pen and ink
1998
When Julie Tetel telephoned me in 1998 about doing covers/ilustrations for her upcoming novel, I already knew of her (although I’d never spoken to her) from the gradskool halls of the Duke English Department.
Hers is the sort of reputation that gets around, so to speak. She was already well-known as a formidable scholar of linguistic historiography, who’d written (and, thank you, published) prolifically on French, German, and American theories of language from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries (as we all do from time to time, right?…).
Oh?….she also had published sixteen, very popular historical novels with mass-market publishers and founded her own publishing company, with two imprints: Generation Books (non-fiction) and Madeira Books (fiction). During her visit to my house, she told me an amusing anecdote regarding the first time that Stanley Fish (yup…THAT Stanley Fish, who had recently hired her for the department) came trundling through some mall and suddenly saw his new recruit…..sitting at a table in a bookstore, happily signing copies of her latest romance novel for a crowd of adoring readers……
I should add that she’s also charming, very pretty, and rarely mentions her own self.
All in all, it was a very fun project. I still find it hard to believe that I was actually **paid** for the opportunity to meet such an accomplished and talented woman.
