K. Marvin Bruce

This is the feeling that keeps me writing.   The email that accepts a story for publication. Although it might not seem like it, I’ve been writing fiction since about 1974.   Those first stories, scrawled on a school tablet, were my way of coping.   After my mother’s remarriage, a move, and a verbally abusive step-father came into the picture, I began writing. My first published stories (which I don’t count) were in my high school newspaper.   I won a state-wide essay contest.   I’d been bitten by the bug.   For reasons I can’t go into here, I stopped submitting fiction until about 2006. Now I’m trying to catch up.   Literary magazines have a backlog.   So do I.   A story I’d tried to publish a couple of times, “Friday before Senior Year,” has just been accepted by The Corner Bar .   I’m thrilled and pleased. You see, I’ve been working on a continuation of that story.   Not the main character, but a secondary charac...

The last time I moved, everything was in a rush.  I had been unemployed and my new job started just a month in the future and half a country away.  I slung things into boxes and unpacked, haphazardly, on weekends.  In the decade since then, life has been a blur. Lately I’ve been trying to find things.  While sorting through a stack of paperwork, I came across a box of old stories.  Really old.  Some of these tales go back to when I first started to write fiction.  Most of them are embarrassing, but when I recall how young I was, they aren’t as embarrassing as all that. One of the stories I remembered writing as a ninth or tenth grader.  My English teacher told me I should try to get it published.  I lived in a small town where no one had connections to the publishing world, and where nobody really knew how to get anything published. Where you’re born does make a difference. The story was in a pile of papers I found....