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in pencil in top margin Hecht, Mike [1979] hand-written note in top margin of magazine article Jack: She and her husband were in that little group that had coffee an' with you & Studs after a Writers for Wallace Rally in 1948. Mike

original title hand-edited to read So they wanted to Be Authors....

File:Book covers and author photographs The Sharing cover illustration face of a woman Roslyn Rosen Lund. photo of woman's head ROSLYN LUND.

THEY DO IT ALL WITH MIRRORS cover illustration abstract triangles  CAROL WHITE    photo of woman's head CAROL WHITE

That uncertain wait before publication - 'All I need is a miracle' Roslyn Rosen Lund note hand-written with arrow pointing to her name: I knew her "way back when

 You sell a book and suddenly you're a writer.  People ask do you write longhand or on the typewriter.  They're saying -- give us the key, we're writers too.
 I've been writing a long time but nobody asked for the key before.  Years ago when I acted in the New York theater and came home repeatedly without a job, my hard-working mother said, exasperated, "Just who appointed you an artist?"
  I thought she made sense.  What right had I to appoint myself, to let others do the tough work?  So I went through life a marginal artist, writing articles while raising a family.
  Suddenly I was thrown into limbo.  My husband died three weeks before my younger son went off to college.  I had no family near me.  My married friends were either too kind or they patronized me.  I wanted to describe this exile in which I found myself.  I tried to do it in a feature article for The Sun-Times--which grew into a longer piece for the Ladies Home Journal.  About 200 women sent letters saying they had the same hunger to communicate that I had.  But I found there wasn't room in an article to show how a woman changes in this crisis.  I began to write fiction because there's more truth in it.
   After a few years and a few published stories I wrote a novel, which was soundly rejected.  I suffered over it, rewrote it many times and found an agent who liked it enough to accept the rejections for me.  One day an editor from the publishing company of William Morrow called and asked if I would meet with their president at 8 the next morning.  She sounded quite apologetic.
  "Is the book accepted?"
  "Oh no."
  "Does he want to see how old I am?"
   She laughed.  I was embarrassing her, she said, but well, you know, maybe he just wanted to make sure I was not an old lady in tennis shoes.
  SO I LEFT my tennis shoes at home and wore a turtle-neck sweater and a mink coat, uncertain whether the editor preferred his authors casual or formal, rich or poor.  I took along my new husband because there's something incredibly viable and sexy about a widow who acquired a handsome brilliant second husband, my second husband said.
   Out at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare under a vaulted ceiling that would shame Saint Peter's we had a cozy breakfast surrounded by a few hundred early-morning businessmen.  The editor, Lawrence Hughes, youngish, gray-haired, intelligent--he praised my book--said the people at Morrow were curious.  My book was professionally written yet nobody ever heard of me.
   "I've only just switched to fiction," I said and added offhand