Fogarassy came of age at a time when writers were supplicants looking for acceptance and space on the pages of respected periodicals and the imprints of major publishers. The SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) was a requisite inclusion with the submitted work. It usually came back with a printed rejection or an encouraging note that said try us again. Rejection was routine and led to a renewed effort to better the craft of writing and aim at the target.
Over the years, Fogarassy’s work has been deemed by editors to be everything from profound to most overwritten ever seen. Those critiques are aptly applicable to a writer thinking in complex Hungarian as expressed in straight-forward English, on who sees the world in the subtleties of an artist with the awareness that the message must be simplified for the pragmatic marketplace. The challenges of Fogarassy’s calling have been monumental. The rewards made the effort more than worthwhile.
Early short works were published in literary magazines such as the Texas Sidewinder and the Canadian Queen’s Quarterly. Two dozen of the short works were published by literary magazines throughout the world when her first novel was published by Quality Publications of Ohio.
Mix Bender is a novel about complex Hungarian-American immigrants meeting on a carefree Caribbean island. “A lively, intriguing and gutsy novel,” wrote international journalist Lydia Ferabee. Other reviewers described the novel as “exhilarating,” “intelligent and entertaining,” and “a fascinating novel of personality, interactions and complex emotions.”
Her non-fiction Mission Improbable: The World Community on a UN Compound in Somalia was enthusiastically received by numerous publishers, including Howard University Press. Even so, only Lexington Books published the work. The US perception of events in Somalia during the intervention was considered too strong to afford any sizable interest in Fogarassy’s first-hand record of events.
Even so, the book was well reviewed by Abdul Rahman Turay of Sierra Leone, head of the UNOSOM Somalia Mission. He said the book set the record straight. The Mission in Somalia was succeeding but nobody in the greater world knew of the success. He said the book was a provocative argument for humanitarian intervention in global cires.
George Parker, head of the Press Section at UN Headquarters in New York, said the work was an accurate and comprehensive view of the Mission. It provided a unique insight into UN operations and shed a remarkable light on the peace the Somalis were trying to achieve after a jump-start from the UN with US help withdrawn just short of the mark.
Among others who expressed support for the views expressed in the book were Richard Holbrooke, Jonathan Howe, Jimmy Carter also on behalf of wife Rosiaynn, Bill Clinton and Anthony Lake. Their views, like those of Fogarassy, are of long-term duration, spanning the inevitable ups and downs of forward progress in mutually beneficial global relations.
Fogarassy’s simultaneously published noves about global relations were the first to enter into the cyber-age. Light of a Destiny Dark about the contrast between the European and American experience of the Second World War era, has been called unrelentingly dark. The Midas Maze about the vast UN global network is a novel in search of an audience. While the mighty United States was the driving force behind the United Nations aimed at preventing another world war after the Second, America has remained complacent about the rest of the world and has has denigrated the diplomatic solution to problems that it first championed.
A global pandemic may have changed that course, particularly under an administration that came to power after the country made great strides as a global leader by electing the western industrialized world’s first non-white head of state. As the world grows global and details merge, differences and similarities become clear. At bottom is the basic human connection.
Nobody anywhere likes to be poor or insignificant. All strive for the maximum impact they can make on the world within their circumstances. Achieving that goal requires a balance of risk and retreat to safety grounded in personal circumstances.
As a writer drive to express her experience of life as encountered, Fogarassy has presented her work to literary and commercial outlets. She has been called profound. She has also been deemed the most over-written writer ever met. The range of views about her work represents not only her stabs at finding her voice and target audience,but also the structural demands of society at large,
The trick today, as throughout history, is to push a personal experience out into the greater world so as to make an impact. Great or small, profound of over-written, the bottom line is to make a mark worthy of the feeling that the mark has been hit. Progress has been made by experiencing life as it presenlf and the experience has been passed on to others through the workds and contacts of a lifetime.