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This MFA thesis, More Stories About Disappointment and TV, is a collection of short stories. I see them as being interconnected, if only in the loosest possible sense. I have certain ideas and themes that recur throughout my work, which I hope gives the stories a sense of cohesion without making the collection feel too monochromatic. The stories vary in narrative approach and point of view. My stories are character-driven literary fiction, to put it broadly, though they often incorporate characteristics of genre fiction. Some of them are more realistic than others, but they almost always have elements of the weird, the fabulist, and/or the absurd.

The critical introduction to this collection of short fiction argues that writing is reading and that reading is writing. The argument draws descriptions of writing as reading from such diverse sources as Sherwood Anderson, Roland Barthes, Neil Simon, J. Hillis Miller and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as from the author's own experience. Descriptions of reading from phenomenological and subjective criticism, including the theories of Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish and David Bleich, affirm the creative role of the reader, show that the reader, in fact, writes the text in the process of reading. The introduction concludes that reader, writer and text are all constructs of language, that both reading and writing are, ultimately and primarily, thought.

A collection of short fiction set in and around Southern California.

How We Live Today is a collection of stories about family connections and the process of making amends to keep a family whole. The families are not just traditional families, but also arrangements constructed out of necessity, circumstance, or convenience. The title story tells how a man ends a lengthy divide with a stepmother for the sake of her, his son, and ultimately himself. We see adolescents do the right thing in their circumstances at the risk of losing peer standing or to avert future social damage. An older golfer encourages a younger golfer, easing guilt but realizing that respect for the game ties golfers together. A young professional steps outside of his bounds to help a family of necessity, a group of gay men stricken during the first AIDS outbreak. Another man erases anxiety by dismissing the differences he has perceived in his relationship with his son. And finally, a young man sinks irretrievably into self-destruction over broken family ties.

THE GREATEST IS LOVE is a collection of ten short stories showing the painful manifestations of romantic relationships in the lives of contemporary American characters from many walks of life. As in the stories of D.H. Lawrence, these characters are often driven towards what may be bad for them, finding that love overrides their rational thoughts. In “The Mechanic” a woman whose legal career has left her isolated becomes irresistibly attracted to her friend’s ex-husband. Three stories center on one character, Charles, whose early failures both in college and at work lead him to become a detective, only to be tempted to betray his new calling by a woman who leads him astray. As in Italo Calvino’s Difficult Loves, the stories in THE GREATEST IS LOVE combine the pain and comedy of passion. Even when it is challenging, love offers characters irresistible glimmers of hope.

My thesis is a collection of my own original poetry and short fiction written as a kind of response to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." Instead of having Whitman continue to represent me through his poem, I wish to represent myself through my own poetry. I attempted to create a new kind of fiction and poetry from the perspective of a Hispanic who has less of a tie to Mexico or the homeland and more of the cultural influences of the United States. Instead of focusing on differences between myself and the dominant culture, I attempted to discuss in chapter II my philosophy concerning subjects such as; war, religion, time and space, and society. In chapter III, I tried to reconcile various cultural mythologies as the United States does not have a single shared mythology. And in chapter IV I gave my own predictions of the future based on personal observation. My twofold goal of this collection was to one, demonstrate that Hispanic writers are capable of more than lamenting their shared past. And two, to challenge the notion that anything besides a disenfranchisement narrative is "inauthentic" and renders me a poor writer of Hispanic literature. I believe it is up to the reader to decide whether I have accomplished these goals.

The eight short stories in Shorty examine themes including racism, oppression, conflict, social perception, miscommunication, struggles over meaning, truth and ethnic identity. New Zealand is a country reinventing itself from its colonial past (Wyn 2004 p. 277); identity-making in this country is a ‘dynamic process’ (Liu et al. 2005 p.11) which generates new cultural forms and practices. The concept of culture and subculture links the aforementioned themes in Shorty.