What follows are a collection of personal essays that focus on close examinations of shifting meaning. Many essays are intensely focused on aesthetics, from the aesthetic elegance of idealized love, through art, to what personal meaning for which people live. Aestheticism seems an ideal that is to be strived for, but never attained. The included essays focus on the disparity between the banality of a lived life and perceived elegance.

The eleven stories in You Thrive Now and Other Stories aim to explore the ways in which we misunderstand the people around us, how we become aware of those misunderstandings, and the ways we then choose to cope with them. Conversely, they examine what we do when we understand others or ourselves clearly and wish we didn't.

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I have no abstract

California City is the beginning of a novel. The narrator, Jane, returns to her hometown in the Mojave Desert upon the death of her close friendâs child. The town was established in the 1950âs when a developer acquired land and built a town that he believed would become Californiaâs next big metropolis. A population of 9,000 people inhabits the town now, but paved roads stretch out for 200 square miles. Land-wise, it is second in size only to Los Angeles. Jane and her friends used to believe in a brand of Christianity that emphasized miraculous healings and resurrections. Her friends are praying that the child will be raised. Jane spends time with her parents and old friends and recalls the strange stories of the people she knew in California City. Also included are three short stories: âUp Birch Creek,â âTreeâd,â and âMarried.â Each of these takes place in Montana. In âUp Birch Creek,â a 30-year-old restaurant hostess returns to the place where her family homesteaded. In âTreeâd,â a young girl goes mountain lion hunting with strangers. In âMarried,â a young married woman begins to lose her mind after some pencil lead becomes lodged in the skin of her infant daughter.

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A Special Relativity is the story of a family living in Orange County, California. The novella takes place during one summer. Vanden Westbeautiful and cruelhas just returned home from college on the East Coast to find that her new family in California is entirely different from the one she left behind. Her widowed mother, Lori West, has remarried Americorp CEO and multi-millionaire Howard Moore, whose stepdaughter Elizabeth Moore is Vandens new stepsister. Vandens mother and her new husband are rarely in the country, leaving Vanden and Elizabeth mostly unsupervised in an environment ridden with temptation. The girls zigzag through Southern California with Vandens wild friends, experimenting with drugs, recklessness, and a blasé attitude toward sex. Surrounded by adults who seem alarmingly lifeless and filled with a frightening apathy toward their environment Vanden and her friends seek out anything that will make them feel alive. Immersed in a world of dizzying wealth and a fanatical obsession with beauty, Elizabeth is transformed from modest, inconspicuous, and well-behaved, to thrill-seeking, spontaneous, and apathetic. Meanwhile, a tragic act of neglect leaves the child in Vandens care dead. Beneath the glittering surface of the West familys lavish lifestyle and behind the barriers this guarded family has erected for themselves, Vanden learns that there is more to her new family than meets the eyeincluding a long-buried secret involving her deceased father. Ultimately, in this world of uniformly blue skies, all becomes relative: truth, morality, self.

Thesis (M.A. Cr. Wr.)--University of Queensland, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

poetry

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