|
Thisbe
Nissen
I think my story of getting published is a round-about one. I met
my agent, Eric Simonoff
from
Janklow and Nesbit, in the Fall of '95, long before I had anything
for him to sell. He makes a trip out to the Iowa Writers' Workshop
every couple years to meet with students, and I'd given him the beginnings
of something I thought might become a novel. When I eventually finished
"Maud and Drew" in '97, Eric tried, unfortunately unsuccessfully,
to sell it.
I
was working on stories also, trying to get them published, sending
my collection out to every contest there is. "Out of the Girls'
Room and into the Night" wound up by some miracle winning the John
Simmons Short Fiction Award and was published by The University
of Iowa Press in the fall of '99. It was subsequently picked up
by Anchor Books and reissued in the Fall of 2000 by them. So my
name was out there a little bit, and I guess that some editors approached
my agent asking what else I was working on. I had been writing what
I thought were going to be connected short stories about Roz, and
Edwin and Miranda, characters who had appeared in two stories in
"Out of the Girls' Room...", but by the time I finished The Good
People of New York it had turned into a novel --- an "episodic
novel" as one of my friends calls it.
I finished writing it in March of 2000 during an extended trip to
New York where I was staying with my parents and spending my days
at the Public Library, writing. I just wanted to get it done, and
I was hoping that maybe someone would publish it. I never dreamed
that there would be a few publishing houses actually bidding against
each other, which is the way it turned out. In the end, the novel
went to Knopf, to the same editor I'd been working with on the Anchor
reprint of the story collection.
All I had ever wanted to do was publish something so I could maybe
get a teaching job and be able to teach and have time to write.
I never even let myself hope that a big publisher would give me
enough money that I'd be able to call myself a full time writer.
Knopf and my agent and my editor have been very good to me, and
I'm incredibly grateful to them.
back
to the Debut Authors feature
|
