Matthew Salesses

		Matthew Salesses was adopted from Korea at age two, and writes about his Korean wife and baby for the Good Men Project and other venues. He is the author of a novella, The Last Repatriate (Nouvella). His fiction has been published in Glimmer Train (Issue 76), American Short Fiction, Witness, West Branch, Hyphen Magazine, and others. His new book is a novel called I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying, and you can learn more about it here, or follow him on Twitter @salesses. matthewsalesses.com copingmechanisms.net

Being Open to Opportunities

Whenever I am asked to do anything, in the literary world, I agree if at all possible. I hate to turn down anyone genuinely interested in me or my work. How rare and amazing that attention is.

This kind of philosophy can backfire, of course. This winter, I am scheduled to teach four courses and two one-day seminars, to edit fiction for a men's magazine and to write a column for said magazine, to co-write a book on adoption, to do monthly profiles of Asian American writers, to comment on three friends' manuscripts, to travel for several readings, and to write a story for a literary magazine, all while promoting my first novel. I would also like to write a draft of something new.

I am a little overextended.

My wife has my best interests at heart when she tells me to say, "no." But being agreeable is how I came to publish my book.

A couple of years ago, an editor asked if I had a story for an all-flash-fiction issue of an online publication. I didn't have anything at hand. Yet that didn't stop me from saying, "I could." I walked around for weeks turning over an image in my head. I walked around until that image—of a beach covered in dead starfish—contained a voice.

Afterward, I couldn't let go of that voice. I wrote 19 more pieces, each shorter than a page, spiraling out from that first scenario, with a boy on the beach and a narrator who might be his father, that atmosphere of washed-up aftermath. I sent those pieces out, a few at a time, until one editor asked if I had 20 more. Again, I said, "I could."

I started to see my miniature stories as chapters. When I had 40, I sent 20 to the editor. I seemed to have a chapbook then, a small book like a poetry volume. My narrator was adjusting to life as a father. And I might have stopped there if I hadn't been contacted, months later, by a publisher who asked if I had a full-length manuscript. They wanted at least 120 pages.

Being open to opportunities, and saying yes to those requests, is part of participating in the literary community, I think. My novel would not have existed without that community. It is a book written-on-demand. I am lucky to have been asked, but I remind myself that it was up to me to say, "yes." It is on the writer to turn those questions into an answer.