Holley Rubinsky

My first published story — way back in 1967! — was 750 words long. Redbook magazine paid me $1500 USD. With the money I paid the rent and bought an electric typewriter; the baby was six months old. I published more stories in Redbook and one in McCalls. My story “Second Thoughts on the Subject of Mother” appeared in a summer issue of Redbook’s Famous Fiction and was published in England. The magazines had editors who phoned or sent detailed letters suggesting changes. My article called “Learning to Fly” appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine, based on my experiences in a Piper Cherokee, earning my single-engine land private pilot's license at Santa Monica airport in California. It took me a ton of hours over a period of a few years because I was supporting my daughter and teaching elementary school. There is nothing that beats literally taking off.

My first husband was Carroll Ballard. We met at film school at UCLA. (He later directed Never Cry Wolf, Black Stallion and other movies). While we were living in Venice, California, I (four months pregnant) went on a bus to Washington State, to greet a blizzard, with money borrowed from a waitress, in order to surprise him during the filming of Harvest, nominated for an Academy Award in 1967. In 1976 I moved with our daughter, Robin, to British Columbia, Canada. Robin Ballard is googlible. She is an artist and children's book writer who lives in Switzerland with her husband and my two grandsons.

I met my second husband, Yuri Rubinsky, at the Banff School of Fine Arts where I was attending the summer writing program, at the time headed by W.O. Mitchell. Yuri was co-founder of the Banff Publishing Workshop, as well as a published book author and co-conspirator of BGMRW. Later he was known for his involvement in accessibility for the internet. (You will find a page about him in Wikipedia.) We met in 1982, we married in 1984. I was an editor at Descant magazine; I worked as a writing instructor at Banff; I taught writing in an evening course at the University of Toronto; I edited a number of essays and my stories were published in anthologies.

Yuri died, so young, in 1996. While he was alive, it seemed that everything I did got done -- the month we were married I won a National Magazine Award for Fiction, as well as the first $10,000 Journey Prize for a short story. Rapid Transits and Other Stories was published; At First I Hope for Rescue was accepted by Knopf Canada one day after he died. The book went on to Picador, in the U.S., and was in the Barnes & Noble series "Discover Great New Writers."

Afterwards, I spent some winters driving in the deserts of Arizona, California and Nevada. For a few years I pulled a travel trailer and had a cat who came when I whistled. Later on literary agent Denise Bukowski showed me a good time in Toronto. M&S published Beyond This Point. My collection of short stories, At Close Range, recently finished, is about those times traveling.