This collection of fiction - a novella and a collection of short stories - focuses on the commonality of the human condition. While we create separations for ourselves by focusing on distinctions such as, religion, class, gender, and race, we are, I believe, spiritual beings sharing a human experience. My work tends to explore these distinctions and our motivations for embracing them. In the novella, Middle Ground, two sisters in alternating narrative voices share the story of their parents' struggles with separation, sobriety and cancer. Their voices, as distinct as their perspectives, explore the landscape of a family, the borders between forgiveness and acceptance, the self-preserving act of looking beyond imperfections and weaknesses, and the realization that truth is an illusion and flawed love the only certainty. The short story collection consists of eight pieces. Many of these stories explore characters in a state of recovery - a brain tumor operation, a death of a spouse, a shot to the head where a bullet rests and reminds - and plot occurs as these characters attempt to move on. They meet sandhill cranes who cry out in pain for the death of another, lovers who speak in italics, vets who swear that the blasted silence is louder than King Kong screaming in your ear. They sit with shrinks who lie, sleep with poets who stray, compete with incarcerated ex-husbands who were "man enough" to put a gun to a woman's head and pull the trigger. They are nothing - and everything - like all of us, and readers are invited to join the characters beside the mirror of our collective Middle Ground.

Racing Fire to the River is a novella about a poverty-stricken community in the Southwest navigating hardship, violence, and the tantalizing mania of an unclaimed lottery ticket jackpot.

Nothing Remains Still is a collection of short stories and a novella. The series of short stories, "The Assortment 1-4" chronicle the childhood of a young girl, her siblings, and her mother, and the lives they lead in the gated, but impoverished, community, in which they live. The tone of the stories is meant to be surreal, approaching the dystopic, as a way to reveal the underlying horror of growing up in low-income housing. The story, as so many of these stories do in their real life correlates, ultimately ends in tragedy for the central family. The novella, Nothing Remains Still, is an epistolary tale of a young woman who rediscovers her mother, and herself, while training to become a psychoanalyst. The novella is about movement and stagnation, or false or artificial stagnation. In this context, the Heraclitus quote, "All entities move, and nothing remains still," which acts as the novella's epigraph, serves to introduce a kind of cosmological conceit concerning bodies of matter and how the study of physics situates inanimate objects. I had my narrator apply this conceit to people, as well, and to situate human bodies as also being physical objects subject to the same physical laws. The quote is meant to signal that the narrator's journey is in constant flux -- there are no endings, happy or otherwise, just a transfer of energy into one thing or another. / MFA

"Distance" and Other Stories is a collection of four short stories and a novella that explore the themes of isolation and personal revelation. The dissertation opens with a preface which describes my background as a writer and the forces that shape my work, including science fiction, technology and the internet, cultural marginalization, and Joseph Campbell's hero's motif.

Key words novella, honour, Baroque, woman, society Abstract The main subject of this thesis is the theme of honour. Unlike my previous study, The theme of honour in the Spanish theatre of the XVI and XVII centuries, this work focuses on the literary genre of the novella and it will be interested in honour of women. Woman's honour is one of the great themes, which played a part of literary output of every author at that time. The work will be based on particular literary works, as well as historical context. Because of this, the first part gives literary-theoretical and socio-historical context. This section has as its purpose to introduce the theory of the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque novella, as well as the social status of women in the society of the 17th century. The second part treats the honour of women in the literary context, and relies on selected texts of various significant authors. How the second part will show us, in spite of relative dogmatism and conservatism of Baroque society, every author in his texts offers a different vision and especially different solutions. The main objective of this thesis is capture and describe the multiplicity of attitudes to the universal theme of honour.

ABSTRACT This dissertation explores identity as its central theme. There are three components to the dissertation. The first is the academic essay which explores identity through the perspective of queer theory and proposes a three-dimensional conception of an “identity cloud”. The second component is the creative essay which consists of ten chapters towards a final novella entitled “troll”. The creative component’s central theme is the lead protagonist’s struggle in assimilating the identities of “gay” and “addict” after receiving a liver transplant. The third and final component is an essay detailing the manner in which the creative and academic created and informed one another.

A linked collection featuring a young gay man -- the son of a black mother and a Mexican father -- coming of age in contemporary Houston.

A story about Searching for truth, and finding More than you bargained.

This dissertation is a creative piece that reflects a dual focus in the American Indian Studies program - American Indian Law & Policy and Native American Literature. This "epidemic of violence," as James Anaya labeled it, underpins the writing of this dissertation. Some statistics: One in three Native women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Some sources purport that 88% of assailants are non-Native. Only 13% of reported assaults on Native women are prosecuted. The core of the dissertation is a novella bookended by an Introduction and an Epilog. The Introduction includes the factors and influences that led to the writing of this novella. The novella presents the convergence of the stories of four damaged women and their individual paths toward healing. An Epilog provides a space for thoughts on the writing process and the final product. The purpose of this dissertation is three-fold: Bring attention to the problem of violence committed against Native women, to promote the sharing of stories to begin the path to healing, and to add to the scholarship of American Indian Studies.

Sketch is a fictional novella that explores themes of love, absence, sexual violence, and coincidence. It is a result of two years of extensive writing as a Michener fellow at the University of Miami, and is my first attempt at a longer work. Though a few of the character names are slightly fantastical, the story is firmly rooted in New York City, and the characters themselves are realistic.