Francisco's Flowers Kristopher Andrew Paul University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected]

University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2016-01-01 Francisco's Flowers Kristopher Andrew Paul University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Paul, Kristopher Andrew, "Francisco's Flowers" (2016). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 721. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/721 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FRANCISCO’S FLOWERS KRISTOPHER A. PAUL Master’s Program in Creative Writing APPROVED: ——————————————————- Daniel Chacòn, MFA, Chair —————————————————— Elizabeth Scheid, MFA ——————————————————- Tim Hernandez, MFA —————————————————— Linnea Alexander, ________________________________ Charles H. Ambler, Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School FRANCISCO’S FLOWERS By KRISTOPHER A. PAUL, B.A. ENGLISH FRANCISCO’S FLOWERS Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts Department of Creative Writing THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO December 2016 Acknowledgements Any accomplishment worthy of great praise cannot be done easily on one’s own. There- fore it is only right that those who worked behind the scenes, in support of great efforts should be given their due respects. First, I would not be anywhere that I am without my amazing, encouraging, and support- ive wife, Heather, without whom none of my greatest achievements would have ever been at- tempted in the first place. My family has been nothing but the most solid rock upon which I was able to stand on. There are also my professors in the UTEP Online Master of Fine Arts program, all of whom have been instrumental in furthering my understanding of the Literature Arts and the pow- er of the written word, especially Prof. Daniel Chacòn, Prof. Tim Hernandez, and my Thesis Di- rector, Prof. Liz Scheid, who most graciously aided me in the focus of my final thesis project. !iii Kristopher Paul Thesis II Sheid 11/13/2016 Preface to Francisco’s Flowers I come from a family of storytellers. My grandfather told stories. Some were his own, some came from others, but he always told them with an enthusiasm that was entrancing. My grandmother often called him chismoso, he was always talking about other people in the neigh- borhood, telling their stories, finding ways to connect them to others, and bring them back around to how those events affected him, or someone in the family. The stories ranged from him milking cows, in the tiny hamlet of Grangeville, Ca., as a young kid during the Great Depression— for a single biscuit with homemade butter, to crawling through the jungles of Papua New Guinea in the fight against the Japanese in World War II, to him seeing strange ghostly lights at night— he swore it was the Cucuy— while irrigating the fields of the Central San Joaquin Valley. I can’t even remember how many times he recounted the time where he, at 14, along with his brothers got the rooster drunk by soaking a loaf of bread with wine and feeding it to him. He laughed so hard when he described how it tried to walk only to fall over every single time, reminding us that if we had only been there to see it. I come from a mixed race family. On the surface, I appear to be a white person. I have light skin. I speak English, primarily. I hold an English degree from a California State University. !iv My name is that of a mixed Christian/Saxon origin. But, my mother’s side, in the most simplistic terms, is Mexican American, but no history is as simple as that, the Mexican peoples are them- selves a result of the European races mixing with the indigenous natives, my maternal grandfather was descended from Tarascan First Nations in Central Mexico. A more accurate term, or cat- egory, would be Chicano. Although my family’s direct connection to Mexico has been many generations removed, it was never really clear because the moving of the borders when territories were annexed by the United States, the language, and language patterns were held intact over the journey through time and space. My mother spoke nothing but Spanish as her first language despite both of her parents being bilingual, later speaking mostly English with family. This Spanish only period lasted only until she was to be enrolled in public school. My father’s family namesake were among the earliest settlers in the new Kentucky Terri- tory, and remained there until my father’s Navy enlistment took him to the West Coast. His sole language was English. Beyond the fact that the earliest known Paul, was born in Kentucky in 1826 and served in the Kentucky 10th cavalry regiment in the Civil War, not much more is known other than the names of his successors. I live in multiple worlds. I code switch when the setting calls for it. I can speak the acad- emic language of education, the slang of the 80’s and 90’s, a bit of Spanish, and the written word. The culmination of this experience has brought me a somewhat unique lens on the world. I see the overlapping of paths, the crossing of cultures, the mixing of language, and the interactions that lead to these phenomena with a consciousness about them that many may take for granted. !v Robert B. Kaplan wrote an article titled Cultural Thought Patterns in Inter-Cultural Edu- cation, and in this article he published a chart that diagrams the speech patterns in regard to the cultural origin. The English pattern is represented by a straight line that moves from the beginning of a narrative and proceeds directly to the end. There is no deviation from the main idea of the narrative. A simple example would be something like, “I went to the store and bought some shoes that were on sale.” The Romance language pattern differs from the English in that it wanders from point to point in a general narrative, while eventually wandering its way to the final point of the conver- sation. A simple example for this pattern would be something like, “I went to the store to get some shoes, while I was there though, I saw your cousin, you know the one that nobody likes, she was also shopping for some shoes, I found some on sale.” These are the two patterns that I am most concerned with. The English and Romance patterns are the most interesting to me because it is in these two categories that I have learned to !vi operate in a blended fashion. While I speak, read, and write in English, I have learned to follow patterns more akin to the wandering Romance pattern. The expression “Time is money,” attributed to Benjamin Franklin, is common in Ameri- can English. This saying rings true more often than not in the modern, service based, American capitalist economy. This idea that time is precious and is wisely spent investing in transactions that prove to be profitable has influenced the language to become very direct and to the point. This direct to the point occurrence can be frequently observed in everyday business transactions from ordering fast food to purchasing gas, that is if you still use cash and enter the actual establishment. “Can I have a number 4, medium with a diet?” “That’ll be $6.78 at the window.” Or, in the gas station situation, there’s the, “$6.78 on number 4.” “Number 4?” “Yeah, number 4.” These are not accurate representations of all small transactions across the United States, but they certainly are indicative of many that happen frequently on an everyday basis. There are other cultures where, though a business transaction may be at the heart of the interaction, it is customary to greet one with genuine attention to their situation before conduct- ing the business transaction. Many of the details of day to day life are often lost in the grander scheme of the universe. It is easy to overlook the potential impact that can be created in the small interactions with oth- !vii ers, in many cases they are interactions that may seem inconsequential due to the lack of intima- cy in many of the relationships that come and go in passing. These small interactions are the perfect setting for the genres of short stories and flash fiction. The formats allow small scenes to unfold and reveal a small slice of the world in the small spaces that they are allowed by the structure of the genre, but there is sparingly little, to absolutely no context for these small stand alone pieces. While worthy of their merit in their own rights, they have a way of leaving out other parts of the story that hold the potential to reflect a more complete and truer version of reality. A reality where the interactions catalyzed by our decisions inevitably influence the decisions of others, causing a rippling effect more commonly known as the butterfly effect. While chaos theory, and the idea that even the smallest change in conditions hold the potential to create far reaching unintended effects had been developed some years before its publi- cation, Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” is the source credited with the term where idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wings could set the conditions for a catastrophic event such as a tor- nado in some distant land.

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