Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / This thesis contains six short stories and an excerpt of a novel. / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

This is a creative thesis comprised of three short stories centered on the experiences of three Navajo protagonists living on the Navajo reservation. The short stories fit within the field of Native American Literature and highlight issues of mortality, sexuality, and ceremony. The stories illustrate the experiences of modern-day Navajo youth grappling to understand how to connect traditional knowledge with modernity. The three stories featured within this thesis are offered as a way to understand these challenges. Each protagonist is faced with an issue of morality, sexuality, or ceremony, and each reach differing conclusions about these topics within their lives. This collection is comprised of three short stories entitled “Dormant,” “Under the Porch Way,” and “The Missing Morningstar.” The first story, “Dormant,” is about a young female Navajo protagonist and her budding relationship with her math teacher. She has a pregnancy scare and considers the meaning of motherhood and her sexuality. The second story, “Under the Porch Way,” is about an adolescent Navajo boy who is being haunted by his father’s ghost, and has a traditional ceremony done, but it fails to work. Instead, after attempting to have sex with his girlfriend, Jenni, under the porch, he finds that his father’s ghost has left him. The final story “The Missing Morningstar,” is about a young two-spirit woman whose romantic interest is kidnapped and left for dead in a ditch. The protagonist considers her sexuality and traditional Navajo identity.

The following eight stories make up Out the Valley, a collection of short fiction. Each story stands independently as a single work, though together they are bound by ties to California's Central Valley. The places the characters inhabit range widely in socio-economic class systems, from the gang-ruled streets of Fresno in Beautiful, Smart, Talented, to upper middle class suburbia, looking back over one man's life in My Mary. Each character is dealing with their own set of deficiencies, so to speak. In Dominoes, Ross recalls his first love from prison. In Be Thou My Vision, a mother takes a trip to understand the life of her daughter in the wake of her murder. The Bare of Our Chests circles truth in a series of frames as the main character, Maynard, tries to confront the past while mourning his mother. A More Interesting Story shows Joni attempt to find freedom in her world of mental restrictions. In A Well Matched Man, Ephram's superficiality keeps him from finding and recognizing love. The title story, Deficiencies, follows a college-aged young man, Erol, as he learns to write despite dyslexia and the onslaught of obsessive love for his tutor. These are stories that the main characters wish they were not telling--events they cannot face in truth, and so view instead through their own flawed lenses.

Most of the eight stories in this collection are about individuals who are alienated. They are unable or unwilling to break through the barriers that separate them from others. The stories are contemporary; the settings are urban/suburban. The past plays an important part in defining and limiting the present, and fantasy sometimes replaces reality as an option for dealing with the loneliness of isolation. Direct confrontation is another option. Desire for power and the need for assertiveness are important elements in the action of the stories. By contrast, retreat into submission may become the sad alternative. The voices change with each story. An older man mourns the death of his wife. A young married woman contemplates her sterile marriage but is unable to extricate herself from her stereotypical role as wife. An old man tries to figure out how he can confront his nephew and his family about the values he thinks they lack. A young woman rejects a marriage that she feels will stifle her freedom but returns in middle age to try to understand what exactly she was fighting against. A young boy tries to understand his aunt and her husbands. A seedy middle-aged man dreams of an encounter with a woman of class. A woman who has been rejected by an old friend tries to comprehend the reasons for her friend's mental breakdown. Some of the characters emerge triumphant to begin again; others are stalemated and accept the status quo; a few make tentative movements in the direction of change without knowing what the outcome will be.

The aim of this research is to give a literary accountable description of the development of the short story in Sepedi. In order to achieve this, the descriptive as well as the expository and comparative method are used, while the short story is seen as a unit consisting of a content layer, a structural layer and a stylistic layer. With these three layers as focus points in the research, the researcher is not to include the socio-cultural circumstance in which the work has its origin, as final criterium in his research. Firstly, the modus operandi of English and American researchers in their descriptions of the history and development of their literatures is reviewed (or traced). The division here into development periods, is based to a large extent on pragmatic grounds, although literary merit was considered too. In the case of the literature in Sepedi, Mokgokong, Serudu and Groenewald separately gave an overview of the history of this literature and divided it into development periods (or periods of development). They, however, do not indicate the grounds (basics) on which these periods are based. The historical and socio-cultural circumstances of the Bapedi are taken into consideration, but how they lead to a literary accountable division, is not indicated. A short overview of the history of the short story in Sepedi is given as introduction to this study. Thereafter the development of the short story in Sepedi is divided into three phases, namely: (a) The moralizing or didactical phase. (b) The experimental phase. (c) The phase of growth. In the first period the works of Ramaila, who is a skilled writer, dominate. He was a teacher and a man of the church, and was moved by the fate of his people when the Western lifestyle in the process of urbanization left them without anchors in life. The stories from this period therefore have a strong moralising and didactical flavour (tendency) which detracts from the merit of the work. Works from the second period place less emphasis on the clash between the traditional and Western philosophies of life. The stories are mostly constructed untidily, the characterization is one-sided and unconvincing, while the conclusions are not motivated satisfactorily. The short stories from the third period portray a reconciliation between the traditional and Western lifestyles. This phase includes short stories which are structurally and stylistically rounded. The detective stories, for example, have highly complex structures which lead to surprising solutions to the story problems, while an ironic situation in life is described with the greatest ease and skills especially in the stories of (N.S) Nkadimeng and Mpepele. The chief merit of these works lie in the characterization and building of atmosphere. In the final or summarising chapter there is reflection on the importance of Ramaila as short story writer, while the possibilities of the short story in Sepedi in the future are touched upon. / Thesis (DLitt (African Languages))--University of Pretoria, 2000. / African Languages / unrestricted

"Strange Neighborhoods" is a collection of short stories chronicling the petty disputes, semi-supernatural happenings, and longing for connection which dominate the lives of its' loners and outcasts. A father attempts to quell his daughter's night terrors through paranormal means; a deer in the house disrupts a man's depressive state; a woman attempts to replace her neighbor's dog with a doppleganger; a stolen pie recipe results in a bitter feud and a search through the phone book for women of the same name.

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Community is often defined by the familial or residential relationships we have, such as family, neighbors or coworkers. But there is another vital and often unobserved community among strangers. These relationships are often haphazard, temporary relationships formed in a moment of necessity—customers trapped in a convenience store by a storm, orphaned runaway teenagers who band together for safety on the streets, miners trapped in the rubble of a collapsed mine, etc. These communities are spontaneous and often undefined, but have the potential to reveal more about our insecurities, reflexes, and emotional capacities than almost any other relationship. For many, they are the catalysts for transformation, epiphany and hope. The stories in this short fiction collection illustrate characters, settings and tensions that revolve around the formation, rejection or elevation of these vibrant and unfamiliar communities.

"Off Main Street" is a collection of short stories concerned, primarily, with the expression of womanhood in the American Midwest.

A Little Slice of the Moon: stories is a collection of short stories that explore the struggles of various characters to find their place in the world. And the world, despite its familiarity, can be a hostile place. The characters in this collection learn that families are a fragile lot, that every desire contains a paradox, that the Road of Life can seemingly be grasped by the horns, but that the future twists and turns, yet never escapes the past. And it is the past that haunts these characters' lives. One word, one act, impacts a lifetime. In A Little Slice of the Moon, Khalid traces the devastation of his 'new' life and his alienation to everything around him back to a youthful error. In The Thousand Trees Orchard, the arrival of Mahjabeen, Laddo's deranged and possibly dangerous sister, teaches Laddo the difference between fleeing the past and embracing it. In Dead Woman's Pass, Priya tries to outrun her malevolent qismet, and in doing so, almost loses herself as well. Isolation, physical or emotional, is a primary element in many of these characters' lives. Whether the isolation is self-imposed or results from circumstances beyond their control, these characters realize that where they are matters less than what they've done. They learn that confronting themselves--who they are, who they were--is the only way to break free from the past and make peace with themselves and with the world around them.