K. Marvin Bruce

I get the feeling not many people are truly haunted.   I know I am.   The reason I get this feeling is that my fiction, which clearly reveals evidence of haunting, is always a hard sell.   I can’t give it away, at times. You see, some of us are haunted by life.   I recently read a biography of one of my childhood heroes, Rod Serling.   The biographer said he wasn’t a haunted man, he just played one on TV.   Not that I want anyone else to be haunted, but I felt a little let down by that assessment. Is there something wrong with admitting being haunted?   Like the stigma of mental illness?   Why are people so afraid of those who are haunted?   I’ve always felt drawn to them.   You’d think the internet might be where we could find one another. Yet I had behind a pseudonym.   Why?   I’m afraid.   I’m afraid to lose my “real job” that I don’t enjoy.   Afraid that my family will find out what’s i...

I’ve been spending a lot of time on literary agents’ pages.   One thing has become clear to me: to find an agent you’d better not have a regular job.   Well, unless that job is prominent, of course.   Professors, politicians, sports stars, actors—they can find agents with ease.   The rest of us, not so much. As I’m sitting here soaking in the proletariat pool, I’m contemplating looking for an agent for a story collection.   One of the things I noticed when doing all my agent hunting was that a few of them handle story collections.   Some writers made livings on stories: Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and H. P. Lovecraft come to mind. I’ve started reading collections of short stories again.   I really like the way a novel sucks you in and keeps you engaged for hours.   Our fractured lifestyles, however, often mean a collection of stories will get you through a compartmentalized day. As a writer I have written four no...

I’ve often wondered if it’s accidental that fact and fiction share consonants.  Oh, the vowels are completely different, and fiction ends with that trickster consonant n, but don’t let that fool you.  Things aren’t always as clear cut as they say. In some languages, I’ve been told, the meaning of a word lies in its root.  My friend Steve once told me that Hebrew words have “triliteral roots.”  That is, words based on the same three consonants, in that order, are closely related.  You can make a noun into a verb by taking the root and changing the vowels.  Maybe something similar is going on with fact and fiction. Jorge Luis Borges, I have to confess, hasn’t appeared in my reading as much as he should.  Many of his story revolve around the indeterminacy of words.  They change, they shift, they mean something we didn’t mean for them to mean.  And he sometimes uses Hebrew as an example. I don’t read Hebrew—English is difficult enoug...