Turning the Shit of Your Life Into Fiction

... and some event news!

Twenty (make that twenty-five) years ago I tossed a coin. The application to Antioch L.A.’s MFA program required the checking of a box. Did I want a concentration in Poetry, Fiction, or Creative Nonfiction? Well, I was way too much of a philistine for poetry, so the coin flip determined whether I would be studying fiction or non.

Non it was.

For the next two years I played in the sandbox of liminality. Meaning: that gray area between making shit up, and mining my life for material. During my MFA, I actually submitted the same story to two different publications/contests calling it fiction in one case, and memoir in another. It ended up accepted by both.

There’s that French term (it’s always the French who come up with this stuff …) Roman à clef. Like a neutral soup base, I found that you could toss in specific herbs (details) to brand the creation definitively. Add oregano, basil and garlic, it’s Italian. Chili powder and cilantro, you’ve pushed it into the taste expectations of Mexican fare. Likewise, by only changing names and hair color, you can still call a project a memoir. But switch genders, cities, plot elements—well, now you’ve got a novel.

The thing that I love most about this malleable space is the way in which the subconscious crawls out of your brain and onto the page. So sneaky. So stealth.

I’ve published five novels, and have two in the queue, and I can honestly say, elements of my lived experience have tip-toed their way, to varying degrees, into each one. Sometimes it’s just an emotion tied to an incident, which then finds itself in a sort of creative centrifuge. Take my debut, The Moment Before: a coming-of-age story wherein my main character, Brady Wilson, navigates the recent death of her older sister. At the time of drafting, I’d been navigating the premature deaths of two family members (ironically, my own sister would fall to cancer three years after the book published).

While writing TMB though, my subconscious conjured the voice of the dead sister as a guide for Brady as she struggled with her grief. The voice came unbidden, diagnosing my own unanswered questions about the emotional toll and circuitous path of the grief process. Which, in turn, led to personal comfort by bringing me into the larger community. The universal condition.

The novel I’m finalizing now, Griftopia (out May, 2026 by Sibylline Press), has three POV characters—each representing aspects of other unanswered questions taken from my lived experience. The three characters are from different generations, but each of their defining characteristics represent things I continue to struggle with: identity, anxiety, failure … you know, the universal human pitfalls made more pronounced by our current climate of uncertainty.

Is it therapy? Maybe. But more accurate would be to think of this process as diagnostic. An exploration. A way to invite readers to invest their own questions into the mix. I knew about this before the coin flip. I experienced this while studying with Tom Spanbauer in the nineties. As a writer, Tom plumbed his experiences for language that expressed weighted and universal themes. As a teacher, he encouraged us to follow that ineffable monster into the darker recesses. To look unflinchingly at our wounds and name them, thereby liberating us from shame or pain or other destructive forces that keep us from personal freedom. The medium he felt best accomplished this, was fiction. He whole-heartedly believed that fiction is the lie that tells the truth truer, and on the heels of seven novels, I agree.

This Friday (April 18), I’m lucky to be part of an event at this hip new book/coffee shop, Bold, where a few writers will be reading from works inspired by the years we spent at Tom Spanbauer’s table.

I’m still not sure what I’ll be reading. But just writing this post has helped me narrow it down.

Hope to see you locals at Bold this Friday evening!