Jennifer Steil
Jennifer Steil’s new novel Exile Music (Viking) was inspired by the Jewish community of La Paz, Bolivia, where she lived for four years. Many of these Jews or their ancestors fled the Nazis in Europe in the 1930s to find sanctuary in Bolivia, one of only three countries still granting visas to Jews by 1938. Although her current home is in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Jennifer and her 10-year-old daughter were recently evacuated to London, England. Much of her work thus far concerns people living far from home, either by choice or necessity, and explores themes of displacement, identity, and home. Although born in the United States, Jennifer has not lived in the country since 2006, when she left to take a job as a newspaper editor in Yemen.
Jennifer’s previous books include The Ambassador’s Wife, winner of the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Best Novel award and the 2016 Phillip McMath Post Publication book award, and The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, a critically acclaimed memoir about her tenure as editor of the Yemen Observer newspaper in Sana’a.
Her stories and articles have appeared in the New Orleans Review, Saranac Review, World Policy Journal, The Week, Time, Life, Peauxdunque Review, The Washington Times, Vogue UK, Die Welt, New York Post, The Rumpus, and France 24.
Twitter: @jfsteil7
Instagram: jenniferfsteil
Is there another profession you would like to try?
Oh, so many! I wish I could live several lives. Above all, I wish I could compose and play music. I wish I could describe things with sounds, to speak that language, streaked with magic and the divine. It lights up my brain with just a few notes, changes moods, redirects thoughts. I love also how musicians become the hearth at a party, everyone gathering around a guitarist or pianist. I wish I could gather people around me like that.
I would also love to be a visual artist, to be able to draw and paint and sculpt the kinds of things that would make people stop and stare, their skin prickling.
One of my consolations is creating characters who do the things I wish I could do. The Ambassador’s Wife is about a painter. Exile Music is about musicians. I’m writing about a composer in my next book. After that one – maybe something with figure skaters? So that just once, I could do a triple axel.
What brings you great joy?
Cherry season. The gold of September light in London. The sight of the Andes Mountains from above. A tub of Mani peanut butter. The stone houses and bridges of our village in France. Arriving in a new country. Baroque music festivals. The National Theatre. Merce Cunningham dance classes. Having written. Rehearsing theatre. Mentoring other writers. Sunset on the old city of Sana’a, Yemen. Climbing mountains. Forests. Listening to my daughter’s stories of other worlds. Talking about theatre with my husband. Working on my PhD. Landing in New York City.
Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long?
I very unofficially collect postcards. All kinds of postcards from all eras and countries. When we first moved to Uzbekistan I went to this vast flea market and was delighted to find whole boxes of decades-old postcards, many of which were covered with writing in Uzbek, Tajik, or Russian. Some were photographs of Tashkent or Samarkand. Some were portraits. I bought as many as I could carry. I buy postcards everywhere, perhaps because I am a lazy photographer and I want to make sure I have a visual record of my journeys. I don’t have an organized collection. Rather, I have many boxes and drawers in several countries stuffed with these postcards. I am not precious about them. Sometimes I send them to people. I dream of wallpapering my office with them. But I doubt I will ever find the time. Postcards also contain nostalgia for me, reminding me of our pre-email days, when we penned messages by hand and had something in our post boxes other than bills.
What do you worry about?
I think you probably should have given me a word count for this one! I worry about everything. I worry about the fact that humanity is so intent on its own destruction. I worry that everything I love about this planet—the forests and wildernesses and lakes and oceans and grass—will be gone before my daughter grows up. I worry that she won’t get a chance to grow up. I worry she won’t have clean air and water or places to be alone in the wild. I worry I won’t live long enough to raise her to adulthood. I worry that so many people have become resistant to facts and science, that people deny any sort of objective reality in order to stubbornly cling to their prejudices. I worry about racism and the fate of my friends’ children. I worry about the kind of people we are electing. I worry about refugees and immigrants and the fact that the US is founded on genocide. I worry I won’t get to be an old lady. I worry I am not a good enough parent. I worry I won’t get to see my husband again. I worry I will never learn to enjoy my life, to simply be present in it.
Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing?
For most of my life, I wanted nothing more than a career in the theatre. It was my earliest passion. I majored in theater in college and moved to Seattle with the intention of becoming a star of stage and screen. But after four years of barely scraping together a living as an actor and increasing frustration with the dearth of interesting roles for women, I began writing. Realizing I had little training, I applied to MFA programs and moved to New York to study. I never had any intention of abandoning the theater; I just needed a way to say the things my characters didn’t. I continued to perform in small theaters in New York until I moved to Yemen to run a newspaper in 2006. It was supposed to be a temporary move, but I met my husband there and haven’t lived in the US since. This means that only rarely am I living somewhere I could pursue acting. When we’re in London, I’m too busy writing and teaching and scrambling to make money to pay the exorbitant rents here to do much else. I miss theatre. I miss it every day. More than anything, I miss the rehearsal process. Writing is so lonesome, and theater is so communal. I loved working so intimately with others, the deep relationships I formed with cast members. Maybe someday I will find my way back.
