first time I’ve been staffed in a writers’ room. I’ve started to have recurring dreams every night that we are in the room breaking the season — you know, whiteboards, post-it notes, character arcs, the whole nine yards. Then I wake up and first I have this feeling of incredible triumph that we’ve broken the whole season. Then I realize that I was dreaming, so none of the problems or solutions are relevant to what we’re actually doing. (In one of these dreams, Dame Judi Dench was a character, and I had to figure out how her arc meshed with everybody else’s.) Then I get up and go to work, where we continue to break the actual season, in the actual room, sans Dame Judi Dench, only now it feels like I haven’t slept in days. I would say that this particular sleep cycle is the most fun I’ve ever had, except I had my wisdom teeth out once, and that was more fun.
Tell us something you're embarrassed to admit.
All of the writers in my writers’ room recently went to paint pottery one night after work. (Look, it’s a queer show, I don’t know what to tell you.) I discovered, for the first time, that pottery painting is my happy place. I am 80 years old.
(YES I KNOW, the hat. Like I said, it’s a queer show.)
What's the strangest job you've ever had?
Let’s just say, the story “Maureen” had to come from somewhere…
What scares you the most as a writer?
Repeating myself. I don’t want to do the same thing twice. It feels lazy. Caryl Churchill is a playwright I look up to because she’s always reinventing what a play is — experimenting, going deeper. She never goes, “That one was great, let me do it again.” I think you have to constantly risk failure in order to remain relevant.
If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Jen Silverman: No One Else Has So Vehemently Defended the Naked Mole-Rat
Offer a favorite sentence from another writer.
I have this on a scrap of paper that I’ve carried around forever: “There are 3 kinds of people — those dead, those alive, and those at sea.” It’s attributed to Anacharsis, but I don’t know if this is falsely attributed, or what the original context is. It’s a piece of language that I’ve loved for a long time. Maybe because it feels like a blessing of a nomadic existence. Like: I’m not a disaster, I’m just Door #3.
Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
There’s a Japanese reality TV show on Netflix called Terrace House. It’s a deep comfort to me. You follow this group of strangers living together in a house. Everybody is kind to each other and tries to do their best to get along. It is an incredible subversion of the entire American concept of reality TV. Oh and also RuPaul’s Drag Race. OF COURSE. I feel no guilt about this. Katya and Trixie Mattel, I love you profoundly.
What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
“Don’t be a dick.”
What is an “average” day like for you, as a (mostly) freelance writer?
I wake up, flawless, post up, flawless, ride round in it, flawless. The rest of the time, I’m just doing rewrites and being told the subway is broken.
How is The Island Dwellers similar or different from your previous work?
Most obviously, it’s a book. My previous published works are for the theatre. Thematically, though, it’s in conversation with my body of work in other genres. I’m drawn to characters who are living between different worlds, who have fluid identities, who are always just a little on the outside, but looking around themselves with a certain amount of longing. I often write women, or queer characters. I am fascinated by questions of transformation: Can you change who you are by changing your behavior? Your language? Your country? Your relationships? Is it possible to become new, or are we always ourselves, no matter where we go? I’m interested in exploring intimacy from different angles — how do others see us in ways that we can’t see ourselves? How would we like to be seen? How do characters — especially female ones — achieve a certain kind of visibility in their lives or their relationships? And I often think the hardest questions are best asked with a certain amount of dark humor.
These are my Top 5 Books To Travel With:
Cities I’ve Never Lived In by Sara Majka
Crush by Richard Siken
Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar
I remember reading Sara Majka’s book over and over again in Riga, Latvia, where I was teaching a playwriting workshop. I’d come home from teaching each evening and sit on the windowsill of my hotel room and read. I felt like that book was talking directly to me, and a little bit about me. I spent a whole year in Okayama (southern Japan), reading Crush over and over again because I didn’t bring many English books with me. I could have recited the poem “Straw House Straw Dog” out loud for you by the time I flew out of Kansai airport. Joan Didion is Sydney, Australia — in the few weeks before I moved to Los Angeles, I was in Sydney, contemplating the big life change that was coming. Sydney has a climate not unlike LA, and I found myself staring at similar palm trees on an entirely different continent, and reading this quintessential LA book. Maggie Nelson is New York winter, my home city, after months and months of being on the road. And right now I’m traveling next to Kaveh Akbar’s book, reading it as I move between a TV job on the West coast and pre-production for two plays on the East coast, letting this book bleed into my dreams.
This book goes on the list: “Books to Read on Vacation While Wondering if All of Humanity Is Doomed; Vacation Turns to Nihilism; Colonialism Is Death; The Ice Caps Are Melting; This Is Still a Good Book Though.”
÷ ÷ ÷
Jen Silverman is a New York–based writer and playwright, a two-time MacDowell Fellow, and the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant and the Yale Drama Series prize. She was awarded the 2016–17 Playwrights of New York fellowship at The Lark and is a member of New Dramatists. She completed a BA in comparative literature at Brown University and an MFA in playwriting at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and was a fellow at the Playwrights Program at Juilliard. The Island Dwellers is her first book.
Silverman, Jen: THE ISLAND DWELLERS
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Silverman, Jen THE ISLAND DWELLERS Random House (Adult Fiction) $27.00 5, 1 ISBN: 978-0-399-59149-5
Playwright Silverman's debut story collection deals with a coterie of international nomads, lost girls, and millennial wastrels as they navigate the mean streets of New York and the clean streets of Tokyo, among other places.
Camilo is a feckless performance artist who is liberated from sexual monogamy. Ancash is the sleek, ethereal diplomat's son who engineers violence into his sexual encounters. Yuliya, a refugee from the turmoil of Cape Verde, navigates Tokyo as if by not touching she can spare herself from being touched. Sarah, a professor in Iowa, resolves to be a "bad person" only with her impossibly lovelorn teaching assistant, Topher, but finds she cannot contain badness to the bedroom alone. In a book filled with memorable characters, Silverman's sharp sense of place, her eye for telling detail, and her pitch-perfect dialogue tumble these stories through their interlocking narratives with great brio. Told from alternating locales (New York, Tokyo, Iowa, Yokohama), these first-person narratives of drift and wrack detail the generational angst of young, urban, queer, or allied loners as they seek to navigate a world whose rules are in flux and where all identity seems to lead to anonymity. Characters reappear throughout the collection. This has the effect of creating community out of what might otherwise feel like an excess of alienation but unfortunately also results in highlighting the thematic similarities between the stories. The characters, while all compelling in their own rights, are all disaffected in similar ways--the men needy; the women resistant to being needed. This thematic overlap has the unfortunate effect of weakening the impact of the individual stories. Even when they are motivated by unique premises, the characters' responses, both to each other and to the world through which they drift, do not startle the reader so much as confirm what the reader has already been led to believe.
A shimmering collection that speaks with humor and, ultimately, tenderness about people whose lives rarely allow for either.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Silverman, Jen: THE ISLAND DWELLERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528960010/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d83ab825. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528960010
The Island Dwellers
Publishers Weekly. 265.14 (Apr. 2, 2018): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Island Dwellers
Jen Silverman. Random House, $27 (272p) ISBN 978-0-399-59149-5
Playwright Silverman debuts with an audacious collection of 11 arresting interconnected short stories. These narratives can stand alone but take on deeper significance together, depicting people living on literal and metaphorical islands of isolation, despite their entanglements with each other. In "Girl Canadian Shipwreck," New Yorker Macey tells a story of being shipwrecked on an island where she finds a set of islanders and a young woman who begs Macey and her fellow travelers to take her away with them once their ship is fixed. They leave her, and Macey callously says that one shouldn't go to an island if one doesn't want to be on an island, an eerie proclamation that could be made about any of the lonely cast populating these pages. In "Maria of the Grapes," Maria pines for her friend Ancash in Tokyo, who prefers men; in "Mamushi," Ancash tells the story of an abusive relationship he shared at 17 with an older man. Risa thinks Japan is the safest place in the world, but her involvement with a powerful man leads to her disappearance ("The Safest Place in the World"). Silverman creates a harsh, seductive world that is both more and lAs than it seems, showing how deeply people will deceive themselves to believe they've found connection. Silverman's winning stories are varied and always engrossing. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Island Dwellers." Publishers Weekly, 2 Apr. 2018, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533555588/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=73ce2176. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533555588
Strauss, Leah
Source:
Booklist. 5/1/2018, Vol. 114 Issue 17, p61-61. 1/6p.
The Island D w ellers.
By Jen Silverm an.
May 2018. 272p. Random, $27 (9780399591495).
Silverman’s assured debut collection showcases
flawed characters at personal crossroads,
grappling with unrequited love, deteriorating
relationships, and the search for autonomy.
Largely alternating between the United States
and Japan, characters are at times disoriented
and vulnerable, and their struggles are deeply
felt. “Pretoria” tracks a South African expat
as she vacillates between the burgeoning relationship
with her earnest Japanese boyfriend
and the pull of her homeland. A professor’s
seduction of her young teaching assistant
devolves into an unsettling exploration of internal
justification as she wields a newfound
power in uneasy, manipulative ways. In “Maria
of the Grapes,” the heady titular character
navigates unrequited love and a strong emotional
connection with the magnetic Ancash.
“Maureen” follows a recent college grad who
jumps at the chance to assist the owner of a
production company, the aforementioned
Maureen, in writing a script. While Maureen’s
behavior first seems eccentric, her late-night
summonses begin to uncover internal questions
and doubts. “Surveillance” portrays two
friends and their spiral of complementary
paranoia. Vivid and passionate, Silverman’s
11 tales offer affecting and bracing journeys.
— Leah Strauss
Farmers Weekly. 3/30/2018, p1-1. 1p.
Document Type:
Book Review
Fiction Reviews
The Island Dwellers: Stories
Random House
Jen Silverman,
27 (272p) ISBN
978-0-399-59149-5
Playwright Silverman debuts with an audacious collection of 11 arresting interconnected short stories. These narratives can stand alone but take on deeper significance together, depicting people living on literal and metaphorical islands of isolation, despite their entanglements with each other. In "Girl Canadian Shipwreck," New Yorker Macey tells a story of being shipwrecked on an island where she finds a set of islanders and a young woman who begs Macey and her fellow travelers to take her away with them once their ship is fixed. They leave her, and Macey callously says that one shouldn't go to an island if one doesn't want to be on an island, an eerie proclamation that could be made about any of the lonely cast populating these pages. In "Maria of the Grapes," Maria pines for her friend Ancash in Tokyo, who prefers men; in "Mamushi," Ancash tells the story of an abusive relationship he shared at 17 with an older man. Risa thinks Japan is the safest place in the world, but her involvement with a powerful man leads to her disappearance ("The Safest Place in the World"). Silverman creates a harsh, seductive world that is both more and less than it seems, showing how deeply people will deceive themselves to believe they've found connection. Silverman's winning stories are varied and always engrossing. (May)
Review: The Island Dwellers: Stories by Jen Silverman
April 23, 2018 inautopiastateofmind Leave a comment
From the blurb alone, The Island Dwellers promises exploration, identity questions, and imaginative stories. Framed around this concept of islands, loneliness, and our relationships to others, The Island Dwellers ties eleven stories together to grapple with these existential crises.
In this razor-sharp debut collection, Jen Silverman delivers eleven interconnected stories that take place in expat bars, artist colonies, train platforms, and matchbox apartments in the United States and Japan. Unforgettable characters crisscross through these transient spaces, loving, hurting, and leaving each other as they experience the loneliness and dangerous freedom that comes with being an outsider.
(Disclaimer: I received this free book from Netgalley. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
I think that The Island Dwellers makes some pretty broad claims about the questions and themes Silverman will explore – and I think it largely succeeds. Just in the first two stories alone – which kind of set the tone for the entire collection – these issues are grappled with. We are asked about how we make sense of home and our relationships to others around us. There’s something, a theme in each story, that kind of pulls you along. Each story leads us somewhere and while they tackle similar issues, the characters are all different. The characters firmly, but gently, take your hand and move you forwards.
Each story has a distinct sense of beginning and resolution. What I found most surprising were the subtle ways that each character, each world connects in this imaginative way. While they all have different lives and stories – it speaks to this idea of a person and islands. They have all moved so far from home, so seemingly different, but they all lie awake at night dueling these same thoughts, and connected in this thread of human experiences. If this idea resonates with you at all, I’d recommend The Island Dwellers. You can find the book on Goodreads for more info.
‘The Island Dwellers’ by Jen Silverman
Review by Pia Cortez
July 4, 2018
Whether it’s performance art or keeping relationships, the “girlfriend” never seems to get it. In “Girl Canadian Shipwreck,” the opening story of Jen Silverman’s collection The Island Dwellers: Stories, the titular girlfriend stumbles her way into a basement to watch her partner’s show, only to resurface later at her partner’s ex-girlfriend’s rooftop party that she once again, stumbles her way through.
Fortunately, at the end of the girlfriend’s fumbling is a dose of clarity, as if relieved from the shadows of wanting to accept what she can’t understand. It’s almost like wanting to leave an island, although there is no easy way out. The girlfriend in “Girl Canadian Shipwreck” is an illumination of what weaves throughout Silverman’s debut collection, an homage to the kinds of escape we’re all looking for, whether it’s from emotions or situations or people. Except in some cases, the escape is not just about getting free but getting out unscathed.
Worlds come through in each story, as Silverman maps out heartache and language from South Africa to Japan. In “Pretoria,” the South African Daniela struggles to stay within the confines of what Tokyo has to offer and the kind of life she’ll have after her Japanese boyfriend proposed. She weighs her decision with a friend Pieter, who’s also South African and who’s also dating a Japanese girl, as the intimacies and intricacies of dating, love and their friendship get all tangled up. There are no easy endings, but there are words for what used to be clouds of fog on her mind: “The things that make me love you aren’t things I love in myself.”
Silverman further plays with this tension, the reader a witness to how we struggle with our own selves in a several of the stories. In “A Great History of American Mistakes,” a professor beds her assistant, while a worried friend worries not for what it will do to the assistant , but to her. Maria in “Maria of the Grapes” vacillates between friendship and a growing, dangerous tenderness for her gay friend, the beautiful Ancash. It’s in this back and forth, this uncomfortable in-between that Silverman spins her characters in, a kind of contingency needed for a gratifying release.
And if there was a story that equates Silverman’s style and theme spot on, it is in the uproarious tale “White People.” Illustrating the idiosyncrasies of the millennial generation, it provides a glimpse in the lives of a soon-to-be divorced couple. From their “Divorce Dinners” where they discuss how to part ways amicably over farm-raised quail, to their exploits in dating that crosses cultural appropriation and tokenizing, the story is guiltily refreshing in its humor:
Elias’s quiet confidence and lack of curiosity were almost as inspiring to me as his portfolio of gestures. And then it occurred to me: passive jealous probing wasn’t in his cultural heritage. That was a white thing, and Elias was Venezuelan. I wanted to tell Elias how grateful I was to be able to learn from him, but he’d already turned his back on me.
And just when I feel like I’ve got Silverman’s style all figured out, two stories throw me a total curveball. “The Wolf” is a story about what happens after a man is murdered, and the person hired to take care of disposing the body delivers an unexpected gesture of goodwill. “The Pike” on the other hand, is a parallel story of a writer in an artist’s colony, obsessed with the biography of the poet Ted Hughes’s lover Assia Wevill, who he marries after Sylvia Plath killed herself. The departure of tone and style took me by surprise, but I was pleasantly buoyed and hooked by Silverman’s literary turn. The depth with which she anchored these final stories of the collection are enough for me to dismiss what I initially dreaded with the first ones, mostly because I felt like they were too easy to make fun of (because these characters are actually pieces of us, in many ways).
The eleven stories that make up this collection are raw, intense in their longing, and tender in the most unexpected ways. Each one a light on its own, in spite of the violence and darkness that they hold. While some can elicit a chuckle or two, these stories also emanate fear, fury. A longing to tether oneself to a person, or a yearning to be freed up from whatever binds them, a need to vacate the island. Whichever it is, Silverman shines in this collection the way sunlight hits the surface of water, forming rivulets of gold. I like to think of her as the protagonist in “The Pike,” the writer simultaneously distant and engrossed with her lover, her work, and really, her own skillfull craft: “Her audience is hungry, captivated; in that moment, they lean in astonished. She’s woven them a story so odd and brilliant that she’s captured even herself.”
Short Stories That Travel the World From a Deliciously Off-Kilter Perspective
By Julie Orringer
June 22, 2018
The island dwellers of Silverman’s linked stories may live within the dense crush of Tokyo or New York City, but they’re all trapped inside mini-worlds of their own making, impeded by sticky relationships, lack of money or severed connections to their former selves. “Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll forget how to be who I am,” the narrator of “Pretoria” says, contemplating whether to stay in Tokyo and marry her Japanese boyfriend or go home to South Africa without him. All of these stories are told from a first-person point of view, but each narrator is distinct; some we’ve met earlier as secondary characters in other stories, and the inside view yields satisfying insight. One of Silverman’s recurrent ideas is how blind we can be toward those we claim to adore — a blindness induced by self-interest, immaturity or ignorance.
In “White People,” Cynthia convinces herself that her boyfriend hails from Venezuela; as she imagines his foreign upbringing, she fails to take note of his Queens accent or to question his non-Venezuelan name. Maria, the protagonist of “Maria of the Grapes,” falls in love with a gay American man who works in a Tokyo kyabakura, where patrons pay to flirt and drink with him. Hoping that her love will make her an exception in his life, she ignores every sign to the contrary.
“How can we know what will come of the strangers we bring close?” the narrator of “The Pike” asks, contemplating the disastrous affair between Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill. “And who can resist a story in which the price of unknowing is so high?” These stories, in any case, are irresistible, delivering a portrait of contemporary relationships that, although bleak, is shot through with veins of real connection.
Julie Orringer is the author of a novel, “The Invisible Bridge,” and a collection of stories, “How to Breathe Underwater.”