Northwest of Normal is the first part of a novel that takes place along an imaginary Oregon river called the Ipsyniho. The story grows from valley’s fertile loam like a blackberry vine, entangling a group of locals—fly fishing guides and midwives, artists and dope growers—just as a posse of wealthy...
This collection of six individual writings, both fiction and creative non-fiction, is an exploration in narrative first-person voices and multiple themes, such as the loss of innocence, modernization versus traditions/myths, the California Central Valley, death, creativity, language, change, and the pressures of the future. Though abstractly linked at times, these...
These stories are an attempt to give a distinct literary voice to the people and places of rural Southern Indiana. They also strive to deal with certain elements indigenous to that region, some of which can be described generally as the tension between modernization and tradition, family and marriage as...
Modern Apostles actively attempts to blur the line between academic scholarship and narrative fiction for the purpose of satirizing the social and the political assumptions of its contemporary moment. By appropriating the loudest voices in dominant American culture, the inter-textual narratives (1) call attention to the voices that go unheard,...
Kiddie Pool is a collection of eight short stories dealing in general terms with themes of culpability and control. The characters in the stories have their share of problems—car accidents, domestic violence, manic depression, obesity, unexpected deaths, truth or dare, religious crises—but they are resilient souls who keep on keeping...
Vladena Aleksandra Dmitriev, in her collection of fiction and nonfiction The Mercurial: Stories and Essays, examines the conflicts inherent in language, whether in her own experiences as a non-English speaking immigrant from the Soviet Union to the submersed anger and resentment that emerges quietly in disintegrating relationships. What unites these...
In this collection of linked stories, four characters navigate space between selves they’ve been and those to come. Alice must invent an autonomous identity after her husband dies in a bike crash. As she casts about to populate a new life, a geographer, a violinist, and a clarinetist emerge at...
The Modern era, roughly the time between 1860-1930, brought about a significant restructuring of artistic mediums. From the canvas to the page, artists of the twentieth century turned towards collaboration as a means by which they could reconfigure their works. Painters, writers, and dancers, borrowed aesthetic techniques from one another...
This thesis is the first third of a coming of age novel called i. In this selection the central character, Bea Bouvier, prepares to see her estranged mother on a cruise ship to the Bahamas. She hopes her parents will decide to reunite as a family, though it becomes increasingly...
These essays are an attempt to rebuild memories that explore the nature of work and family. They explore how work knocks against the joints of the body and against the joints between family members, and, as time passes, how the next generation inherits the family line of work only to...