The Man Behind the Man is a novel that explores identity, creativity, and how people come to understand what is important in life. The setting is the future and certain technological advances in the future become important plot and thematic tools for unraveling the mystery of personal identity. This is also a work that deals heavily with country music and how country music speaks to commonalities of the human experience.

A novel written in fulfillment of the requirements of the Masters of Fine Arts degree.

Enter the room with a black contractor bag rolled up. Walk to the center of the room, unroll the contractor bag, shake it as you would to fit it to a garbage can, and pull it over your head. Feel your way to the nearest wall and smooch along it. The bag, as you rub your shoulder along the wall, should naturally begin to twist so that it spins around you as you are walking within it. This will create the illusion that you are twirling, and the bag will begin to replicate skin. If there is external sound, be cognizant of it, and in moments when you sense the sound has halted, you should also halt, remaining pressed against the wall, or the corners of the room, until the sound resumes. Take the time to retreat or advance along the wall as you see fit. When you reach the door, exit the room maintaining the same cadence until the door has fully closed behind you and you are no longer being observed. Ordinal is an exploration of obscene consumption. The images and words consumed can be understood to symbolize the consumption of the body. This piece may register as significant of a sexual act or acts, but is intended to be understood as solitary, selfish consumption in place of something lacking. The substitution of the consumed for that which is unattainable or unknown is an individual desire often carried out privately as a form of grief. The rupture of this privation can be interpreted as the resistance to know or confront the aesthetic truths of our desires. One of the most approachable ways to acknowledge grief is to plagiarize its most powerful symbols or triggers and to make them absurd. I am haunted by the image of a black contractor bag. This body of work takes measure of the grief it inhabits, weighs the constraints and usefulness of this grief as a habitat or environment in which to enact solitude, violence, or ecstasy, and generates its own conclusions.

This is a poetry manuscript that examines the epic form, concrete poetic techniques, and science fiction concepts so as to posit a created world of surfaces.

Not applicable for fiction.

A collection of essays addressing topics in North American ecology and environmentalism.

A sustained memoir narrative about the author's relationship with her father.

Leonard Murphy lived a life of urban subsistence, on the verge of thirty, and still living alone in a studio a block from his parents in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He worked part time, he took care of his dementia ridden, and hobbled, great uncle Harold. He suffered what he felt were the betrayals of modern life: his parents and Harold growing old, his brother marrying up into a well-to-do Catholic family and converting out of the Murphys tradition of atheism. But when Harold dies mysteriously after claiming to be followed by a pair Gaucho detectives, Leonard is sent on a journey into Cambridges leftist past to figure out how Harold became alienated from his community and ended up losing a leg. Teaming up with a childhood friend, the local librarian, the director of a historical walking tour, and eventually the Gaucho detectives themselves, Leonard searches Cambridges history for how radicalization, community, and his family failed modernitys great tests.

It is when art displaces, defamiliarizes the world around us. It is what creates, succumbs, hurts, manipulates, that is, the experience of energy. When we find words a journey begins. The language we create to experience a world to move through, the language that inhabits the travelers one meets along the way. THOUGH WE BLED METICULOUSLY is when we choose to destroy, when we choose to open ourselves to destruction to see what might happen.

Four short stories and a novel chapter.