- - - - Copyright 2001, The Columbus Dispatch
- - - - Author's Own Life Inspires Her Prizewinning "Pharmacist's Mate" Thursday, May 3, 2001 Margaret Quamme For The Dispatch Last spring, a Web site promised to publish the best book it received "about electrical engineering on boats." Though she cared little for boats and less about engineering, Amy Fusselman won the odd competition and is on a nationwide tour promoting The Pharmacist's Mate. The contest was sponsored by McSweeney's, a quirky literary quarterly with a strong Internet presence. The Pharmacist's Mate was chosen, according to the Web site, "even though its actual connection to electrical engineering on boats was tangential at best." Fusselman had subscribed to McSweeney's from the first issue and had written a short piece for the Internet site (www.mcsweeneys.net), but she didn't know the editors. She submitted a book proposal, then didn't hear from McSweeney's until the editors informed her in August that she had won. "In the interim," she said in a recent telephone interview from her home in New York City, "what I wanted to write about changed. "My father had passed away, so I started writing about that because it was pretty much all I could write about." The book she finally wrote, a 92-page work of nonfiction that weaves accounts of her struggles with infertility and her reactions to her father's death with passages from the diary he kept as a purser-pharmacist's mate in the Merchant Marine in 1945 and 1946. "I didn't find the diary until shortly before he passed away, and I was just blown away by it as a beautiful document," she said. "My father wasn't a writer, you know -- he was a business guy -- and it was really amazing to me to find his writing voice, which I think is very beautiful and really warm. It just seemed like a good counterpoint to some of the things I was talking about in the book in terms of absence and music and voice." The Pharmacist's Mate is the fourth book published by McSweeney's. The others were by Neal Pollack, Jonathan Lethem, and Lawrence Krauser. "I think it's a credit to what they're doing that we are all, I feel, so different," she said. "Neal is just such an incredible showman, and has a whole kind of character thing happening, and Lawrence Krauser is more someone who is doing formal invention. I'm probably not the person to figure out what I'm doing, but it's not either of those things." Being published by McSweeney's, Fusselman said, gives her brand-name recognition. "It's probably about the same as being associated with a certain record label. People think: I like that other thing; maybe I'll like this, too." The Pharmacist's Mate will be published officially in June, though advance copies are available at all the venues where Fusselman will be reading, including the Wexner Center Bookstore. Fusselman is touring before the book is released because her first baby is due in August. After the tour, she's planning to "eat Popsicles and sit on the couch until I go into labor." She made her first tour appearance April 23 with Dave Eggers, author of the best-selling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. "It was kind of like opening the tour at Madison Square Garden," she said. "It was really exciting." "Just to add a little extra measure of stress to the whole thing," she said, she's recording her experiences and snapshots of the tour on the McSweeney's web site in "Amy Fusselman's Delicate Condition Tour Diary," which she updates every few days. She also has her own Web site (www.surgeryofmodernwarfare.com). Fusselman, who graduated with a bachelor's in English from Ohio State in 1987 and went on to get a master's in English/creative writing at Boston University, has strong ties to Columbus. "I married my Ohio State college sweetheart," she said, "and we have a cadre of Ohio friends. We used to come back every year for the State Fair. "If there were some way I could just marry Manhattan and Ohio State, I would, in a heartbeat." From 1993 to 1998, Fusselman self-published Bunny Rabbit, a small magazine of her writings and drawings. While she was publishing it, she became friends with Nancy Kangas, the Columbus-based editor of Nancy's Magazine, who will be appearing with Fusselman at the Wexner Center. She's also involved with "a theatrical broadsheet that comes out of New York called Emergency Gazette and a poetry journal called Six by Six," and she publishes regularly on the Internet. But this is her first book. "I love the Internet," she said, "and I am, for better or worse, on line for hours a day, but there's something lovely about having a book. I love having the object, I love holding it in my hand, and I don't think the Internet is meant to replace that experience." - - - -
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