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This is a selection of linked lyric essays, covering explorations of memory, experience, nature, transcendence, insignificance, orientation, boredom, privilege, vocation, and more.

The Gate is a collection of short stories by Cassondra Bird Combs. Combs' first collection is heavily inspired by the small Northern California towns she grew up in, and the disillusioned characters who live there. The Gate marks the introduction of an incredibly sympathetic voice, a voice hard to find in modern literature, that didn't rise from New York or Iowa but from a youth spent in solitude in the redwoods. Combs' characters range from a fifteen-year-old girl trapped in an endless abusive cycle to a young man whose parents have suddenly left him to a older woman trying to end her marriage by burning Christmas trees in the street. In these seven stories, Combs reminds us time and time again of the advantages and disadvantages of a rural life, and forges connection between character and reader in a remarkable way. In "Little World" a little girl is paralyzed by fear of the dark but is stronger than she knows. In "Turn" a young woman has to make peace with her past and escape. In "B-Side" a recovering addict realizes the thing he needs isn't the thing he wants. In a voice entirely in tune with the hum of the woods and alive with unusual descriptions and deft character traits, Combs' collection will keep you reading.

The following is a collection of six short stories written between 2014 and 2016. While the short stories are not connected, they tend to grapple with issues of grief and belonging. Characters who struggle to name their feelings, to inhabit them, and yet feel them nonetheless, populate these pages. There is also a theme of fantastical bodies in some of the stories--women who levitate and little boys who suffer heart problems when they feel too much joy. The interplay between emotion and physical ailment is exaggerated and dramatized in these instances.

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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The Monk and the Butterfly is a set of six fictional stories ranging in length, experimenting with different narrative structures and techniques, which examine and explore the idea of the human self as a fictional story. This creative work seeks to deliberately transgress the boundaries of genre within literature and evoke the sense of non-empirical, ecstatic, or poetic truth in the mind of the reader. In doing so it mingles and remixes ideas of dystopian and utopian, cyberpunk and zombies, fairy tales and scientific inquiry, multiphrenia and recursion, mythology and ontology, copyright and copyleft, media theory and queer theory, feminism and transhumanism, genderfuck and genrefuck, rejection of binaries and absence of identity. The stories range in subject matter including the larvae of the deathwatch beetle, a suicidal artificial intelligence, a woman made of bread, the eating of names, a global pandemic of sleep deprivation, and the end of the world. / February 2014

The purpose of this essay is to examine the sense of immediacy in fiction, i.e., the sense that the story is unfolding before one's eyes; the sense that the story is happening now. What it is and how it can be achieved is discussed in relation to the author's own stories; as well dealing briefly with some more general points in regard to what fiction is and how it seeks to achieve what it attempts.