Profile: Even mistakes become fodder for a story for Bruce Taylor

One day, Bruce Taylor was writing a letter to a friend and misspelled a word. Most of us, at that point, would fix the error and get on with the letter. But Taylor looked at the misspelled word and knew immediately that it was the name of a character. He went on to write a story about that character.

It's just one of the ways that Taylor has gotten a story idea, and he's had lots of them. He's written hundreds of stories, 60 of which have been published. And recently, 30 of his stories were published as a book, The Final Trick of Funnyman and Other Stories.

Around the UW, Taylor isn't a writer at all. He's a mental health specialist at Harborview Medical Center, has been for 27 years. There, he co-leads groups and does one-on-one work with patients on a locked psychiatric ward. He has implemented and l eads a relaxation group on the unit for patients in addition to teaching relaxation and stress management seminars for employees at Harborview and the public at Discover U.

His work and his writing aren't entirely unrelated, though. Take a story called "The Coat," for example. In it, the lead character wears a black coat, which has been handed down to him from his father who in turn got it from his father and so on. Th e character finds that the coat is constantly getting in the way: It keeps him from making contact with other people; it gets waterlogged when he tries to swim. But he continues to wear it until he meets a young woman who encourages him to look at what' s under the coat. Lo and behold, his wardrobe is actually very colorful, but he hasn't been able to see it because of the coat.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what the coat represents, or the colorful clothes beneath it. Taylor often uses psychological concepts in his stories, which he can do in fanciful ways, since what he writes is called "magic realism." The storie s often begin with a realistic scene and person, but at some point the person is plunged into distinctly non-realistic events. Think Like Water for Chocolate and you have some idea what it's like.

"Magic realism is much more common in South America than in the United States," Taylor says. "In this country there hasn't been a wide market for it."

Which hasn't stopped Taylor from writing that form of fiction, even when he didn't know what to call it. A Seattle native, Taylor has been writing since the age of 8. Spurred on by the support he received from his schoolteachers, who often read his s tories aloud, he continued to write through college. He graduated from the UW with a degree in sociology, but he earned almost as many credits in creative writing, studying under Jack Cadynow retiredand the late Jack Leahy.

The two men were his mentors, always encouraging him to go on writing, but Taylor had little financial success and so was grateful for the job at Harborview. "Fortunately, I really enjoy my work, and I have a lot of respect for the people I work with, " Taylor says.

He kept on submitting his stories for publication, despite frequent rejection. Many editors, he says, liked his work but didn't know what to do with it. It didn't fit with other things being published. Then Taylor picked up a collection of stories fr om South America called Eye of the Heart. "It was purely by accident," he says, "but I read them and I finally saw some people doing the same kind of work I was doing. I had a sense of homecoming."

The term "magic realism" is derived from an expression coined by the cultural historian of South America, Alejo Carpentier, who called the form "marvelous reality." Taylor thinks that South Americans have taken to it because their society is one in wh ich realism and fantasy hold more equal positions. In the United States, a sharper line is drawn between the two, and realism is generally considered superior.

A frequent attender at writer's conferences, Taylor spread the word about magic realism, and was dubbed by friends there "Mr. Magic Realism." He liked the title so much he had it printed on his business cards. And as awareness of the genre increased, he was able to publish more and more of his stories. But book publication eluded him.

Finally, Taylor sent a collection of his stories to a contest in New England. The top five manuscripts were to be published, and his came in at number six. That was disappointing, but a magazine editor and head of a small publishing house whom he had been corresponding with for 10 years said to him, "Let me see the manuscript." Although this same editor had earlier turned down Taylor's work for his magazine, he liked the collection and decided to publish it as a book.

The book's first printing has nearly sold out, Taylor says, and he and the editor are trying to decide whether to do another one. In the meantime, he continues his job at Harborview and writes whenever he can. He's already completed two short novels and one longer one, and is currently hard at work on another. And he'd like to find a place where he can teach the writing of magic realism.

"I write because I have to," he says. "It's not about selling; it's about finding an outlet for what's in my imagination." But before you applaud him as a martyr on the altar of high art, Taylor wants you to know he's not suffering. "I never know wh en I start out to write just what will bubble up. It really is great fun." ¶

Nancy Wick