Wheaton professor sells first novel to major publisher
Thursday, October 1999
While English professor Nomi Eve teaches the art of fiction writing to a group of Wheaton students this semester, she is getting a crash course herself on the business end of the writing game.
Eve recently signed the North American publishing rights to her first novel to major publisher Alfred A. Knopf and is now preparing herself for the publicists, media kits, bookstore signings, and interviews that inevitably accompany a major book deal and national publicity tour. The novel is due to hit bookstores next summer.
The visiting assistant professor says she finds the prospect of becoming a published novelist wonderful if also a bit disorienting. "It has all happened at warp speed," says Eve, who says it took seven years to finish the novel but less than one month to sell it. "I’m so thrilled that my book is being published. I feel very, very lucky."
Wheaton students also feel fortunate, according to Associate Professor of English Paula Krebs, who chairs the department. "The book-sale has created a buzz of excitement in the creative writing program," Krebs says. "Students are very inspired by her success, and they are learning a lot about the business of writing, too."
The yet-to-be-titled book blends six generations of her family’s history in Israel and pre-state Palestine, as told to her by her father, with events and people spun out of her imagination. The book is entirely fictional, Eve stresses. Still, readers will recognize the name of at least one real person among the book’s characters (Eve has placed herself in the novel). A native of Philadelphia, Eve spent her summers as a child in small coastal village in Israel, her father’s homeland. "I still go back each year and am very close to my family there."
Eve said that when she began writing the book, about a year after graduating from Brown University with a master of fine arts in writing, she had no idea that it would turn out to be a complete novel, nor that it would take her seven years to complete it. "I worked on it in pieces, and not at all in a beginning to end fashion. In a chapter with 30 paragraphs, I might have written each paragraph in a different month over a couple of years. It was very strange. It was like the whole book already existed and I found different pieces at different times."
The experience of writing a book in disconnected pieces, and then later knitting the parts into a cohesive whole, inspires one of the lessons she is passing on to Wheaton students in her classes on composition, fiction writing and memoir writing: "I tell them, ‘You can start a story from the end or the middle, it doesn’t matter. Start with whatever part of the story inspires you the most."
Before coming to Wheaton, Eve taught fiction writing at Brown and English as a second language at the New England School of English in Cambridge. She also wrote reviews for a variety of publications, including The Village Voice Literary Supplement, The Boston Globe and Publishers’ Weekly.