MCCC’s English Professor Jacqueline Vogtman, released her debut book, Girl Country, published by Dzanc Books in May of 2023. The collection features eleven fictional short stories emphasizing female characters and their experiences.
After being rejected by several different places, Vogtman decided to enter her manuscript in a contest held by the publisher Dzanc Books. Vogtman said, “…it was a contest for a short story collection. They do it every year, and they picked mine…I don’t usually win things so that was a great really nice surprise.”
Vogtman has been writing since she was little, starting with poetry and then transitioning her way into writing fiction by the time she was in graduate school.
Vogtman said, “I always was a writer even since I was really, really young…Since I learned to write, that was like my passion and my calling in life.”
However, the writing process behind Girl Country took some years to be completed. Vogtman said, “A couple of the stories…are probably almost fifteen years old…a lot of them were written in the last few years like during the pandemic.”
When asked about obstacles faced in this process Vogtman said “the common obstacle for all writers is just rejection.” Additionally, the Professor says that finding the time to write while being a full-time teacher and a mother was difficult.
Vogtman kicked off her book’s release with a reading at Frenchtown Bookshop in Frenchtown, NJ. The bookshop accepted to host the event after a publicist reached out to them.
Helen O’Connor, bookseller at Frenchtown Bookshop, said, “We loved the book and were also interested because she is a local author. Jacqueline did a solid job of reaching out to her network, so the room was nicely filled with her fans and our readers.”
When asked about the event, Vogtman said “It was great. They asked me some questions, we did like a Q&A, and then I did a reading from some of the stories and a lot of people showed up actually more than I thought.”
Professor D’Arpa, Associate Professor of Spanish at Mercer, read Vogtman’s book and said he was reminded of the magical realism of many South American novelists like Alejo Carpintier and Mario Vargas Llosa.
D’Arpa said, “Overall, I loved the collection of short stories for its edgy, and gritty approach to dark themes…For several of the stories in this collection, very early on I could guess where the storyline was heading and how it might end; the surprise in these cases was how the author held my attention through to the predictable end with very good storytelling; I wanted to know how we would get there even after I saw where we were going. Some stories haunted me, waking or sleeping, for days after.”
After the success of her first published book, Vogtman plans on returning to her poetry and will continue working on other projects.
Vogtman said, “I also have a novel that I’m just kind of beginning…writing notes and ideas and things down about the novel, but I haven’t actually started writing it yet.” Her readers can expect more stories to come.
As for Girl Country, Vogtman said, “Overall…my goal for the reader would be to…experience that empathy of putting yourself in the shoes of a person who might be very different from you, who lives in a different time period, who has different struggles or different life but to be able to feel their feelings and kind of be inside of their mind for a little bit.”
