How The Love of Reading Can Lead to Publication

Writer: Mary Salisbury

It was by reading short stories and loving the form that led me to writing short stories. I studied from the writers who wrote short stories by reading their work. I read the stories of V.S Pritchett, Penelope Lively, James Salter, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Anne Enright, and many more. I read and I read, absorbing what each writer was doing, and then I began to write my first short stories.

I figured I had nothing to lose. No one was there to tell me that I didn’t know how to write or that I needed a degree to do this. I was alone in a room writing and it felt like fun. I wrote in longhand filling spiral-bound notebooks with stories. I wrote out full first drafts without censoring myself or stopping to rewrite a passage. It was this freedom to write anything and write with abandon that helped me most. I had nothing to lose, like I said. I simply wanted to try this form and see if I could do it.

I returned to the library every week to drop off books and to get more books. I discovered more short story writers. It was the act of reading widely which fueled my desire to write.

Once I had a small collection of stories I had written and revised I began to look around for a safe place to share them. I attended my first writing workshop in 2005 with Tom Jenks of Narrative Magazine. There were about twenty of us sitting at a long table in a conference room in Seattle, Washington. We shared our stories, we talked about stories, and we discussed the books we had been instructed to read prior to the conference. We each got to have an individual evaluation from Tom at the end of the conference and I left with a strong sense of encouragement and hope.

I began to send my stories out to literary journals and, though I received rejections, I sometimes got a nice note about the story and what the editor liked about it. This encouraged me too. I looked into writing programs in my state of Oregon and found a low residency one which would fit into my work and family life. Going to the Pacific University MFA program gave me time to dedicate to writing and the mentorship of other writers.

I slowly began to get work accepted. Many life events stopped me from being able to write along the way, but I kept returning to writing because I needed to write to understand life. Writing, for me, is a way to figure out what is happening, what it might mean, and why.

It has been twenty years since I wrote my first short stories and this October I had my debut short story collection published by Main Street Rag. Those early stories I wrote alone in a room figuring I had nothing to lose are in this book, along with the stories I have written more recently. I still love to read short stories and have gathered enough books to make my own little library filled with some of my favorite writers.

Mary Salisbury’s short fiction and essays have been published in Fiction Southeast, The Whitefish Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and Cutthroat’s Truth to Power. Her chapbooks, Come What May and Scarlet Rain Boots, were published by Finishing Line Press, and her poetry has appeared in Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Spry Literary Journal, and Wild Roof Journal, and is forthcoming in The MacGuffin and Michigan Quarterly Review. Mary is an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship recipient and a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA in writing program. She lives in Portland, OR.

Find Her Book: Main Street Rag