Haven’t Come Up With Title Yet

Peyton Sammons

Professor Susan McHugh is one of many professors at the University of New England that have published pieces of work. It’s rather fitting since she is an English professor at the university as well. One of her very first monographs was Dog, which has a 3.75/5 stars on goodreads and a 4.1/5 stars on amazon. 

“It was my first book and you make a few mistakes with your first book. That one was a bit of awesomeness because a friend had an idea for a series, pitched it to the press in London, and it’s now in over a hundred volumes. I was the first person he approached and told me he wanted subversive people to do the normal animals,” said McHugh, followed by a hearty laugh.

She soon signed the contract to write the book ahead of time and it was in the same month she signed the contract to begin working at UNE. Finishing the manuscript, she thought about what was specific to dogs. Check out her chapter on mutts to see how she ties in dogs to a cultural approach. The book was so popular it was even translated into five to seven different languages. 

This book has opened many doors for her that she has gladly walked through while also finding the balance with teaching at the same time. 

“A group in India started doing a series of online talks with authors. They specifically recruited me to talk with them about the mutts chapter. They wanted to do it because the racial politics in India are starting, if anything, to become more inflamed,” McHugh said. 

McHugh has an abundance of love for her first published piece for many different reasons. One being it helped her pay off her student loans and the second big one also being a spiral into her future works following close after Dog.

Since McHugh has a PhD in Literary Criticism and Theory, many of her books have serious topics and morals that need to be seen by the world. 

“My second monograph was actually based on my dissertation and it was really hard for me to publish because no one was doing it at the time. My PhD professor told me to pick a topic that I wouldn’t get tired of talking about for the rest of my life,” said McHugh. 

She believed in a lot of what she was doing which led to her various successful pieces. Some of her topics are present concerns within culture that fly under some other people’s radars, but she sticks with her heart and what she values in her pieces. 

The writing world can be a tricky career path with too many ups and downs, but McHugh offered some of her best advice for students willing to go down the windy road. 

“Learn the process. That was extremely helpful to me. I don’t think I would have been nearly as successful as I have been if I didn’t work my way into a teaching assistant position as well as a copy editor for a journal. Through that I learned soup to nuts how something goes through an author’s desk to print. There are a lot of people involved and appreciating the domino effect has made it so that I don’t have a primadonna attitude about writing,” McHugh advised. 

As an author, you have to realize that it’s not just you alone on this published journey. There are the editors and the marketing staff, so many more, that you have to take into consideration when starting your journey. 

Even though writing is a tedious process and publishing may be more difficult, don’t give up on your piece. Professor McHugh is now an author that not only has published monographs, but scholarly articles as well. So in the wise words of McHugh “learn the process” and don’t give up. 

*adding in interviews with some students who have taken her classes and students who also want to be writers for other voices in this article.*