Minutes from Pragma is a collection of twelve pieces--a memoir, five short stories, and six short-shorts--exploring ways in which estranged characters may find refuge from chaos and entropy. These stories attempt to deal with bleakness and despair through playfulness and humor. In Enterprise Carolina: A Capsule Review, time has stopped, but somehow everyday life goes on as usual. In Errands, children work in razorblade factories. In Roadblock, the narrator lives with a relative who repeatedly sets his possessions on fire. The collection concentrates on hardship and alienation, but suggests ways in which characters may confront and endure hard times. Characters' attempts to connect with others sometimes fail, but the characters themselves persevere--they read, hold hands, even treat one other kindly. In these ways, they fashion temporary shelters from the frustrations and horrors of the world.

Academic Abstract: Famous Performances examines the complications and struggles that people face attempting to maintain a sense of authentic humanity in the twenty-first century. Through various performances, the collection deals with how human-made phenomena like popular culture, technology, and consumer society, to name a few, affect identity formation, complicating the ways in which the self, as well as the world of today, is both similar and remarkably distinct from the world of only fifteen or twenty years ago. These stories run the gamut of the above mentioned interests, including a story about a television writer and his sister, a performance artist, who tour the country, acting in a bizarre, improvisatory show together, while debating the merits of commercial versus avant-garde art; as well as a story about a wealthy and emotionally unstable man who grapples with his famous activist mother's death, when her face is printed on a commemorative coin. General Abstract: Famous Performances is a short story collection that attempts to investigate the complexities of the modern world and the importance of performance in people's everyday lives. Each story dramatically examines a particular type of performance and its effects on people's inner and social lives. The characters in this collection are grappling with the various ways performance is presented to us in modern society, through technology, the media, pop culture, social media, and more. Throughout the collection the reader is forced to confront their own iterations of authenticity and performance. / MFA

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.