K. Marvin Bruce

Like many people, I had a few days off over the recent holiday season.  Being a working-class writer is not easy, since most employers demand their pound of flesh, and then some, so taking a few days to write was, in a word, bliss. The new year begins with a new round of responsibilities and a boss making renewed demands for more time.  As it is, the time I have to write is measured in minutes rather than hours.  I keep hoping that this will be the year that I’m noticed. Well, I may be exaggerating there a bit.  I started writing fiction, by my recollection, in about 1975.  It may have been earlier, given how sloppy those initial manuscript pages look.  In a working-class family, I didn’t have the first idea about how to get published.  I’m still learning. 2014 was a boon to me, with four fiction pieces published in one calendar year.  That has never happened before.  I first started sending out potential publications in 2009, an...

A lifetime in higher education has taught me that connections, not authenticity, make a writer.  At least in society’s eyes.  If you can afford the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, doors will be thrown open for you.  Don’t you dare being born a nobody, though. I’ve been writing since I was a teenager, unconnected, in a small town.  My teachers praised my work but really had no experience with publishing.  Stories moldered away in a dilapidated cardboard box stuck in a ratty, unused upstairs room until the bulldozers threatened and I had to haul them away. I grew up without much.  I had an armload of books for friends and I wrote tales that no one ever read.  This kind of thing doesn’t get you a job.  In a small town with no bookstore—or even a library—I never heard of literary journals; I didn’t even hear of journals period until I got to college.  First generation.  Thoroughly confused.  Nobody has to teach you how not to kn...