years after her grandmother's death. De Rosa stated that she had been "dealing with terrible grief and sorrow" and needed to "talk to" her deceased relatives, "so I would sit down and write about them. And that would make them—and the place where I grew up—present again. I just poured my heart and soul into it, never knowing it would be published. Writing is a very solitary thing. Me and my soul." The novel was developed during an eight-year period. Michael Anania, a writer who served as De Rosa's mentor while she studied for her master's degree in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, read some early versions of her work. Lauerman stated that there were times when De Rosa "tried to find her voice" and had "abandon[ed]" it on some occasions, and also that she "struggled" during the writing process. In 1977 De Rosa gave a reading from a draft of her work. After her reading, the head of the Chicago publishing company Wine Press, Jim Ramholz, approached De Rosa and offered to publish it. By 1980 he had received a grant from the Illinois Arts Council and he used this grant to publish the book. The initial press run was for 1,000 copies. Months after the book was first published, it went out of print. At the time the book was first published, De Rosa was in her 30s. An excerpt of Paper Fish was re-printed in The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women by Helen Barolini. This 1985 anthology had works from 56 writers, all Italian-American women. Lauerman wrote that the book had become unknown after the print run ended, and Edvige Giunta, the author of the afterword of the 2002 Feminist Press printing of Paper Fish, stated that the novel was mostly "excluded from literary history" and that it and De Rosa "remained in the shadows for fifteen years." Lauerman had stated that "Only a handful of Italian-American scholars kept "Paper Fish" alive by mentioning it in dissertations and essays and circulating photocopies of it." Some academics had used this book as part of courses on Italian-American culture, and so their students could read the book they distributed photocopies of the novel to them. Fred Gardaphé, a professor at Columbia College Chicago, had given the novel a favorable review when it first came out. In June 1995 he sat next