Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2021, Creative Writing/Fiction

In this short story collection, Welcome Home, I explore what it means to be lonely, an outsider, and someone searching for their place in the world. My characters are complex men and women who struggle with grief, heartbreak, and a disconnection from their own mind and body. These characters consider themselves the NPCs in the lives of main characters, who shape, affect, or harm them. We see them grow over the course of these stories and learn to find their voices. They are not in the in-group, but outsiders in more ways than one. In many of these stories, I allow my characters to be angry. They feel like real people because they are real people. Despite run-ins with an alien, a virtual reality device that allows you to explore your literal memories, or a cult to Neil Armstrong, theses stories are grounded in the fact that they are centered around human beings with real struggles.

Committee: Jackson Bliss (Committee Chair); Lawrence Coates (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

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 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 Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Cleveland State University, 2016, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

This thesis consists of ten short stories that are structured, formatted and thematically aligned with the yamas and niyamas, the ten moral tenants of yoga philosophy. The yamas and niyamas are the first two limbs of Patinjali's eightfold path, or the path to enlightenment through yogic practices. The yamas account for five principles that guide ethical living and instruct followers on how to interact with others and the world. The yamas consist of: ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (non-stealing), brahmacharya (non-excess), and aparigraha (non-possessiveness). The niyamas are guidelines for personal practices that relate to, develop, and enhance one's relationship with self. The niyamas are: saucha (purity), santosha (contentment), tapas (self-discipline), svadhyaya (self-study), and ishvara prandihana (surrender). Each story in this collection loosely correlates with and comments on its assigned yama or niyama. As a collection, the stories function as glimpses of being—fractal pieces of life from inside differing existential or personal crises. The characters face moral, personal and spiritual dilemmas, often grappling with ghosts from the past, striving to make sense of what is through varying tools and coping mechanisms. The highest goal for this thesis is to act as commentary on the modern condition by using the spiritual and existential lens to diagnose and categorize modern afflictions. Some characters reach towards being—towards harmony or enlightenment—as dressing for their wounds. Others merely grapple with their conditions of dis-ease. Still others contribute to, and worsen, the disharmony. Guided by ten moral principles, these stories stand alone and work together to lead readers into the depths of varying states of being, while shedding light on modernity's inherent conflict with ancient spiritual practices.

Committee: Imad Rahman MFA (Committee Chair); Caryl Pagel MFA (Committee Member); Christopher Barzak MFA (Committee Member); David Lardner PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Language Arts; Literature; Modern Literature; Religion; Spirituality; Theology

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2016, Creative Writing/Fiction

Warp and Woof is a story collection primarily governed by non-linear, woven story forms. My interest in forms that draw attention to the artifice of story is inherently tied to a love for the oral tradition I grew up with in rural Pennsylvania and, more broadly, northern Appalachia. The way that stories told aloud wind and weave creates a kind of atmospheric cloud that's as much about the telling as it is the words themselves. In my study, woven story forms seem to best emulate that atmosphere. What's more, Warp and Woof's subjects and characters are tied to the same region as its forms, making this as much a collection of place as it is one of structural experimentation. Here are hills, forests, small farms, and animals; dirt tracks, and Sunday School, 4-H, and dogs chained long in kennels. The characters at the center of the stories that make up Warp and Woof are necessarily struggling in search of a personal narrative, a metaphor. The weaving of different times, voices, and points of view provides the reader with a system of symbols for understanding this search on a built-in, experiential level, even if the characters never find what they're looking for.

Committee: Wendell Mayo Dr. (Advisor); Lawrence Coates Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Cleveland State University, 2015, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

The stories contained herein explore a mythologized, fabled, American Heartland. American as in post-9/11 fear and discomfort, guns, television, consumerism, and self-image. Heartland as in place, society, family, and containment. Each story is connected in some way: recurring characters, words, language, themes, and place. Each story works to further a mythology of ordinary. The you and the me of us and of this: ours.

Committee: Imad Rahman MFA (Committee Chair); Christopher Barzak MFA (Committee Member); Caryl Pagel MFA (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; 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

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2014, English (Arts and Sciences)

This thesis is a collection of nine short stories reflecting upon Appalachia from a contemporary feminist Appalachian writer. While the setting of the collection is Southern Ohio, the characters are not limited to an ultimate place of being and neither are the characters. Told through the eyes of a young woman searching for her biological mother, the stories are written with Appalachian story-telling heritage, parable qualities, unexpected endings, and genuine dialect. Many of the characters are faced with moral dilemmas that cause them to think about what family, love, abandonment, oppression, joy, and identity are truly about. A central theme making the stories cohesive is a set of storage units and the contents each unit holds, much like our minds and the memories we choose to discard or keep.

Committee: Connor Joan (Advisor); O'Keeffe Patrick (Committee Member); LeMay Eric (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Ethics; Families and Family Life; Fine Arts; Folklore; Womens Studies

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2013, English

This linked short story collection explores the concept of utilizing the genre of fiction to tell a true story. These nine stories all feature a single narrator-character, known simply as Nick, who interrogates his own past through the art of writing. The collection challenges the notions of conventional narrative tradition in terms of both its composition and its various styles of narration. In addition to their concern with fiction's ability to capture greater truths, these stories also investigate the themes of memory, trauma, and the subjective nature of reality, as well as the social and societal ramifications of working class life and the physical and psychological consequences of labor. Finally, the collection examines the ways in which place and region work towards the construction of persona.

Committee: Joseph Bates Dr. (Advisor); Margaret Luongo Professor (Committee Member); Kay Sloan Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; 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

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2012, Creative Writing/Fiction

These nine stories and the first chapter of a novella are linked by non-linear narrative styles. A majority of the fiction, in the collection, is in a way an exploration of families in the traditional and non-traditional sense. A family can be one a character is born in, has acquired, is forced to belong to, finds themselves thrown together with etc. In all the stories there is a great deal of looking backwards and looking forward. Other motifs that play an important role include trauma, ritualized violence, the exploration of sexual identities, the role of religion, social class, caste, fate and food.

Committee: Lawrence Coates PhD (Advisor); Michael Czyzniejewski (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2010, Creative Writing/Fiction

This thesis presents a collection of short stories united by the common theme of loss, and how human beings cope with the various permutations of grief that each stage of life can bring. As such, the collection moves from stories of childhood, to adulthood, and finally, to parenthood. Though the stories are not linked by common characters or settings, they share an overarching progression from childhood to parenthood, and the losses that human beings may meet along the way. In addition to the theme of loss, the collection explores a variety of other themes and subjects, including communication, violence, caretaking, security, masculinity, femininity, vulnerability, and care of the earth. Aside from initiation into the possible losses of each life stage, the collection also explores the possibilities for hope, magic and transcendence within the human experience.

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