How I Got Published

This month, I'm fulfilling a lifelong dream - twice! But not at all the way I had planned.

In the fall of 1995, Jenn Crowell was a senior in high school at Dallastown Area High School and applying to the creative writing program at Goucher College. As her writing sample, she enclosed the manuscript of her novel. The head of the creative writing program, Madison Smartt Bell, liked it enough to send it to his agent. She liked it enough to send it to a publisher. They published Necessary Madness.
By the time Jenn got to freshman orientation, she had already sold the cable TV rights. Her story was told in the Baltimore Sun, the Portland Press Herald and across the country.

How do I know? Because family and family friends clipped the story out of their newspapers and mailed them to me (this was 1997 - people did that!) from across the country. And I saw myself in Jenn Crowell. Dallastown was our football arch-rival (though, to be honest, it was no contest; we were terrible). I took a boy from Dallastown to prom, and he spent half the night throwing up in the bathroom, poor guy, under the influence of my best friend and her boyfriend's teasing.

I also applied to Goucher College. Jenn Crowell was living my dream.