This MFA thesis, More Stories About Disappointment and TV, is a collection of short stories. I see them as being interconnected, if only in the loosest possible sense. I have certain ideas and themes that recur throughout my work, which I hope gives the stories a sense of cohesion without making the collection feel too monochromatic. The stories vary in narrative approach and point of view. My stories are character-driven literary fiction, to put it broadly, though they often incorporate characteristics of genre fiction. Some of them are more realistic than others, but they almost always have elements of the weird, the fabulist, and/or the absurd.

"Distance" and Other Stories is a collection of four short stories and a novella that explore the themes of isolation and personal revelation. The dissertation opens with a preface which describes my background as a writer and the forces that shape my work, including science fiction, technology and the internet, cultural marginalization, and Joseph Campbell's hero's motif.

The following collection, Bent, is comprised of 11 stories and one novel excerpt. The stories, while they stand alone as individual works, are tied together by their questions. "Boy Box," "Lemons," "Claws," "Heart Feathers," "Hot," "Empire," and "How We Were Tamed" experiment with magic and suspension of disbelief in the most overt ways, while "Saints," "Glaciology," and "Cartographers and Creeps" seek instead to work within the constraints of folklore through less stated modes by adopting more of the atmospheric qualities of the tradition. The following stories are curious about the way fairy tales can be reworked to represent diverse, non-heteronormative, worldviews, while dealing explicitly with issues of sexuality, identity politics, and loss of innocence. The excerpt from Swallow is lifted from the opening pages of a novel in progress. Swallow follows Claire during a year at college as she investigates issues of art-making, obsession, bodies, and same sex attraction. There is also an overarching, more dystopian theme that deals with the climate crisis and raises questions about value making in a world that is degrading around us.

by Christina Lee Ka-pik. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1990. / Bibliography: leaves 163-168. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowedgments --- p.ii / Chapter Chapter1 --- Introducion --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter2 --- Orthodoxy vs Anti-orthodoxy --- p.12 / Chapter Chapter3 --- Historicity vs Fictionalization --- p.52 / Chapter Chapter4 --- Ordinary vs Unexpectedness --- p.97 / Chapter Chapter5 --- Conclusion --- p.151 / Notes to Chapter 1 --- p.156 / Notes to Chapter 2 --- p.157 / Notes to Chapter 3 --- p.160 / Notes to Chapter 4 --- p.161 / Notes to Chapter 5 --- p.162 / Works Cited --- p.163

A collection of short fiction set in and around Southern California.

This project is a collection of interconnected short stories all based in the Los Angeles area. Each story is able to stand on its own as a short piece, but ultimately plays a larger role of possessing a relationship with those that come before and after it. The collection is broken into three segments, each segment possessing its own theme. And while each segment, and the stories within each segment, flourishes with the theme they are placed in, each and every story still interconnects with each other in order to produce the framework of the book entirely; that being the story of two young lovers: “Leslie,” and “Thomás.” These two characters that I have produced are at the basis of this project. Their stories are peppered throughout the collection in order to better convey the sporadic nature of their relationship.

The works of creative writing which culminate in this thesis explore themes of everyday trauma, the gendered body as rendered in writing, and writing as propelled by the aural senses above factors such as logic and plot. Dysphoria of identity through gendered, geographical, and institutional means pervades each work in instances that range from the subtle to the all-consuming. Rhythm and intuition bond at the sentence level in each work, rendering a wildness to the pages. Moved by sensation rather than a drive to make something abundantly clear, the revelations of reading arrive at a level of the associative, the dreamy, and the sound of certain syllables and words as juxtaposed with deliberation posing as spontaneity. Grappling with a simultaneous urge to assimilate and to reject societal and geographical cultural norms, there is a fraught tension and a charged friction to the entire thesis herein.

Scattered Sandpipers is a Young Adult novel excerpt. Seventeen-year-old Bee, lost her mother two years ago in a car crash. As she denies and represses her grief, strange and magical things begin to happen.

Dissertation--Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften und Philosophie--Marburg--Philipps-Universität, 1985. Titre de soutenance : Die politische Seite der Science Fiction : eine inhaltsanalytische Bestandsaufnahme. / Bibliogr. p. 367-386.

Thesis--M. Phil., University of Hong Kong, 1985. / Photocopy of typeccript.