K. Marvin Bruce

  I’m a recovering academic, as my bio makes clear (I hope).   Earning a Ph.D. is a long, expensive way to get a license to write.   Or to be taken seriously, take your choice.   My academic career, sickly to start, never thrived.   Although I still write nonfiction (four books and counting), my real interest is here, in fiction-land. A friend recently pointed out to me a new journal AcademFic (which no spell-checker will accept), run out of Butler University, for publishing fiction by academics.   You may not have known that many of your professors were aspiring novelists, but let me assure you that many were. Of course, aspiring writers aren’t necessarily good writers.   I have a friend who’s an editor with an academic press.   He tells me that few academic writers are even fluent in academese.   Writers, however, sometimes end up trapped in academe. Back when I was in my master’s program, I was working on a novel.   I showed it to a ...

As an erstwhile professor, I used to research and write academic papers.  As a professor outside the academy, I no longer have the opportunity.  My day job, however, takes me occasionally into the hallowed halls and I start to feel a little lonely for the academic publishing world. Sure, the papers are boring and read by maybe a dozen people, but I never had the difficulty of getting them published that I do with my fiction.  My non-pseudo-nym was fairly well known among colleagues and they knew, as a friend once said, “the author is as important as the story.”  In the fiction realm, I’m nobody. Recently I met with many professors.  The experience divided my loyalties.  Before meeting with them I had been making good progress on my latest K. Marvin Bruce project.  Since meeting with them I’ve been brooding over whether to try more academical writing.  So boring.  So dull.  Yet, I can get it published. It sort of makes me won...

A felicitous bit of unexpected delirium came my way as I received news that one of my stories had been accepted for publication in Danse Macabre .  That magazine reserves a bishop’s throne of reverence in my psyche as the first place willing to publish my efforts at finding a voice. Not exactly a neophyte at fiction—I have been writing since grade school days—publication has been an uphill forced march in an icy rain for me.  I finished my first novel last century, in 1988.  Like many first novels, it sucked.  It didn’t seem that way to me at the time. Nothing is a better assassin to good fiction than academic writing.  Trying to establish a career in higher education, I wrote a couple of dry books and some articles, always trying to up the bar a little on style and panache.  Most publishers were not amused. I was 47 years old when my first fiction piece was published.  In Danse Macabre .  It won special mention as a macabre Christma...

Sometimes it is all I can countenance even to consider submitting a piece of fiction for publication.  You know, I always thought artists were sensitive people, but these days we’re told to have thick skins—not to take rejection personally.  “I’m sorry, but I don’t like what you’ve spent hours and hours creating, honing, and polishing.  It’s nothing personal.” My day job is a professor at a nondescript college.  I still do research now and again, and like my fiction it is generally rejected before somebody else picks it up and says its worth a look.  Sometimes it is said even to be good. I wrote a scholarly book some years back.  I sent it around to publishers who didn’t like it for various reasons, and so it languished while I moved on to other things.  Recently three publishers approached me about it, expressing an interest.  Ah, editors!  Ye are such a fickle breed! Fiction, however, is far more personal.  It is mi...