The Surviving Parties
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THE SURVIVING PARTIES A THESIS IN Creative Writing and Media Arts Presented to the Faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF FINE ARTS by BENEDICT E. BIERSMITH Columbia College, 2007 Kansas City, Missouri 2017 © 2017 BENEDICT E. BIERSMITH ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE SURVIVING PARTIES Benedict E. Biersmith, Candidate for the Master of Fine Arts Degree University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2017\ ABSTRACT This thesis is a collection of short stories that were written and re-written between my time as an undergraduate at Columbia College and my time as a Graduate Student at UMKC. These stories were picked out from many fictional works because they each present a youthful perspective through a unique lens. These stories are meant to offer different points of view from protagonists who are all on their way somewhere, for better or worse. The goal of this thesis was to take these budding protagonists and bundle them together into some sort of cohesive unit. The characters in these stories all struggle with family members, substances and authority figures who offer which gives them each an individualized take on the world around them. There is a sense of suburban dread that inhabits a lot of the peace, and I several of these characters want nothing more than to break out of their current setting. What ultimately unites these characters though, none of whom will ever meet one another, is their struggle to exist in places where they are told they cannot exist. This collection is about fitting into a world that doesn’t want you, and how no one’s past can dictate anyone else’s future. iii APPROVAL PAGE The faculty listed below, appointed by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences have examined a thesis titled “The Survival Parties,” presented by Benedict E. Biersmith, Candidate for the Master of Fine Arts degree, and certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance. Supervisory Committee Michael Pritchett, Committee Chair Department of English Hadara Bar-Nadav Department of English John Barton Department of English iv Table of Contents ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. iii Critical Introduction ................................................................................................................... vi Defcon Five ................................................................................................................................ 1 Pogo.......................................................................................................................................... 15 The Harpy and The Shrew ......................................................................................................... 32 Ten Sleep .................................................................................................................................. 46 Mal Content and the Birds at No-Name Lake ............................................................................ 55 Evening Eyes ............................................................................................................................ 73 The Ice Cream King .................................................................................................................. 85 Sylvia ...................................................................................................................................... 103 Free Lunch .............................................................................................................................. 112 Black Buffalo .......................................................................................................................... 119 VITA ...................................................................................................................................... 165 v Critical Introduction At the beginning of the summer of 2016, I began my journey to create this thesis. The first hurdle I could see was that I had no idea what I would be writing about. This is almost always the trouble with designing works of fiction, and though I have plenty of tricks that can inspire writing, I decided I would try to use my time to simply write, rather than extensively plan. A friend who completed the program last year gave me some good advice, “don’t overthink it.” Of course, this is almost always good advice, because the moment you’ve overdone anything, it’s usually ruined. So, I decided to proceed with casual caution. As the fall semester began, I met Professor Pritchett, my thesis advisor. I admitted to him at the time that while I had a lot of material to offer, I was not quite sure what I wanted my thesis to be yet or if any of the material was good enough. I gave him all my nonfiction and fiction work that I had at the time. It was somewhere around ninety pages of material, I believe. When we met again, Professor Pritchett gave me extensive edits and advice on the fiction and nonfiction pieces I had turned in, but also informed me that a lot of the material would need some work if it were to be included. At that point, I took a step back and looked at everything I had written in the last nine months. While I cherished my nonfiction for its personality, I also knew that it was a new field for me. I decided to discard most of the nonfiction and focus on a mostly fictional thesis. I started to separate the art forms a little more, and I remembered that I’d been to a similar crossing once before. One night in 2003, as struggling Poetry major in Chicago, I decided to visit a friend. I traveled north forty minutes from my apartment in sheets of pure white blizzard to Rogers Park to sip some whiskey with him. I sat and told him about my woes with my art form at the time. vi “I just don’t think I’m any good,” I said. “So…change it,” he said. The words eased me with their simplicity, and I started to look around a little more. I think that was when I began to open up to what was around me. I would ask myself, ‘What do you really love about language?’ I knew I loved words on a fundamental level. Words were the key to happiness, health and love. Words were always going to be there. Words are everlasting. We can continually create with words. I just didn’t know what words to put in what order or why. My friend gave me a very important book that night. “You like any sad bastard writing?” he asked. “I like Kerouac,” I said. “This is Carver,” he said, taking a swig, “he’s a real sad bastard.” The cover said, “Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Stories,” and had a drawing of a woman smoking on a bed. I spent the train ride home entranced. The twisting white tornados outside the L car were like faint, whispering ghosts to me. I couldn’t be bothered. I had never truly considered such a work as what I was consuming that evening. Such a perfect collection of short stories. A short story. Each piece of the puzzle had individual meaning as well as to the greater whole. The writing was so simple, beautiful and menacing all at once. Characters seemed like sketches that were imagined so purely that there was no way they couldn’t really exist. Sure, its fiction to us readers, but Carver wrote them so real that they seemed to be tangible. This is what I wanted to do. Make a collection of short stories, plain and simple. I changed my major to Fiction Writing in the fall of 2004 and I have never looked back. My writing, however, would not directly benefit from my introduction into the wonderful world of fiction. I don’t feel that I’ve become a decent writer until the last year or so. I believe vii this to be the sole work of the professors I’ve had here at UMKC for the past three years and the myriad of literary knowledge I have attained at their hands. When I decided back in the late fall of ’16 to make this an entirely fictional thesis, I went full force into my work. I knew that the clock was ticking. When revising the work, I had turned in to Professor Pritchett for this thesis, I looked specifically at what was missing. The story “Defcon Five,” was written for my springtime workshop class. The draft I turned into Professor Pritchett dealt with a mentally ill, alcoholic protagonist in a crumbling marriage with two imaginary friends or voices who tend to guide his decision-making process. The draft contained a lot of creative and vivid language to describe the narrator’s slow descent into madness at the hands of himself, but the voices were too disembodied to seem real. I began by going through and examining every line of dialogue either voice had. For Horace, I would work on sketching more of a personality into his voice by adding better descriptors like “hoarse chuckle” and “vile echo,’ (1). For the other voice, Mary Frances, I added ‘braced teeth, sloshing every ’s.’ (1). These small edits give both characters a simultaneously menacing and childlike quality. As I continued to edit, I began to focus more on the disembodied voices as the wheels of the story, each one playfully indicating what the main character should be doing. In true Carver fashion, I wanted the piece to look like change could be possible for the protagonist, but it’s not happening on this particular night. My workshop found this ending confusing, but when I asked Professor Pritchett. “So, change it,” he said, “…if you want.” I thought the ending worked well as it was, so I left it but I included the line “I felt the sleeping birds and