Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2016, English

This thesis consists of five original short stories and a critical introduction in which I explore my notion of "quiet realism." Quiet realism is the lens through which I seek to describe, explore, and understand the stories and writers that have inspired the writing of these stories. Quiet realism has much to do with the inner life—what is not quite visible and what often is difficult to say.

Committee: Patrick O'Keeffe (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2014, English

Modern Love and Other Stories is a collection of short stories that oscillates between a central protagonist and his surrounding online world. This project presents and analyzes the challenges of finding a place in today's society. With fiction as the tool, the short stories reveal truths about human nature, growing up, parental relationships and attempts to discover happiness. The focus is less on plot and more on the illumination and examination of structures of feeling within ordinary people. Characters bleed from one story to the next, ideas remain afloat, and the reader finds meaning in the sum of the collection's parts.

Committee: Albino Carrillo (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

M.A. (Master of Arts in English), Ohio Dominican University, 2019, English

This work is a creative exploration of the short story form in the tradition of James Joyce and Flannery O'Connor, paying particular attention to how stories can function together as a part of a collection or cycle. It brings some of their techniques into the contemporary era by using a world in which humans have superpowers.

Committee: Martin Brick Ph.D. (Advisor); Jeremy Glazier M.F.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2019, Psychology

This dissertation examined the operation of cognitive heuristics in short-story reading by incorporating two halo manipulations and two anchoring manipulations into passages of varying length. The main purpose of this dissertation is to test whether participants show anchoring effects or halo effects during long-form short-story reading the same way participants have shown in other cognitive tasks. Three experiments were conducted where participants were given either four 200-word passages (Experiment 1), four 700-word passages (Experiment 2), or a 3000-word short-story (Experiment 3). Each of the 200-word passages in Experiment 1 were expanded to create the passages in Experiment 2. The four passages in Experiment 2 were expanded and combined with a fifth section in Experiment 3. In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, participants showed anchoring effects and halo effects in the predicted direction for three of the four manipulations. In Experiment 3, there were no observed effects in any of the four manipulations. Although this dissertation was not designed to draw any strong conclusion for not finding significance, the overall results imply that people relied on bottom-up heuristic processing during short passage reading, but decide a priori on a top-down algorithmic strategy for longer short-stories.

Committee: Mary Hare Ph.D. (Advisor); Richard Anderson Ph.D. (Committee Member); Howard Casey Cromwell Ph.D (Committee Member); Sheri Wells-Jensen Ph.D. (Other) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Experimental Psychology; Psychology

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2018, English

Dotted Lines is a collection of short stories centered around commodification to reflect the ways systemic ideologies affect the individual psyche. By placing monetary value on abstractions like death and time, I comment on consumer culture and capitalist influence. Similarly, I inspect social constructs like gender, sexuality, and love to dissect the patriarchal/puritanical foundations from which westernized perspectives are derived, with emphasis given to queer relationships. I convey these stories with consideration for accessibility, prioritizing clarity and humor. Fabulism, realism, transgression, and absurdity are all present within the collection, with tonal influences of Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, and Flannery O'Connor.

Committee: Margaret Luongo (Advisor); Joseph Bates (Committee Member); Daisy Hernandez (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2018, English

This thesis is comprised of short fiction ranging from four to eighty pages, inhabiting worlds as familiar to the reader as a suburban home and as alien as a magical, spirit-filled wasteland. I assembled this collection along three key thematic lines, the first being feelings of ambivalent motherhood. Characters in this collection come to terms with their pregnancy or reject it; they leave their families wondering if they should have had children at all; and they live in a liminal space where love is expected of them but not easy to procure. The second thematic concern present in many of these stories is grappling with mythology. In “Ithaca”, a young woman is introduced to a cosmic mythology by her aging employer. In “Investigation No. 5,” a family mythology is investigated as if it holds as much importance as one of the major world religions. Disillusionment with Judeo-Christian mythology is portrayed in “In the Pool,” and “Shoulder, Midrib, Neck” deals with the retelling of a Scottish myth. The final theme running through these stories is that of generational legacy: what a parent bequeaths to their children far beyond physical possessions. How is that legacy corrupted by the actions of the parent? How can a child fit themselves into the world, bearing these often-sordid gifts? Characters struggle with these questions in “Nomads,” “Shoulder, Midrib, Neck,” and the novella that ends the collection, “The Ballad of Baby MacCrae.” The novella is the story where all of these themes come back and braid together. The solitary narrator must grapple with the worldview she's been indoctrinated into by her aunt: pagan Celtic beliefs, Old Testament Christianity, and blood rituals. This novella concerns how a woman can bring a private mythology into the public world, and how she can make peace with the legacies that have been left to her.

Committee: Lawrence Coates (Committee Chair); Wendell Mayo (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2017, English

Happily Ever After & Other Myths is a collection of ten short stories that draw upon Olympian myths to tell the untold—but often experienced—tales of romantic misadventures. Readers will discover early on that they will not find a standard happily ever after in the collection. Each story in the collection pulls upon a myth to guide the unsuspecting characters and to present a story more closely aligned with reality. They refuse to supply a happily ever after ending, instead opting to leave the characters with their pain, their longing, and their decisions. Their lives continue as they reappear in the background of other stories. Readers will find a collection of happy-for-nows, or better-off-this-ways, something that's messy but real. If the collection succeeds, readers will find parts of themselves there too.

Committee: Margaret Luongo (Committee Chair); Brian Roley (Committee Member); Daisy Hernandez (Committee Member) Subjects: Folklore; Literature; Modern Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2006, English

A collection of short stories centered thematically around the idea of “the hole, ” or that thing which is missing from each characters' life. “The hole” is the gap, or void, that each character must struggle to identify, to fill, or to sink into.

Committee: Margaret Luongo (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2013, English

This dissertation examines the aesthetic revival of the short story in the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Traditionally, short stories, and the collections that contained them, had been viewed as inferior to the novel. The short story, most often published in the pages of mass-market weeklies such as The Saturday Evening Post, was understood as a primarily commercial genre written for money, not status. The growth of creative writing programs in postwar America offered a new institutional home for literary production, one buffered from the uncertainties of the commercial literary market. Creative writing programs presented favorable circumstances for the short story's revival. The brevity of the short story made it an ideal genre of fiction for study and composition in writing workshops. Creative writing programs housed literary journals that specialized in short stories, and, since creative writing programs participated in the academy's economy of prestige in which symbolic, rather than economic, capital is at stake, writers were institutionally rewarded for publishing stories within the journals. By removing the short story from its position as a commercial genre, creative writing programs reframed the value of the short story and emphasized its aesthetic possibilities. Creative writing programs helped create a renaissance of interest in the short story form that I trace through the examples of four figures: John Cheever, Gordon Lish, Lorrie Moore, and Lee Abbott. Cheever's omnibus, The Stories of John Cheever (1978), helped reveal the commercial market for short story collections and, with the acclaim the collection provided him, showed that writers could obtain literary recognition by writing in the genre. Gordon Lish's editing of Raymond Carver's short stories produced the most popular aesthetic of creative writing programs, literary minimalism. By applying his experimental literary tastes to Carver's traditionally realist stories, Lish (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Gary Stonum (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1960, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1913, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1924, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1911, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1916, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Design

Git Gud: A Braided Comic About the Good, Bad, and Ugly in the Video Games Community (2024) is a creative inquiry into presenting research in a comic format. Comics-based research refers to a broad set of practices that use the comics form to collect, analyze, and disseminate scholarly research. The unique design aspects of this project include the creation of a braided comic about harassment in video games, which adapts the principles of a braided essay into a visual braid of three strands: a narrative short story, research on harassment in video games, and my autoethnographic experiences with harassment as a video game player. This paper reviews the development of the braided comic as a format to present these three strands of harassment in video games. This paper then documents the process of creating this research-informed comic and reflects on creative inquiry and design discoveries from working within this comic-making process.

Committee: Maria Palazzi (Advisor); Kyoung Swearingen (Committee Member); Dr. Jesse Fox (Committee Member) Subjects: Design

Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Ohio University, 2023, Film

This paper includes a combination of structural and genre analysis of the film "Lonely Creatures" (which was directed by the author), reflections on the process, and analysis of the film's strengths, weaknesses, and what was successfully accomplished. There is also explanation and reflection on the process of fabricating props, set pieces and a puppet as well as discussion of the visual effects techniques employed in the post-production process.

Committee: Lindsey Martin (Advisor) Subjects: Film Studies; Fine Arts; Motion Pictures

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2019, English

What We Know is a composite novel, accompanied by a critical introduction. The stories deal with issues of home, family, and finding a sense of self through the lens of a queer identity.

Committee: Patrick O'Keeffe (Advisor) Subjects: Families and Family Life; Literature

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2018, English

"The Things He Left Behind" is a short story cycle inspired by the consequences of war and the power of legacy. It follows a young soldier, Felix Rocha, through the eyes of the many friends, family, and strangers that he impacted throughout his short life. The character is based off of a real-life soldier, Felix Del Greco, who was the first Connecticut National Guardsman to be killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The incorporation of artifacts into the story is meant to mix fiction and reality; to present to the reader both the real Felix and the fictional Felix. As Tim O'Brien famously said, “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” This short story cycle is meant to make a lasting impact on the reader, leaving them with the question, “What are the things that I will leave behind?”

Committee: Meredith Doench (Advisor); David Fine (Committee Member); Christopher Burnside (Committee Member) Subjects: Families and Family Life; Literature; Military History; Military Studies; Personal Relationships

Bachelor of Arts, Ohio University, 2018, English

This analytical introduction and short story explore the genre of postmodern southern fiction through the lives of characters from a small town after the arson of a newly built corporate chain store.

Committee: Joan Connor (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 0, English (Arts and Sciences)

Two brothers dream of being astronauts. A man wakes up to read his own obituary in the newspaper. A failed country musician seeks to reconnect with his estranged daughter, and a woman deals with the aftermath of her husband's alien abduction. In these five stories of cosmic happenings and intimate relations, characters seek to control their lives—both past, present, and future. They hide from their guilt and search for notoriety. They distort reality to fit their needs and learn too late that the universe does not answer to yearning.

Committee: Patrick O'Keeffe (Advisor); Eric LeMay (Committee Member); Joan Connor (Committee Member) Subjects: Language Arts