“I always wanted to be a creative writer,” explains Elizabeth Catalano ’94, “but I didn’t think of it as a money-making profession.”  Nevertheless, creative writer she became—writing in three different genres and winning prizes in two. 

Catalano was a Liberal Arts major at Mount Saint Vincent, with minors in English, communications and history.  “Everyone has a different point of view at the Mount.  A different angle for each class,” she says.  She took film and screenwriting as well as short story writing—and also designed her own course in Greek myths. 

The idea for the course came to her while reading Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude.  “A light bulb went on over my head,” she explains.  “You can do this, I realized. You can do exactly what you want to do as a writer—and García Márquez seemed to do it with such ease.”  Catalano learned that García Márquez had decided to read everything—from the early playwrights Aristophanes and Euripides on.  “I wanted to do something similar,” she explains.  “I was interested in the basis of story and wanted to study myths as they repeat and contradict each other, their different viewpoints and details.” 

After graduating from the Mount, Catalano earned her MFA at Emerson College in Boston, where she wrote mainly short stories.  “But toward the end of my degree I took a playwriting class,” she explains, “which really appealed to me.”  Catalano discovered she had a knack for dialogue—“I felt I had some sort of ear for it,” she admits—and wrote a play that was performed at Emerson.  “People liked it—and encouraged me to submit it to contests.” 
“Sestina”—a one-act comedy about two college students assigned to write a poem together—won the San Francisco “Dramarama” award.  Catalano then developed the project into a full-length play, which won Oklahoma’s “Heller Theater” award in 2003. 

While working as a production editor at St. Martin’s Press in New York, Catalano launched into yet another genre, novel writing.  “I had an idea that had been gestating for a while.  Working for a publisher, I learned how novels get published, and I began to think, if these people can do it, why not me?  I’ve been working on a novel for the last two years.”

Set in Astoria, Queens, in the late 1980s, the novel is a bittersweet comedy about a girl whose Catholic parents’ marriage is being annulled and whose brother is sick.  In structuring the book and developing the main character, Catalano reached back to her favorite childhood story:  Catalano’s protagonist believes that she can fix her family—if she becomes a detective like Nancy Drew.  The novel, The Nancy Drew Uncertainty Principle, is “a little sad” but mostly funny “coming-of-age” story.

Between concentrating on the novel and revising “Sestina,” Catalano sends out “batches” of short stories to literary journals, “slowly getting rejections.”  Finally after 20 rejections, one story that had been “heavily revised,” “News from My Father,” won “The 2004 Robert Owen Butler Award for Short Fiction.” 

Although she is a hard-working, prolific writer who revises endlessly, Catalano admits that she doesn’t have “a great writing schedule.”  Her methods vary.  “In the summer,” she explains, “I’ll go to a park or a café.  I write in bursts rather than with an organized plan.  I joined a writing group that helps me become more disciplined.” 

And sometimes she writes during her hour-long commute from Bay Ridge to Manhattan.  “You can get the express train,” she says, “but then you can’t really write because you’re standing.”

So if you see someone on the subway scribbling away in a trench coat, chuckling to herself, you may have caught a glimpse of this sleuth.