A collection of short stories that explores women and faith in the Christian church, dating and relationships, and magical realism in Chinese communities.

This dissertation consists of a literary novel. A preface deals with issue of introducing philosophical ideas into fictional works, with special emphasis on the techniques of ambiguity and destabilization of reality, as deployed in the novel.

This thesis is a portion of a novel manuscript. The novel is tentatively titled The Better World Movement. These thirteen chapters introduce the reader to the main character, Smith Anderson, who is banished from his dream college after the first semester of his freshman year. Forced to start again at a different college, Smith becomes close with his roommates, meets a girl, and begins assisting an ethically ambiguous professor. When the professor implements troublesome social experiments on the student body, Smith and his friends must reconcile the mistakes of their pasts and decided what is best for the world as they know it—transparency, or improvement at great cost.

“The World Still Undiscovered” explores a particular way of seeing the common setting, i.e., the so-called West, of all seven of the short stories contained therein, specifically responding to two ideas of the West: in America, that the West is somewhere you can go to find the freedom to grow up independent of the oppression of civilization; and in Canada, that the West is a place that is inherently deadly and therefore boxes people into small, narrow towns. Each of these stories resists that binary.

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A selection of fiction, creative non-fiction and novel excerpt in partial fulfillment of requirements of an MFA

The following thesis contains a novel in progress and three short stories. The novel is set in the years 400,000 and 2350 and explores themes of post-humanism, interstellar travel, post-apocalyptic survival, and extra-terrestrial encounters. Each short story contains a speculative element that seeks to draw out thematic and character-driven "truths." This collection of fiction was written between February 2013 and April 2015.

Of Two Minds is a work of fiction that includes short stories and a novel excerpt. The Fire We Wait By is set in 1986 in the fictional town of Boone Springs, Kentucky. The novel chronicles how a family navigates the aftermath of grief caused by their middle daughter’s disappearance. It includes elements of magical realism with chapters narrated by a ghost trapped in an abandoned coalmine. The novel strives to depict a complicated South--a region filled with legacies that it must grapple with but also a community rich in spirit that contains more outsiders than insiders, including immigrants, gay men, and mixed race couples. My short stories also combine literary fiction with the psychological and supernatural and often have an undercurrent of dark humor. My stories deal with female protagonists pulled in multiple directions as they struggle with what it means to be a woman and a mother.

In this collection of fourteen stories, the author explores the connections that hold families together. She is particularly interested in how personal memory, episodic violence and unspoken love seem to propel generations of families in surprising ways.