by Greg Costello ’00

quick glance at the journalistic pieces Ludolph has published since graduating from Vassar as an English major will confirm her love of the not-so visible. Her New York Times pieces, for example, tend to focus on the forgotten characters of the 20th century whose lives make for such compelling reading that it becomes impossible to imagine their stories have been so seldom told. Her subjects line up with moments in history—WWII, the Cold War, the Space Race—that Ludolph likes to call “moments of rupture.”

Just such a moment inspired Ludolph’s first foray into historical fiction—and her residency at Catwalk this spring. Her nascent novel takes place in post-WWI England as the smoke of battle is clearing to reveal a world of shifting gender norms and new technologies. “It’s an incredibly destabilized time when all these assumptions about society, work, and what new tech makes possible are up for debate,” says Ludolph. “That’s an open playing field for entrepreneurial thinkers. My main characters see that opening and step right in.”

The space they create is the real-life cottage industry fueled by the Spiritualism craze that gripped Europe in the aftermath of the Great War and the Spanish Influenza when mediums, channeling, and even publishing posthumous voices became social fixtures.

Ludolph has nothing but enthusiasm for her characters. “They’re playing with the question ‘What is authorship?’ at a time when the idea of women’s authorship, women’s authority, is fraught,” she says. “Historically, the topic of spirit mediums raises the specter of fraud, but I wanted to look at them as experimental, entrepreneurial, scrappy … Also, if we’re going to talk scams, it’s a scam that women were being paid half the wages of men at the time. I’m drawn to the idea that my characters don’t feel the need to follow the unspoken rules of an unfair environment.”

In the Catwalk residency, Ludolph found both a writer’s retreat and a source of inspiration. “You could wake up in the morning and see the river, and barges going up and down the Hudson, and Frederic Church’s Olana right on the other side of the bridge,” she gushed. “I would go to the bakery and get a loaf of bread and cheese, and that was part of my toolkit for the day. I would pack my sunscreen and a big hat, and I would wander the property to find a place to write —these big Pride and Prejudice meadows, these little gazebos, this big pond with a rowboat. The residents were a composer and a playwright and another writer, and it was incredibly nice to be working alongside people who were so kind and so smart and so driven.”

That love for different academic fields crossing paths was something nurtured years ago in Poughkeepsie. Born and raised in Brooklyn Heights (“when that meant the Promenade, the Historical Society, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses”), Ludolph spent a year at Georgetown before transferring to Vassar. There, she discovered an English department that was “so unbelievably interdisciplinary.” She recalled several of her favorite professors, like “Dan Peck, who was doing 1820s and 1920s art and literature. Then there was Miriam Cohen, and Pat Wallace, who were from two different departments, co-teaching a class about lit and history. Everything about how the humanities were taught at Vassar was collaborative, interdisciplinary, clashing all these ideas together.”

Vassar stayed in Ludolph’s heart after she graduated and began an eclectic writing career, ultimately providing the springboard to apply to Catwalk—a decision for which Ludolph is grateful. She speaks with reverence of Catwalk’s founder Purcell Palmer and her mission to nurture creativity. “It was very important to her that she protect artists over the course of their whole careers. So, it’s not just that she would pick people and they would come for two weeks and off they went, but once they were in the family, they were in the family for life.” Ludolph pointed out that the fall and winter months at Catwalk are reserved not for new artists but for alums of the residency. “They want you to come back all the time and feel like you have a place where you can keep making work. It’s a really wonderful thing to become a part of.”