K. Marvin Bruce

I was born in a small town.  That’s not a quote from John Cougar Mellencamp; it’s the truth.  My hometown, which shall remain nameless here since it is sometimes easy to identify a person by such a small place, is who I am.  We are defined by where we’re from. After spending my first decade, which I didn’t realize was a decade at the time, in my hometown we moved.  We moved to an even smaller town.  A community of less than a thousand.  Industrial, dirty, and drug-ridden.  I began to write. Like most restless minds in small towns, I wanted to escape.  When I first saw the city, I was enamored.  So many people.  So much excitement.  So little community. This week I received the happy news that my story “Prom Night Redux” was accepted for publication by Exterminating Angel Press: the Magazine .  (More details to follow.) The story is close to my heart.  It is a story about being from a small town and wanting...

Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery.  In the case of writing, literary nods are also forms of acknowledgment.  “O Driver, My Driver,” has just appeared at Exterminating Angel Press: The Magazine.   And it is a nod to Walt Whitman. I realized that “O Captain, My Captain,” was a tribute to Abraham Lincoln.  I understand Lincoln to be, perhaps for the last time, a president who stood for the common man.  Few after Lincoln would rise from humble beginnings to the presidency.  Soon it would become the office of the rich and high born. For many of us, life is work.  In my particular case, it is a life of commuting as well as working.  I sent this little story out to a few places that didn’t understand the pathos involved.  I make no fun of Lincoln; in fact, the drivers of my buses are in many ways literally and figuratively, my captain. Climbing aboard a bus before dawn many months of the year, a passenger cannot hel...

With a shock I realized it had been months since the last time.  Months!  I write every day, and yet I hadn’t submitted anything for publication since the spring.  I had several stories ready to go, and although my skin is getting more reptilian, each rejection still hurts (nobody’s allowed to say that, by the way). A couple weeks back, then, I took three stories that have been gathering electronic dust, and sent them out.  The first, a prose riff on Whitman called, “O Driver, My Driver,” was turned down by a journal that had published me twice before.  I’m incredibly busy so I just took the pain and went to work. A decided to send it out again—it really is a good story.  I will discuss it more, once it’s published.  That’s why I started this blog.  Long ago a friend warned me not to try to publish fiction on a blog.  Of course, some people do, and become best sellers. Did I say it’s going to be published?  Oh yes, thank you...