Catherine Tudish came to Dartmouth along with the Class of 2010 this September as the newest faculty member in the creative writing department. Her course, an advanced seminar for fiction writing, has gotten rave reviews from students.
A veteran professor who has taught at Harvard and the prestigious Bread Loaf School of English, Tudish is also a published author of a short story collection, and has also recently wrapped up a new novel.
The Dartmouth sat down with professor Tudish to talk about writing and the scary publishing world out there.
The Dartmouth: So you published your book, "Tenney's Landing," in 2005?
Catherine Tudish: It actually came out June 2005 and in paperback in February 2006, so it's a fairly new edition.
The D: I understand that you grew up in an air force family and did quite a bit of traveling. Did you draw on these experiences when you wrote "Tenney's Landing"?
CT: I didn't really use experiences from traveling. Interestingly enough, what I used were experiences from a little region of southwestern Pennsylvania, which is where both my parents are from.
My grandparents, my aunts and uncles and cousins lived there when I was growing up. While my own family was moving around all the time, that always felt like the one stable place that really felt like home.
When I started writing stories, I ended up writing a lot of stories which were set in that place, without really intending to. The stories aren't autobiographical, so the characters aren't based on real people. But they could take up residence there, if they became real people.
The D: How did you get your book published?
CT: I had some very good luck. I had a short story published in a literary journal called Green Mountain Review, which is published at Johnson State College. It's a very good publication, but I wouldn't expect a lot of people to read it.
About a year after I had a story in there, I got a letter from an agent in New York saying that he'd read my story. He wanted to know if I was working on a book, and, if so, whether I had an agent yet.
I was very skeptical at first and I checked him out online. It turned out that he was quite a reputable, respectable literary agent and I was in fact working on a book, so we started a correspondence. I told him about the story collection I was working on. He encouraged me and gave me some advice.
About a year after our initial contact, I sent him a manuscript. He sent it out to 12 publishers, which were some of his top picks. They were big publishers like Random House. Eleven of them said, "No." Scribner said, "Yes." Scribner was my first choice anyway, so I was really delighted.
Scribner published a lot of authors that I'd read and really admired when I was in college, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, so I was thrilled to be a Scribner author all of a sudden. They wanted to publish the story collection, but were also very interested in the fact that I was already working on a novel.
Story collections nowadays don't sell very well. I hoped that mine would be an exception but it isn't; it's holding true to form.
The D: Are you still working on the novel?
CT: I've finished it recently. My editor has it now. It's going to be called "American Cream."
The D: That sounds interesting.
CT: Yes, that's what everyone says. They have no idea what it might mean. It's also being published with Scribner.
The D: What class are you teaching here at Dartmouth?
CT: I've been extraordinarily lucky this term. I'm teaching a creative writing class for fiction writers and all the students are seniors.
They've had quite a bit of experience already as writers, and they've taken several other fiction-writing courses. It's almost like having a graduate seminar. They're all quite good writers and also very good at proofreading each other's work and helping each other.
The D: Have you talked about publishing in class?
CT: We haven't really talked about that so far. I think it's something we'd want to talk about in class in the future. When I've taught these courses before in Harvard, Boston University and the Bread Loaf School of English, usually what I do is talk about the procedure for getting published on the last day of class. It's actually the thing that people are most interested in.
The D: Do you have any general advice for students hoping to get a book published?
CT: The best piece of advice is to not rush into publication. Take time to perfect your work. With these literary magazines, you only get one chance to make a good first impression. If you send something before it's really ready and looked over, you can muddle your chances.
But I think it's a great idea when you have on-campus publications to support those and submit your work. Those publications count. When you start sending out to some of the bigger literary magazines and you can say you've had poems published in the Stonefence Review, it does make a difference. It's better than not having any publication. People should definitely not bypass their college literary magazines.
