Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction
Ploughshares is pleased to present Jen Silverman with the fourteenth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for their story “In the Next World, Maybe,” which appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of Ploughshares. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by acclaimed writer, guest editor, longtime patron, and member of the Ploughshares advisory board, Alice Hoffman, honors a short story published in the journal in the previous year. Of Silverman’s story, Hoffman writes:
“Jen Silverman’s story ‘In The Next World, Maybe’ is nothing less than extraordinary. This tale of transformation and complex relationships is as beautifully written as it is surprising, a one-of-a-kind fictional journey by a writer who is not afraid of the dark.”
Jen Silverman’s most recent novel is There’s Going to be Trouble (Random House, 2024). Other books with Random House include the novel We Play Ourselves (2021) and the story collection The Island Dwellers (2018). Silverman’s essays have been published in the New York Times, Paris Review, and Vogue. Plays include The Roommate (on Broadway with Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone), The Moors, and Collective Rage. Silverman has written for Tales of the City (Netflix) and Tokyo Vice (Max). Honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim.
1. Talk to us about your work as a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, and the connections across the three disciplines. How does your work for the stage and screen inform your fiction?
Though I work across different media, the motivating impulse is the same for me. I’m driven by character: how and why people do what they do; the boundaries of how far we’ll go to get what we want; what we become when we chase our need to shape-shift, re-invent, re-begin. Theater is naturally a character-based form—you are, after all, spending real time in a real space with an actor portraying a character who had better be complex enough to keep you in your seat. But the projects I choose in other media also push at the edges of these character-driven questions.
My first novel, We Play Ourselves, tells the story of a thirty-something playwright who tries to reinvent herself in the wake of a massive public humiliation. She flees to LA and gets embroiled in a teen girl fight club, along with the ethically dubious female documentarian who is making a movie about the girls. My latest novel, There’s Going To Be Trouble, is about an American in Paris during the 2019 Yellow Vest protests, who falls in love with a French activist. As she gets pulled into his world, she is forced to confront a life-changing secret about her father’s involvement in the 1968 student protests. I love looking at what we think we know about ourselves—and how that knowledge can then be shifted or reframed in a heartbeat. A number of my chosen TV/film projects live in that space as well.
2. What inspired “In the Next World, Maybe”?
I started writing it during a stretch in which my partner and I were living in upstate New York. There were so many daily details that mesmerized me—the light, the trees, the mice living in our walls, the seasonal ebb and flow of nearby working farms. I was struck by the mysterious quality of the lives around me—how the rural unknown is distinctly different from the urban unknown. There’s something so specific about what is permitted and hidden in wide open spaces, as opposed to what is permitted and hidden via density and anonymity. And I knew that I wanted to follow a character as she encounters a series of uneasy revelations and adapts to them, instead of withdrawing from them. Our adaptability as a species is an incredible gift, but also an attribute that becomes incredibly dangerous when we adapt to dangerous things.
3. What did you discover or grapple with while writing “In the Next World, Maybe”? Were there any risks you took that paid off?
I wrote the story right before beginning my second novel, There’s Going To Be Trouble. Some of what I was grappling with was the third-person pronoun—I’m much more comfortable writing characters from a first-person POV, and We Play Ourselves functions almost by the same rules as a monologue. Knowing that TGTBT would be in the third person, I wanted to experiment with the ways in which knowledge can be transmitted and withheld across that remove—how the audience can have realizations that the character isn’t having, or how we can draw one conclusion even as we see our protagonist drawing another. By the end of the story, we have (I hope) rounded the bend of a few sets of revelations, including how our protagonist is choosing to carry the troubling knowledge she’s gained.
4.What’s the most valuable piece of writing advice you’ve received?
Over the years, I have found it very comforting to hear from others—and witness for myself—how much clarity comes with rewriting. So much can only be solved by time and iteration, as opposed to needing to be known right up top. And/but/also, the mysteries in the writing are sometimes its truth and its pleasure and need to be trusted instead of being ironed out.
5. What or who have you been reading lately?
I read a lot of poetry, and some of the poets I come back to repeatedly are Rebecca Lindenberg, Traci Brimhall, Jenny George, Donika Kelly, Tomás Q. Morín, and Sarah Ruhl. I’m currently reading Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, which is nourishing me in ways I didn’t know I needed. I’m also working through Sue Prideaux’s particularly riveting biography of Strindberg as background accompaniment to a Strindberg adaptation I’m working on for a director.
