Stephanie Dickinson's fiction appears in Cream City Review, Green Mountains Review, African-American Review, Storyquarterly, Gulf Coast, The Santa Monica Review, among others. She is an editor for Skidrow Penthouse and an associate editor at Mudfish. Her story "A Lynching in Stereoscope" was reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 edited by Dave Eggers. "Pigfarmer's Stepdaughter" (Weber Studies) was shortlisted in Best American Short Stories 2007. "Lucky 7 & Dalloway" (Salamander) was shortlisted in Pushcart Prize XXXII. Her short story collection Road Of Five Churches is available from Rain Mountain Press.

How did you go about finding a publisher?

I finished my first novel, Half Girl, in August of 2001 and just as I started my search for a publisher, i.e. composing my synopsis and query letter and sending them to some of the agents listed at the back of Writer's Market, the bright blue morning of September 11th dawned. I live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was used to seeing the World Trade Center from my bedroom window. That morning I was on my way to work when I looked up and saw that one tower had disappeared and flames were shooting from the upper floors of the other.

It was one of those moments when the observing self continues to function, but the feeling self goes numb. Two writer friends lost siblings, missing posters in Grand Central made face after face excruciatingly real, and yet more vanished. Afterwards it seemed sacrilegious to consider marketing and pitching a novel in the midst of funerals, many without bodies, and some with only body parts. The city went about its business in twilight and for months the pyre fires smoldered at Ground Zero. Then there were anthrax attacks via the U.S. postal service. Solidity yielding as leaves of a quaking aspen.

The anthrax scare caused some agents to stop accepting snail mail manuscripts. I waited for my original query letters to return—some never did and others straggled in with form rejections. The U.S. mail was a dead end and a friend suggested the internet, specifically Agentquery.com. The site lists literary agents alphabetically and includes their email addresses, the genre of books they specialize in, and the authors they represent. After polishing my synopsis I emailed it to a number of agents and got immediate responses with some wanting to see the first fifty pages, others the entire manuscript. In September, a year after the attacks, an agent emailed me a contract. And that's when another cycle began.

The book went out to ten commercial houses and an editor at an imprint of Random House was interested enough to say yes when my agent asked if she wanted to meet me. She found the first half of Half Girl to be "brilliant" but the second half autobiographical "like it really happened." It needed to be heightened. She wanted to know the subject of my second novel and after I told her she curled her nose and said one of her authors was finishing a book with a similar subject. I was hustled out the door with some hardback freebies of the imprint's recent fare.

I began revising in earnest and months later had two new and different endings and neither seemed quite right. No matter the hours spent at the keyboard trying to trick it, simplify, heighten, energize and preen it, the ending wouldn't fix. I had a half book like the title Half Girl and ultimately the commercial houses all said no. More revision. It didn't seem possible that, if I kept working, the right ending would elude me. But what if I was turning a butterfly into wood, what if I was trying to hammer a cloud to the ground? Maybe I'd actually finished the novel but couldn't recognize it. A writer suggested I send my manuscript to a fine arts press with a growing reputation and an impressive list. The publisher accepted Half Girl in 2004 with edits suggested for the last third of the book. I signed a contract. The last revision took months, but now the second half no longer sounded like a cloud being drowned. It was fuller, denser, and the entire manuscript felt whole. After cover design, layout and proofing, Half Girl was up on the publisher's website and Amazon. Ready for pre-publication orders. Coming soon! Months passed, then a year and another year. The press went on a mysterious hiatus. Friends, relatives, workmates still ask, "When’s the book coming out?" They ask so frequently I have to beg them to stop. I occasionally email the publisher to inquire after Half Girl and when it might be going to print. I hear, "We’ll be moving on everything soon. Hang in there."

But I'm not hanging. I'm writing stories, finishing a second novel. I look at Half Girl as my training-wheel ride on the bicycle. I think I've learned a manuscript needs to be truly ready before you go out into the world with it and that's not always an easy thing to know. You have to be satisfied that your writing is coherent and connected from beginning to end and with that confidence you won't rewrite at the first negative wind. That confidence will enable you to pick up your words from inhospitable places and keep searching for a welcoming.