Mara Finley is a writer and editor based in San Francisco
Mara Finley is the recipient of the Katharine Bakeless Nason Participant Scholarship in Nonfiction for the 2024 Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Emerging Writer Fellowship in Fiction for the 2024 Lighthouse Lit Fest, and the O’Dwyer scholarship for the 2023 Community of Writers Summer Fiction Workshop. She is a 2024 graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction Writing at Saint Mary's College of California, where she received the Agnes Butler Award for Literary Excellence. Her stories, essays and reviews have been published in The Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and The Rumpus.
Mara can be found counting pelicans with her son at Ocean Beach, sipping overpriced lattes and Negronis, and preaching the gospel of Deborah Levy to browsers at Green Apple Books on the Park. Currently, she is at work on a memoir about infertility, infidelity, motherhood, and the ongoing quest for a full, autonomous life.
About
Writing
I trust Mara to edit my work. She is a close reader, my best reader. I value her precision with line edits and her rigorous attention to detail in which she demonstrates a mastery of style. I look forward to her comments which draw from a diverse range of sources and are ever insightful. If you hire her, you won't be disappointed. She's a rare talent.
—H. L. Onstad, finalist for Solstice Magazine’s Annual Literary Contest, longlisted for the Virginia Woolf Short Fiction Award, and author of the story, “A New Country for a New Woman,” which will be anthologized in Simpsonistas Vol. 6 (Rare Bird, 2024).
In “Her Berliner,” a short affair leaves behind a lasting sense of possibility. Sometimes it’s enough, not taking them, to be shown alternatives, other paths you might have followed, the glimpse itself sustaining you for years to come. More sweet than bitter, Mara Finley’s elegant story is about letting an opportunity pass while keeping its promise alive in the heart.
—Editors, The Missouri Review
Judge's statement: "Loneliness, especially when one is not alone, is perhaps one of the most beautiful and baffling of human conditions. The narrator of 'Her Berliner' is in such a state; she has unleashed herself (albeit temporarily) in a foreign place where her bewilderment and her quest for tenderness are unwitnessed by anyone other than a lover and a close friend. What I love most about this story is perhaps what they both teach her about her bravery and her power to be free wherever she is; these are lessons she desperately needs as she makes an impossible choice—a choice that love often requires of us."
—Destiny O. Birdsong, Judge, Lighthouse Emerging Writer Fellowship in Fiction