(they/ them) / We Play Ourselves + There's Going To Be Trouble
@randomhouse
// writer-producer on Tokyo Vice S2 Max // The Roommate on Broadway
@theroommatebway
I went to bed, woke up, & discovered thousands of people have opinions on cows. For those asking - the yogurt is from , a small family farm in NY. I generally have more book recs than cow recs… but the yogurt is delish, and TBH I’m
#TeamQuiet
@greyshuh
In the wake of the Omicron super spread, my suggestion is cancel Santa Con forever and replace it with Grinch Con, where nobody gathers because nobody likes other people.
When the tweet got to 100k I thought I’d get my own activewear line. By 200k I hoped for skincare products. Now it’s 500k and I’m still a sad writer in a pandemic, so I’m gonna hawk my debut novel. ✅ girl fight club, 🚫 cows. Pub 2/9 Random House.
I left what has been my home for the past 5 weeks (and, from time to time, the last 10 years) with a full heart & a full first draft of my next novel. Thank you
@MacDowell1907
This happened, I went to bed & woke up & it had still happened! So now I’m posting because this seems not to be a fever dream. All my thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation
@GuggFellows
& to my recommenders, and congrats to the 2022 cohort!
Today's the day! Congratulations to our new class of Fellows. These 180 individuals represent 51 fields of study. We're honored to give them the opportunity to pursue their passions under the freest possible conditions.
#guggenheimfellowship2022
Read more:
Thrilled & grateful to be chosen as an
@NEAarts
Literature Fellow in the company of these other writers. The day I learned I’d received an NEA, a book order landed containing books by 4 of my cohort. I’m looking forward to reading the rest!
My only takeaway from Bad Art Friend: DO NOT GIVE UP THE GROUP CHAT. If that shit gets subpoenaed, set your phone on fire and move to the woods. If you can’t do that for me, it’s only phone calls from here on out.
New Yorkers get a bad rap. Yes we will tell you to fuck off to your face BUT ALSO, we are orderly and polite when navigating 3 different lines of 2 separate PCR testing sites on a narrow sidewalk in 20 degree weather
My feed is 60% people saying they have Covid after doing everything right and 40% people urging each other to go to restaurants and theatres. I have new sympathy for the ex who once told me - rather severely - that mixed signals will lead to the end of life as we know it.
My next novel There’s Going To Be Trouble is coming next month on 4/9 from Random House. I’m told it’s a great novel to 1) wander around Paris while reading, 2) read in bed, while pretending you’re wandering around Paris.
Of the many plot twists I didn’t see coming: the fact that in 2001 I barely made it through chemistry and in 2021, I’m binge-reading immunologists on Twitter
Went to vote and the lady studied my handwriting & told me that I’m emotional, optimistic & I like to give orders. When I hesitated, she shouted, “The body doesn’t lie!” across the check-in table at me - then read my aura. Planning to vote a 2nd time so she can unblock my chakras
Slightly baffled about all the pearl-clutching re: pride. You don’t want the kids to see leather daddies but you’re fine with Santa Claus WHO INVADES THEIR HOMES, INTERROGATES THEIR ETHICS, AND LEAVES BLOOD MONEY???
I’ve been sitting at this desk for days on end, typing & deleting on loop - and I finally just glanced up and took in the shelf over my head. I guess somehow things do get written. The UK version is white (hardback) and red (paperback) and it comes out TODAY with
@AtlanticBooks
!
Dana Delany’s essay on Gloria Grahame is a fascinating examination of a female artist who was both trapped by & making use of her cultural moment. Check it out in full
@noircitymag
@DanaDelany
All of my British vocabulary is informed by Love Island UK, so all I can say when presenting you with this gorgeous
@AtlanticBooks
paperback cover, is: OI OI OI! Out in the UK on April 7th.
“You effeminate boys of the theatre, what do you know about war?” - Hemingway to Orson Welles, unintentionally creating my aspirational gender label: EBOTT.
Ever since I started writing this essay, I told myself it was OK because I would never publish it. So much for that. Thanks to The Gettysburg Review and
@lithub
for giving this a home, and to
@BKreimendahl
and
@ElyKreimendahl
for letting me write about them as well.
"What scares me the most: eventually, how we’re seen can become how we see ourselves. This is the definition of power, and if we let it, it will rest in the hands of strangers."
@_Jen_Silverman
considers the many forms of dissent.
“Good afternoon, this is a message from the MTA. It’s not too late to take off your mask. Your body is a temple. Show me your penis.” - a gentleman with a bicycle and a bullhorn, who is most likely not an MTA employee
The Guggenheim announcement, 2022 vs 1941. I’m so grateful to
@GuggFellows
& to anyone who would care to describe any of us as “in the flower of their age.”
In which I write about my mother, my ex, the time my Lyft driver stopped to buy drugs on the way home, and a series of other things that make me intensely uncomfortable. This repost = GOING WILD ON A TUESDAYYY
Bringing you a small book of poems from a mysteriously small bench! I’ve been working on this for a decade now - begun at
@macdowell1907
in 2012. Thank you to
@driftwoodpress
and to Traci Brimhall who chose BATH for publication. Pre-orders here:
“I’ve always felt the origin of anger in my vagina and am surprised it is not mentioned more in literature.”
@Julia_May_Jonas
’ debut novel VLADIMIR knows how to make an entrance!
How casually Twitter moves on from vampire discourse to MFA discourse. But picture this: you are in workshop… you read three unremarkable pages by a peer who smells delectable… a hunger takes you. Twitter, you can have it all!
Which Way to the Stage at
@mcctheater
is funny, sharp, and it invests in the complex humanity of its characters and therefore its audience. And OH MY GOD that cast. Don't miss this one.
The Britney Spears docu is a crash course refresher in how misogyny is corrosive, pervasive, and inextricably embedded in all American systems & power structures. And that’s just the first 15 minutes.
Arthur was so generous to me, as he was to many younger playwrights. He was beautifully unapologetic about writing weird shit, and unwaveringly encouraging of my own. I owed him a dinner and a catch up. I’m so sad that won’t happen, in this dimension.
Ending mask mandates on public transportation during a Covid surge is staggeringly stupid. For the federal judge who has been watching a different show for the past 2 years & is just tuning in now, the plot involves a pandemic… in which a virus is spread… via the air.
Everybody said "join Twitter for the writers" but honestly it's Entomology Twitter and Dinosaur Twitter that's really doing it for me so if Twitter ends, I'll just have to go hang out with bugs and dinosaurs
Honestly still can't believe our weird, gay-sexy little movie ended up streaming via
@NewYorker
. But here it is! To quote my father: "...Hmmmm." Check it out below.
Mike Donahue’s film début “Troy” may take its big-dick name from a man in apartment 4-A, but the film’s trajectory has more to do with the evolution of the couple in 4-B, who can’t help but listen to their neighbor’s activities.
@JoshuaConkel
1: Decide your life has no meaning.
2: Shore up this theory with available facts.
3: Come to the conclusion that life in general has no meaning aside from whatever arbitrary pleasures drift your way during your long inevitable tunneling toward death.
4: Write a novel.
Maggie Nelson and
@legroff
are writers who have luminously, exhilaratingly shown me what prose can do that nothing else can. Happy pub day to both, and happy reading to us all.
You are either a person who will pick up the bright red salamander & then find out it’s covered in neurotoxins or you will not pick up the bright red salamander & I have just found out which type of person I am & I haven’t washed my hands with this kind of fervor since March 2020
Reading
@legroff
’s Florida and (though this is news to no one) it is so astonishingly good that I’ve passed the point of re-rereading her sentences and am now just shouting enthusiastic adjectives out loud to myself.
@ElyKreimendahl
You don’t understand, Ely, it’s very important to shout at people on Twitter about how to QUEER CORRECTLY, otherwise they might QUEER INCORRECTLY.
Jen Silverman (
@_Jen_Silverman
) is a screenwriter, playwright, and author of the novel We Play Ourselves, the story collection The Island Dwellers, and the poetry chapbook Bath. In 2022, Silverman was awarded a fellowship with the National Endowment for the Arts for prose.
Spent a morning talking with
@Lynnbrooklyn
and Hansol Jung about
@VogelPaula
's Mother Play, and would like to spend every morning that way. Thank you
@3viewstheater
for inviting us to chat.
“People should look at the meter, they should look at the meter as a fucking example of HOW IT IS!” - NYC Traffic Cop standing beside a parking meter, very upset, on the phone
We Play Ourselves comes out on Tuesday! Pre-orders are hugely helpful to boosting a book in its entry into the world, so if you were already planning to order but just hadn’t gotten to it yet - link below 💙📚🎉
Reading essays about disaster in 2022 might sound like a questionable decision but
@egabbert
’s are as humane as they are destabilizing, and gorgeously written
@HilaryBettis
Please ask him to send you a comprehensive email of all the things he understands about women, including appendices where he provides examples.
I am normally deeply suspicious of Americana & the selective myth-making that goes into it. But Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is truly extraordinary, and so is its lens on America.