Those Who Got It Out

Ernest Hebert

Dartmouth Creative Writing Professor and Novelist

While working as a reporter for the local paper in his hometown, Keene, New Hampshire, Hebert wrote his first novel, The Dogs of March. The book depicts the rural working class he grew up With. Viking published it in 1979 to ecstatic reviews. Hebert has written five novels since then four set in the fictional town of Darby. New Hampshire.

His own recommended reading for beginning authors: Literary Marketplace.

Michael Dorris

Author, Adjunct Professor of Native American Studies and Anthropology at Dartmouth

More than a decade ago, the University of New Mexico Press called Dorris's wife, novelist Louise Erdrich '76. The publisher wanted Erdrich to write a chapter for a book about the Native American novel-in-progress, and it asked for a contribution from Dorris fasvveil. "I said of course." And so he began his own novel- in-progress, Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Dorris found writing fiction "extraordinarily liberating...to suddenly have characters who could say things that only had to be internally consistent."

Henry Holt published Raft in 1984; the book is now in its 16th printing. Dorris went on to write several more books, including The Broken Cord and The Crmvn of Columbuswhich he co authored with Erdrich and Morning Girl, a young adult book which has been made required reading for junior high school students in Japan.

Lane Von Herzen '84

Novelist

Von Tierzcn does not have a horrible first-novel tale to tell; hers got published right off the bat. Having worked for several years as a college c areer counselor, she took an M.F.A. program at the University of California, Irvine. While still a grad student she wrote her novel Copper Crown, based on family stories she had heard of racial conflict in small-town Texas. She finished the manuscript and showed it to her adviser, who sent it to his agent, who "sold it right away" to William Morrow, where it was published in 1991.

Von Herzen has since written a second novel, The Unfastened Heart, which, like her first novel, has sold well. ''People have said that the end of the novel has been imminent for decades," she says. "So it's nice to make one's living in such an impossible way"

William Carpenter '62

Poemmd Novelist

For his first novel, A Keeper of Sheep, Carpenter sat down each afternoon and became a female protagonist. The writing became c "IMIM CM He' aetivity," he says. "It was rather like playing a long run of a theater performance.'' The novel first appeared in Germany in 1993, published by a press that had run a translation of one of Carpenter's poetry books. The boot got serialized in a Germaimaily and won a wide following in that country. Milkweed published it in America in 1994.

Evan S. Connell '45

Writer

"All I know is myowu experience, sending out stories," says Council. "An agent got in touch with me and some years later I wrote a novel. "The year was 1959 and the book was Mrs. Bridge, the tale of an upper-class Kansas City homemaker. Written in unconventionally short, spare chapters and widiout a traditional dramatic climax, the manuscript got shopped around to nine or ten publishers by Conncll's untiring agent before Viking said yes. The bookmade the bestseller list, and in 1990 Merchant/Ivor) made it into a movie, Mr. and IS Irs. Bridge. Connell has published some 14 other novels, several short-story collections, nonfiction books of history and archaeology, and "two rather strange boob that turn up in libraries under poetry."

Robert Eaton Kelley '61

Nonfiction Writer and Editor

Kelley had had long .experience with nonfiction before the University Press of New England published The First Book of Timothy in 1996. He is now working on a second novel, set in Ireland, and a book of essays about golf.

Bruce Ducker '60

Novelist

After penning one "very bad" novel "that happily never saw the light of day," and getting fired from his first job as an attorney, Ducker wrote Rule By Proxy, publish ed by Crown in 1976. It was one of just two first novels published by Crown that year. (The other was by a "similarly unknown person In the name of Judith Krantz.")

Ducker's latest, Lead Us Not into Perm Station, won the 1996 Colorado Book Award.

Julie Wallin Kaewert '81

Novelist

Soon after graduating tram Dartmouth, Kaewert went to England to work for a publishing company, an experiende she later usee! as fodder for her novel Unsolicited, published by St. Martin in 1994 Her first book she calls it "a test" was as far from fiction as you can get: a series of case studies about how Digital Equipment Corporation uses artificial'intelligence, written while she was working at Digital. Her advice: "Write about the thing you can't not write about."

Jean Hanff Korelitz '83

Novelist

It's sort of mind-boggling that I wrote a legal thriller." says the English major and Joiner poet. She notes thai she once "was dubiously praised, or insulted, sulted, by The Dartmouth Review as a 'seraggly-hai red writer of mediocre haiku.' Alter she worked for five years on two unpublished literary novels. Korelitz put them aside and tilted a 'very ting idea" into a courtroom courtroom drama, A Jury of Her Peers. She found an aggressive agent who quickly sold the manuscript to Crown. Not that she would recommend that route. "When I wrote poetry, my mother always said, don't write poetry, write a thriller. So I write a thriller, and this month my publisher is sending a poet on a ten-city book tour:"

Scott Smith '87

Novelist

Smith made big news a couple of years ago, not just for the commercial success of his first: novel, A Simple Plan. but also for Stephen King's defense of the book (and of genre fiction in general) after the New York Times Book Review slammed it. Smith is now working on the screenplay ply of A Simple Plan and on another novel. "It's going to heaven long book-Ihave 450 pages now and nobody has seen a single line."

Kate Phillips '88

Novelist

The 1996 publication of White Rabbit, a story about the list day in the life of 88-year-old Ruth Hubble, was the end of six years' peripatetic writing. Phillips began the book while working as a newspaper reporter in her hometown of Claremorit. California. She brought the manuscript to Harvard while she worked on a Ph.D. in English. Despite its decidedly uncommercial storyline. Rabbit, published by Houghton Mifflin, was heralded by glowing reviews and recently hit the bestseller list in Southern California. Phillips is working on her second novel, The Shadow Life, about three women in their twenties.

Debbie Lee Wesselmann '81

Novelist

Wesseimamt wrote two unpublished novels (one during her senior year at Dartmouth) before writing Trutor and the Balloonist, the story of a young woman hired by an eccentric older man to research the puzzling life of his recently dead sister. The book is being published by MacMurray & Beck in the spring of 1997.

David Godine '66

Publisher

Godine's firm, David R. Godine. Publisher. annually produces 40 books, a i bird of which are fiction. He says that would-be authors should understand why today's fiction market is so difficult. which fiction basically is, they have a lot more options open to them as well as more demands on their time."

phil Pochoda

Editor

Pochoda is editor of Hardscrabble Books, the two-year-old fiction imprint of die University Press of New England. He has been in publishing for 17 years, including working as editor-in-chief of three imprints at Doubleday. He admits he's cynical about the publishing in dustry as a a whole "celebrity is really what publishing is about" but says there is hope for first-time authors, especially with smaller presses such as Hardscrabble. "We've been surprisingly successful, because we do well with a level of sales that would be unacceptable in New York."

A. Richard Barber '62

Literary Agent

Barber, an agent in New York, has been involved in the publishing business for decades as an agent, editor, and writer. As an undergraduate, he wrote a book about espionage during the American Revolution, and he admits to having a couple of half written novels in various drawers. "People write to say something." he observes. "And if you're not writing what you want to say, you're not going to do as well."