A Life, Fictively is based on the premise that experiences create insights that we want to shape and record, so life becomes fiction. A Life Fictively is such a collection of individual short stories, many of which have been published separately in literary journals and anthologies, each one crafted at a different time.
The collection is in that way, pure "fiction;" in another way, it's a memoir of sorts since the life the stories spring from is my own.
The stories deal with some experience I thought both individual and universal. None of the events is, strictly speaking, true. The issues range from the awkwardness of youth and young romance to experiences of motherhood and teaching, as well as separation, divorce, dating, betrayal, death. Each story, because each was created separately and at a different time, has its own voice, its own "style," or tone, or even length, its own characters. Although the settings might range from the 1950's to the 2010's, the themes, mentioned above, are those experienced by a great number of women. The stories are arranged in rough chronology according to their time settings, but can be read in any order.
