Yesterday Will Come is a hybrid collection of linked short stories that focuses on the way a particular family passes down the family history through physical and emotional memories. The collection largely focuses on the process of making and preserving memories and how the lack of control over one’s memory can lead to paranoia and displacement in their life. Particular value is attached to certain memories and the value and emotion attached can at times overwrite the actual content of the memory. The stories center around the Riviera family and particularly Ana Riviera’s life as she considers the many aspects of her family history she continues to inherit and the comfort and paranoia she associates with such inheritance. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This is a collection of fiction that draws on the author’s own experiences as a western foreigner in America, while also taking inspiration from many different art forms and their depictions of American life, as experienced by outsiders. The themes of this collection center around the discord and disparity prevalent between British and American life. The other key theme in this collection is how violence seems to be simmering, always near at hand, in a country like America. In this way, many of the stories allude to a kind of violence taken to be something unique to American society, which often goes unrealized or unacted upon, or sometimes unravels accordingly. The thesis project itself considers how these stories could only take place in America today, and how the aforementioned cultural discord, or disharmony, connects the narratives with a shared feeling of cultural commentary about the country as a whole. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

THE REAL THING is a collection of short stories released from the confinement of the everyday. The stories allow characters to pop off the page from every angle. With an eye for anthropomorphism and ear for lyric, the collection is comprised of twenty-nine short stories, nineteen of which work in a flash fiction form. Magical in its motions, and charming in its spirit, The Real Thing explores life’s losses and gains through the lens of the strange and at times the absurd. It invites its readers to cast away expectation, sit back, and watch the show.

The early years of childhood are characterize d by new ideas; experimentation; the building of relationships; fears, both real and imagined; and play, through which the child tries to assemble these experiences into a meaningful whole. The early years are an exciting, complex and vibrant time of learning while the child grows in his understanding of himself and the world around him.

"Write about what you know" is a familiar mantra in fiction workshops, but writing facts or details about what is known doesn't necessarily create character or reveal conflict. The story must develop from the alchemy of these elements and stand as a whole, and the story must pull the reader into its own particular world. "The Nature of Grief" and other stories center around one character named Loren Shay and her experiences as a first-time teacher in the small rural town of Folkston, Georgia. With the exception of "Free," these stories represent her conflicts with students and faculty and her struggle to know herself through her experiences. She does not always succeed, but the mystery of her life changes and grows with her identity. I tried to experiment with style and structure in these stories. "The Nature of Grief," "Adultrysts," and "In The Blackout" are written in episodic scenes pieced together to form a whole. For inspiration and guidance, I studied Lorrie Moore's stories from __Self-Help__and Susan Minot's __Lust__. "10-30," "Quonda B.," amd "Free" are more conventional, following traditional lines of conflict and resolution. My main goal in writing this thesis was to inhabit the fictional voice and create a rich, dimensional world of how one woman dealt with her triumphs and losses during her first year as a teacher. / Thesis / Master

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Narrative Possibility: an introduction to, and a move towards, Integral Creativity is an exploration of creativity and a creative exploration, and it is a search for meaning and making which carries as backpressure an individual, societal, cultural, and global need for change. Change, as I have interpreted it, is a change of consciousness. While the exploration is multidimensional and multidirectional it has as its foundation a process of communication that is essential in and to all aspects of our present and past, showing and telling. Implicitly and explicitly we define ourselves and all that we encounter by stories. I am using the term ‘story’ to mean showing and telling in all its forms but my approach, although it is predominantly aligned to Western interpretation, is a perspectival inquiry into and through word and image. It comprises and integrates stories by a layered methodology that includes diverse perspectives from theorists and artists. Among these: David Bohm, Andrew Wyeth, and Leonard Shlain are important, but, in the aspects of their work which focus on Integral Consciousness, Jean Gebser, Ken Wilber, and Terry Sands are most prominent. My exploration also incorporates stories of my lived experience as student, mother, visual artist, teacher and researcher, as well as fictional stories and poems. In both methodological structure and the writing and content of this work (in documenting its progress and in recording the unfolding visual work of several of my students,) I bring to this thesis my philosophical approach: Narrative Possibility -stories that do not have preconceived outcomes. Narrative Possibilities originate and manifest in and through (and require, therefore, a methodology that encompasses) Creative Events, States, Processes, and Products. It is a disciplined method that unfolds a story to a point in which all aspects appear to cohere, and yet this aspect of the story is untold: there are no definitive words or marks which obviously or even abstractly point to completion. Creativity, according to David Bohm, is a natural potential largely blocked by the way civilization has developed. I accept this premise and suggest that Narrative Possibility is a creative approach to integration and that it is a personal, social, and spiritual move towards our possible evolution. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This research explores Metis identity through the use of a Metis family story. The participants of this Metis family were my father and his two sisters and his two brothers. As children, they lost both their parents at the same time in a car accident. After the death of their parents my participants all encountered the child welfare system, through adoption, orphanage, and foster care. Through adoption, the two youngest participants were separated from their siblings, and any knowledge of their Metis heritage, until they were adults. Individual interviews were conducted with each participant to gather their life stories. Two additional gatherings of the participants were completed in order to share individual and family stories. The second and final gathering was conducted as a talking circle. A culturally congruent qualitative research process was created with the use of stories, ceremonies, and the strengthening of family relationships. Analysis was completed with the use of Aboriginal storytelling guidelines. The themes examined through my familys story include trauma, the child welfare system, and Metis identity. A significant piece of the research process was the creation of a Metis psychological homeland (Richardson, 2004, p. 56), a psychological space of both healing and affirming Aboriginal identity. This dissertation is an example of how research can be completed in a way that does not perpetuate the mistrust between Aboriginal people and researchers, and that works to improve this relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the degree of uniformity in the narrative roles that male and female characters carry out in the relationships in El adulterio como vocacion y otros cuentos (2012), a collection of six short stories written by the Spanish author and journalist Juan José Millás. The analysis is based on the theory of narrative roles, developed by the French literary scholar Claude Bremond in Logique du récit (1973). The analysis concludes that even though some recurrences can be discerned, the two sexes do not have fixed roles throughout the stories. In the first three stories the women tend to be degraders and beneficiaries, while the men shoulder the role of a victim. In the last two stories of the book this situation is reversed. The fourth story differs somewhat from the rest, since both man and woman are mainly beneficiaries.

It wasn't his father's beaming face that greeted Yusuf. It was his mother's, frigid and encased in a white orna, the frayed edges of which she had trapped between her teeth. "It's getting late," she whispered to him. Shafts of bright early sunlight leaked through the curtains, attracting mosquitoes to the windowpane. Beyond it, the neighborhood was slowly waking up on the happiest day of the year. "Get up, Yusuf, please. You have to go to the mosque."