The following is a novel in the form of a gospel, telling the story of religious fanaticism in the early years of the United Sates and the rebellions in West Florida in the year 1805 and 1810. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Spring Semester, 2011. / March 30, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Thesis; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member.

Relief, a novel, tells the story of Eric and Abigail Kees, who fall in love in the months after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Over the next decade Eric and Abigail marry, have a child, start a business, buy a second home and eventually discover that some of their earliest anxieties about their relationship are true.Meanwhile, Eric's brother, Boyd, comes in and out of their lives. The first time he enters their lives Eric and Abigail are living in New York. Boyd stays long enough to reveal some of the fissures in their relationship and then leaves a few weeks later, apparently taking with him a lottery ticket worth millions of dollars. Eric and Abigail not only feel like they have been robbed of their winnings but also like they were robbed of the ideal future they had begun to imagine for themselves.Years later Boyd reenters their lives. Now the setting is Relief, a small coastal town on the Florida panhandle. Relief is where Eric and Boyd were happiest as children, and it is where they have returned as adults, hoping to reclaim a measure of that early happiness. But neither of them manage to pull it off, and when Boyd flees this time, Eric and Abigail can no longer lie to themselves about the life they have built together—or the lives they might have built if they had never met. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Spring Semester, 2011. / February 25, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Thesis; Julianna Baggott, Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member.

The Gifts of Odin: The Violaceous Amethyst, follows the Miller family as they battle tarantula fish, learn secrets from trees, and go up against a conniving, double-crossing, espresso-drinking villain.

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"The Filmmaker's Apprentice and Other Stories" is a novella and six short stories set in a contemporary South Africa more complicated than ever, where people are constantly moving, young people are trying to forge identities and an older generation struggles to adapt to a radically altered reality. Characters struggle to relate meaningfully across socioeconomic, gender, national and racial divisions, bumping up against their own prejudices and perceptions in a way that makes it difficult to really see each other.

Wonderboom (Wondertree) could be considered as a dystopic novel that takes place in a post-apocalyptic era within the South African landscape. It is the time of disillusioned citizens and access to most resources is limited, except for the plutocrats. The result is that the division between the haves and have-nots is more severe than ever before and is particularly evident along the fringes of society. The protagonist, Magriet Vos, is a fifty-year-old violinist whose memory is disintegrating. Due to the fact that she is a regular performer at the ‘court’ of the despotic ruler Albino X, her impending mental incompetence pitches her at a knife’s edge, because when she will no longer be able to master her art, Albino X will have her killed and dispatched to the taxidermist in order to extend his diorama. Further to this, she has virtually no friends or relatives left in the coastal village where she lives, and she is thus compelled to migrate north, back to the Magaliesberg and the last members of her clan. Vos raids her past in a desperate attempt to survive the post-revolutionary wasteland in the hope of arriving ‘home’ safely. The text fluctuates between the territory of memoir and travelogue as the journey progresses and her sense of consciousness starts to dissipate. Aspects of her musical craft, such as rhythm, tone and tempo are synthesised in the structure of the novel. Further to this, careful consideration was given to references to existing texts by particular authors, serving the purpose of either parody or elegy. Vos’ journey commences in Betty’s Bay on the southern coast of South Africa and unfolds through four voices or perspectives: - The main narrator (illuminating the idiosyncratic viewpoint of Magriet Vos) - Magriet’s diary (memoir) - Encyclopedia (endnotes) - Disintegrating photo texts: a series of constructions/collages, which serves as introduction to each chapter and refers to the ‘image sequence’ of the British photographer Eadweard James Muybridge (1830-1904) and which is here applied as dismantling device to allow text and image to dovetail. The tree serves as central metaphor − both as axis in nature and as archaic source of ‘knowledge of good and evil.’

From the cold shores of Marion Island to the plains of the Great Karoo, this is a story about four South Africans, by birth or circumstance, who are marooned on the outskirts of society and trying to find their way back. Livhu is a scientist who has been sent to a remote research station to study ocean currents. Besides the challenge of adjusting to the frozen island landscape, she also grapples with her feelings for a young seal researcher. When the relationship takes an unwanted turn, Livhu is forced to search deep inside herself and find the strength to survive a lonely year very far from home. Casper is a sub-editor who works for the most trashy tabloid in Johannesburg. He’s on cruise control, plugging away at a job he doesn’t really enjoy, full of regret about previous opportunities he thinks he’s squandered. When a strange assignment comes his way, and a new friend with it, he sees the hazy outline of a map that will lead him away from previous hurt towards a brighter, more ambitious future. Garrick is a ski-boat skipper from Durban. He once captained cargo ships, but when his family fell apart and the rum took over, this was the only job he could get. Now he has a rare opportunity to make good money delivering a catamaran to the Seychelles and rekindle the bond with his estranged son at the same time. On the open ocean, however, tempers fray under skies brimming with thunderclouds, and the threat of pirates is ever present. Jamal walked out of war-torn Somalia as a teenager with his brother. Now his brother has been killed in a xenophobic attack in a Johannesburg township and Jamal is all alone. With no other prospects, he carries on walking, south towards Cape Town, where he has a cousin who might be able to help him. Along the way, desperate and dehydrated, he is taken in by an elderly loner in a small Karoo town who has secrets of his own. Unbeknownst to each other, the lives of these four strangers will touch each other in unexpected ways, suggesting that we are all closer than we’d like to admit, held together by the universal desire for redemption.