Shrapnel is an exploration through memory. It’s a work that bends and twists upon itself and, as memory often does, lands within worlds and experiences only for a moment before jumping to the next story or thought. This text is a hybrid work that doesn’t fit neatly within any specific...
Scenes from the Tarot is a novella that explores the desire to control time. The narrator, Truth Aiken, spurred by fear of her own death, recounts the story of her sister Beauty's death and its effects on Truth's highly unusual family. Proceeding backwards through time, Truth describes her tumultuous relationships...
The purpose of this thesis was to create a sustained piece of fiction that both represented my growth as a writer throughout my time at Oregon State University, and wove together a mixture of imagination, language, and creativity. My hope was to write a novella that incorporated and drew from...
Down the road is a collection of short stories written in the post-Stonewall tradition of gay men's literature, which has focused on works that reflect gay experience and specifically autobiographical fiction; a desire to write for gay readers without having to explain circumstances or points of view to readers unfamiliar...
Set in the dryland farming country of Eastern Oregon in the late 1950's, this novel follows a year and a half in the life of a young girl as she comes of age. A water rights dispute, the plight of nearby ranchers, disappointments in her own family and a harrowing...
You Stay Here is the beginning of a novel that centers on the notion of family, community, and the expectations that drive our interactions within these circles. The novel tells the story of brothers Mills and Nance O'Malley as they interact with their parents, Richard and Margaret. The brothers own...
Hamilton Falls is a screenplay about a young attorney who
returns home from WWII, is appointed District Attorney,
and begins investigating an old murder. In the course of
the investigation, he discovers that his mentor, the
former district attorney, may have been the murderer.
The story follows the film noir...
This collection of stories explores moments of stillness in human relationships: moments during an argument when there is nothing to say, moments of quiet contemplation which precedes inevitable--and often unwelcome--life changes, moments of frustration, confusion, despair, and grace. In the chaotic lives of these characters, stillness is neither tranquil nor...
The Long House explores belonging and commitment. Jennifer Hawley, an American graduate student in linguistic anthropology, arrives in the early 1990s in Long Awan, a Dayak village in the remote highlands of Borneo. Her research concerns oral history among Punan families, traditionally nomadic, which have recently decided to settle in...
Living by the Wayside and Other Stories explores the tension between control and dependence and how that tension affects the ability to sustain intimate relationships. These are stories about women who struggle for independence, but experience the cost of self-rule as isolation. Living by the Wayside and Other Stories focuses...
In 7 composite stories--shifting from the roads of Southern Colorado neighborhoods, the fields and unpaved roads of Northern New Mexico, and the streets of Culver City, California--Penitence follows Relles Ortiz and the bleak peripheral existence of the voiceless suburban people living in disorder and disorientation within the harshness of their...
Ellis, a booming mid-sized town in California's Central Valley, is packed with farmers and commuters, and plagued with a dwindling sense of itself and its history. Set against the backdrop of a failed murder-suicide, a secret affair and a wealthy local mogul's attempt to develop the town into something it's...
The thesis is the first third of a novel entitled Steelhead. The story takes place in and around a small southern Oregon town in the summer of 1967. The narrator, eighteen-year-old hot-rodding Emil Reese, discovers hippies swimming naked in the river near his house. The hippies, newly arrived from San...
The Yogiebogeybox is a novel-in-stories. This novel explores spiritual transcendence and the connection of art to that spiritual journey. A variety of points of view are employed in the narrative in order to depict the journey of the protagonist, Ant Malo, through this journey. Some of the narrative threads are...
This thesis is the first third of a novel in progress called Rose, Thou Art Sick. In the selection, Rose loses her mother in a freak accident in Boston, is threatened by her evil uncle Charlie, and packs up and moves to Kansas to live with her father, whom she...
The purpose of this document is to display a portion of the work I have completed over the last two years. The Athlete is the recently written opening to a novel of the same name. I've decided not to excerpt a longer section of the novel because the novel isn't...
This thesis, a collection of short fiction, attempts to surface some of the discrepancy between inner and outer lives, between who these characters want to be and who they've become, between the lives they might have had and those they've chosen because the former are too chancy and the latter...
A collection of short stories about the Gardner family, spanning several generations, but focusing on the children of Len and Laura Gardner, Brooke, the second oldest, in particular. Set primarily in Utah, the collection tells the story of family members' struggles with one another, with their religious faith, and with...
There Were Bears and Rumors of Bears is a collection of stories that explores spiritual injury and recovery using a variety of interior and exterior narrative approaches to depict the profane and sacred, the mundane and non-ordinary, aspects of experience. In each story, the characters encounter situations in the physical...
Comic Toast is a novel depicting a transition period in the life of the comic book artist character, Monica Holliday. This document includes a prologue, which provides details of a trauma in Monica's distant past, in order to inform Monica's adult reactions to the situations she finds herself entangled in....