The New Yorker Publishes Work by JSC Professor

August 24, 2015

It’s a writer’s dream to get published in The New Yorker, the esteemed literary, cultural and political magazine that has showcased some of the world’s most respected authors since its founding in 1925.

Now Jensen Beach, assistant professor of writing and literature at JSC and fiction editor of Green Mountains Review, has been welcomed into an elite group that has included such well-known writers as Dorothy Parker, Vladimir Nabokov, John O’Hara, Eudora Welty, John Updike, Haruki Murakami, Alice Munro and Stephen King. The New Yorker published a short story by Beach, titled The Apartment, in its Aug. 31, 2015, issue.

Jensen discussed the story, set in Stockholm, and his experience living in Sweden for six years during an interview on Vermont Public Radio with Mitch Wertlieb the morning the issue hit the stands. In a another interview with Cressida Leyshon accompanying his piece in The New Yorker, Jenson delved into how he approaches character development in his fiction writing:

“One of the reasons I so enjoy fiction is that, like life, it’s so morally ambiguous,” he told Leyshon. “There are bad characters capable of all sorts of bad actions in history and novels alike, to be sure, but for the most part I’d argue that the best characters, like most real people, elicit both sympathy and judgment.”

The Apartment is from Beach’s forthcoming book of short stories, Swallowed by the Cold, scheduled to be published by Graywolf next year. He also is the author of the short story collection For Out of the Heart Proceed (Dzanc Books and Dark Sky Books), as well as numerous stories, reviews, interviews, and essays that have appeared in A Public Space, American Short Fiction (web), Cincinnati Review, Fifty-Two Stories, Kenyon Review Online, Ninth Letter, Sou’wester and Witness.