When the world is full of so much fear and worry, pain and tragedy, we need new ways to work through our own personal loss; we need new ways to heal. It is my opinion that stories are meant to heal, to make us feel and take us to a better place. Stories offer understanding, a good laugh, a way to move forward, they thrill us, make us cry, show us love, or scare us into momentary elation. My creative thesis will be a collection of short fiction that employs elements of literary realism and magical realism to explore the topic of loss and grief, as well as modes of alternative healing, demonstrating a progression of human awareness.

The intent of this thesis is to explore historical issues of Cuban restrictions on emigration through a magical realism lens. Drawing inspiration from Cuban-American writer Ana Menéndez and Columbian writer Gabriel García Márquez, this thesis focuses on family relationships, especially how grief shapes those relationships and the people in them. The thesis approaches these issues of family, grief, and Cuban emigration by weaving a more grounded central narrative with an original fairytale.

This thesis investigates the poetical interplays of the contemporary magical realist computer game Kentucky Route Zero. Through the notion of literariness coined by the Russian formalists, the work centers on the ways the game operates with the established conventions of magical realism. The theory of intermediality, with its concepts of media modalities, media representation and transmediation, introduced by Lars Elleström, foregrounds the underlying connectedness of Kentucky Route Zero with older media – early instances of computer games – and with the discussed literary style. Text-world theory, outlined by Alison Gibbons and Sarah Whiteley, allows locating and analyzing the idiosyncratic presence of magical realism in the game. As the analysis demonstrates, the realization of magical realism in the game performs a subversive role by destabilizing the aspects of linearity and progression, important for games of the same genre. This, in turn, composes an overarching theme of Kentucky Route Zero – nostalgia; the theme that runs both through the stylistic features of the game and through its content.

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As people awaken to find their skin morphing into tree bark, gears or stained glass, they navigate a landscape of disconnection, uncertainty and volatile metamorphosis. Years into this newfound reality, and with licorice limbs guiding her every step, Aziza joins the Lynchpin Society, an institution developed to navigate the unfamiliar changes unfolding beyond humanity's orbit of understanding.

The Uglier Animals is a collection of short stories exploring themes of change, impermanence and bodily transformation through a speculative lens. The characters in these stories struggle with the friction between place and desire. The body becomes a place on its own, to be trapped in or freed by. Humans and animals alike navigate the challenges of being, existing in relation to others and the space between us. Their bodies are burdens and tools, prisons and possibilities, and they morph accordingly, flesh inscribed with trauma and yearning. A bear fears going into hibernation. Unable to get an abortion, a young girl begins to absorb anyone who touches her pregnant belly. After a friend survives being beheaded by the farmer they worship, a rooster reckons with the tangled web between faith, love, and violence. In modern Brazil, a chicken coop, or under the sea, characters grapple with abandonment and longing. Bodies shrink and grow, cling to life and return from death, are opened up and torn apart. The stories swim in the gaps between emotional connections, characters wrestling with our reasons to leave, our reasons to stay, and everything we must carry along the way.

Snapdragon and Other Short Stories, is an exploration of how characters interact with supernatural elements. These stories give the perception of the characters' encounters with supernatural elements, their reactions, and the results of their acceptance or denial of their response to the supernatural. These stories are not genre fantasy pieces that include dragons, wizards, and the like. The supernatural is presented along the lines of magical realism. Magical realism differs from fantasy in that elements of the miraculous can appear along side of reality while seeming natural and unforced. In his 1949 preface to The Kingdom of This World Alejo Carpentier first defined magical realism as "the practice of melding everyday realism indistinguishably with elements of magic and myth" (Taylor 2). In Dead Zone a young woman who adheres strictly to what can be proven scientifically and factually, is confronted with the ghosts of the Interstate 4 Dead Zone. In Dead Girl Pearls a high school girl is faced with the disappearance of her best friend, and what her dream reveals to her about the disappearance and her own friendship. An old woman in The Color Stealer tells the story of a young man who seeks to have his color vision restored to him for the sake of love, and the price its restoration carries. In China Doll a woman is taken in by a man as his possession and shows the importance and value of belonging to one's self. Snapdragon is the story of a young woman who realizes, upon recognizing her ability to overhear people's thoughts, that changing herself to suit others is not giving her the life she thought she wanted.

"Here, There, Everywhere" chronicles the tumultuous journey of Jon, a twenty-something Nigerian international student residing in the United States. Scarred by a harrowing incident of abuse at the tender age of five, inflicted by the landlord's daughter, Jon grapples with the enduring trauma and its profound repercussions on his existence. The novel delves deep into Jon's psyche, unraveling the intricate threads of his past trauma and its pervasive impact on his relationships, aspirations, and sense of self.