Late actor's stories published

By MARK SAGE/Staff

Beverly Jensen was an actor.
Among other playhouses, she spent three seasons at the Barter, where she performed in productions that included “Vanities,” “The Mousetrap” and “Private Lives.” It was there, in Abingdon in 1977, that she met the professor who would become her husband.
Jay Silverman, who is now at Nassau Community College in New York, was an English professor at Virginia Highlands Community College.
According to a website, www.beverlyjensen.net, the pair married in 1984.
Two years later, she stopped being an actor.
She became a writer.
And a mother. Silverman said Jensen also worked a part-time job, crafting her stories in her spare time.
She was a writer, though, not a publisher. Silverman said his wife didn’t care about publishing, or at least didn’t care to invest any time in trying to get published. She wrote, he said, to write. She enjoyed concentrating on getting it exactly right, he said.
It was he who wanted to publish, after Jensen’s death. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2002, she died a year later, in her home state of Maine.
A few weeks after her death, at a memorial service at the Public Theater in New York, Silverman said Jenifer Levin, the instructor for Jensen’s two writing courses, asked what he planned to do with the work. She told him, she would help try to find an outlet. They had beginner’s luck, Silverman said. Honing one story, “Wake,” Silverman and Levin sent it to the New England Review, which picked it for a 2006 publication.
The story wound up catching the eye of one very important reader. Stephen King picked it for the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories. Joyce Carol Oates, meanwhile, nominated it for a Pushcart Prize.
Before she died, Jensen’s college roommate, Jennie Torres, sent several stories to her ex-sister-in-law, who Silverman said was in the business. After she died, he and Levin pulled all of Jensen’s stories together and sent a copy to Katrina Kension, who helped guide them to an agent, who found an editor, with Viking Press, who published the book
Some of the stories are based on family lore and legend, he said. Others were simply part of the creative process.
“I wish that Beverly could know,” Silverman said.
He said that she would have been thrilled to know that writers who she admired, like Richard Russo, were reading and reviewing her work favorably. She had now idea how good she was, Silverman said. As an English teacher, he did, but he said it’s still nice to have that confirmed.