Tomorrow’s Lunches
When I was admitted to Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program in Creative Writing, I had to pick a concentration: Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, or Speculative Fiction (the science fiction of years gone by). It was easy to exclude the latter two but I grappled with the remaining choices. All my writing up to that point had been creative nonfiction: memoir and personal narrative essays about my life and the experiences that shaped me. And yet I felt the beginnings of a novel inside me; a story inspired by my grandmother’s early childhood experiences and the enduring impact of those events on the generations that followed. So I chose fiction and began writing short stories (while keeping my novel alive in my spare time).
It turns out that writing fiction is not so different from writing nonfiction. In creating characters and scenarios to explore in fiction, I draw from people I know and experiences I’ve had. The power that I felt in writing my truth in creative nonfiction is still present when I bring the emotional honesty of my own experience to the characters and circumstances I explore in fiction.
Tomorrow’s Lunches, recently published by the Green Hills Literary Lantern of Truman State University, is such a piece. A work of fiction, it explores a moment in the life of a working mother juggling the needs of her family while trying to hold on to some semblance of self. I was once such a mother and while the events portrayed in Tomorrow’s Lunches are created from my imagination, they thrum with very real emotions that I and many of my contemporaries have navigated.
As a writer, whether I am utilizing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or even speculative fiction, I strive always to write honestly. To convey the sometimes raw emotions that are part of our collective human experience. Bringing words to those feelings and sharing them with strangers, whether in fiction or nonfiction, is the way I choose to build community. To reach out and find common ground. Won’t you join me?
Tomorrow’s Lunches, by Beth Holly
