HOW TO fictionalize YOUR hometown

This is home: the scratch of dewy grass, barely alive after the heat of summer, still sharp and squelching from morning and evening sprinkler sessions. Roads and hills rise and fall like unsteady breaths. In Columbia, Missouri, a short drive from the Missouri River, the short downtown strip of Broadway is dissected by stoplights, which the college students love to jaywalk after a cheap pitcher at one of several storied sports bars. Faurot Field, the football stadium, is typically holy ground this time of year, though lately the team’s struggled to fill seats. There’s a steakhouse gem in a strip mall and an indie bakery stuffed inside the arthouse cinema. This is home, my indefinable home, one of those mid-size Midwestern towns not always at ease with its own identity.

But wait. What if this were home: A main street called Littleton rather than Broadway. An indie bakery hidden not inside a theater but, perhaps, inside a museum. Or, consider this: Columbia underwent a seismic controversy over race on the University of Missouri campus in 2015, but what if, instead, a debate around identity had sparked in 2020, during the re-election campaign of Donald Trump?

I wouldn’t be writing about Columbia, no. Not the real one, anyway. But it’d be something like Columbia – a fictionalized version tweaked to fit a different world, one tailor-made for a novel.

This is the