• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Among the Stars and Other Stories A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts Logan Scott Wells May 2018 © 2018 Logan Scott Wells. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Among the Stars and Other Stories by LOGAN SCOTT WELLS has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Patrick O’Keeffe Associate Professor of Creative Writing Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 Abstract WELLS, LOGAN S., M.A., May 2018, English Among the Stars and Other Stories Director of Thesis: Patrick O’Keeffe Two brothers dream of being astronauts. A man wakes up to read his own obituary in the newspaper. A failed country musician seeks to reconnect with his estranged daughter, and a woman deals with the aftermath of her husband’s alien abduction. In these five stories of cosmic happenings and intimate relations, characters seek to control their lives—both past, present, and future. They hide from their guilt and search for notoriety. They distort reality to fit their needs and learn too late that the universe does not answer to yearning. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ..................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 5 Among the Stars ...................................................................................................... 19 Abduction ................................................................................................................ 27 The Obituary of Daniel Sebastian Potter .................................................................. 55 Vox County Case Review Board: Exhibit A............................................................. 71 Four Chords and the Truth ....................................................................................... 90 5 Introduction Saunders-esque In his introduction to George Saunders’s Civilwarland in Bad Decline, author Joshua Ferris claims that “while Saunders does satirize, or, in other words, render the real absurd, he also carefully and lovingly and artfully renders the absurd real” (xiv). Saunders is not then, Ferris says, “a satirist in the early style of Mark Twain.” Rather, he is “the natural heir to both Poe and Melville…[speaking] with Whitman’s original unchecked energy…as close to the nineteenth century as he is to the twenty-first.” Saunders, in short, is no one but himself, “an entirely autonomous product of his own devising” (xii-xiv). I first encountered the work of George Saunders about a year and a half ago after the first story I ever turned in for fiction workshop at Ohio University received the stamp of ‘Saunder-esque’ by a few of my classmates. I was almost brand new to the world of creative writing and didn’t recognize the workshop speak for “this story is weird as hell, and, in the hands of someone like Saunders, it might actually be pulled off, though we have no idea what you’re doing.” So that night I read “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” on The New Yorker’s website and thought to myself, hot damn, Logan, they think you’re as good as this guy. I was struck by the clarity of Saunders’s prose, his absurdist rendering of a middle class geniality I had grown up a part of. Not only did he capture the repressed lives of suburban America that I was so familiar with, but did so in a way that seemed wholly true despite (I might say because of) its audacity. 6 I set out, then, to be the best Saunders I could be—to write a vision of stunted middle-class America so dark and demented and ferociously funny that I too might be the subject of someone’s critical intro one day. There was only one tiny problem with that plan—my vision sucked. Or rather, I sucked, not as a writer, but as a stand in for one of the most admired contemporary writers in all of literature. The more I read of Saunders’s work, the more I tried to copy it, the more I realized that I was not, in fact, George Saunders. So where did I turn? You guessed it. In his author’s note to Civilwarland, Saunders cautions against the very kind of literary imitation I was attempting, saying that a writer must “tear down the scrim” holding back his or her natural ability of voice (189). Failure to do so, he claims, results in a “disclarifying clapmuddle”—one that might pass in MFA workshops (if only because no one wants to admit they didn’t ‘get’ your story), but produces no pleasure or entertainment or greater insight/purpose for your reader (188). And so, I decided to take Saunders’s advice and blaze my own path—one still inspired by his voice but not beholden to it as I had been before. Much of my work, then, was influenced by his absurdist realism, though just as much took lessons from his precision and empathy of character. He has said before that “a book [or story] doesn’t have to do everything…it just has to do something,” and I took that message to heart (198). The stories that appear in the following pages are trying to do exactly that. What “something” that is varies from story to story, though I do hope I’ve begun to harness my own vision. To me, it is one of desperate yearning, of a desire to control one’s fate. It is 7 not divorced from the middle-class absurdity I fell in love with in Saunders, but that is not, by and large, its focus. Instead, I’ve cast a wider net, one that reaches out to many corners of life (and beyond), to understand the necessary delusion that takes place when our classmates call our work ‘Saunders-esque.’ Levels of Unreality Picture a boy. He’s a little shrimpy looking, wears glasses and has crooked teeth. This boy is 11 years old—11 and a half, we’ll say. He has just stepped off the bus from a long day at school where Timmy Thompson, the playground bully, has shoved his head into a puddle again. The boy hates Timmy Thompson, wishes he would go fall in a hole. He is jealous that Timmy gets to kiss Suzy Mitchell behind the vending machines at lunch. The boy likes Suzy Mitchell, told her so in a note last week that she promptly threw away while her friends giggled in his direction. He sometimes thinks that when he hits puberty—the teachers all showed “the movie” before Christmas break, so the boy knows all about what happens when his testosterone kicks into high gear—that he will grow big and strong and have a thin little mustache. Suzy will start to take notice of him, then, and Timmy Thompson will stop grabbing his crotch at the boy for fear of being pummeled to death. He envisions all of this as he walks upstairs and lies on his bed to stare at the ceiling. His mother has still has not taken down the glow-in-the-dark night- light stickers even though she said she would. They’re childish, the boy thinks, something a baby would have. He stands on the mattress but is not tall enough to reach them. He gets a box out of his closet and sets that on top of the bed too. He can just barely start 8 scraping at the edge of the little plastic pieces. They fall to the floor like little shooting stars, and the boy grows taller with every one. This is the boy’s reality now. He has created a life that does not exist because he is unhappy with the one he is living. He is not alone in this act—the only reason Timmy Thompson bullies him so much is because he has a crush on the boy, and if the truck- driving, gun-toting Mr. Thompson ever found out about it, he would do a lot worse than shove Timmy’s head in a puddle. In both cases, these boys have constructed an unreality based on expectations from a multitude of sources. The boy sees Timmy Thompson as the epitome of masculinity and projects that template onto himself. Timmy, meanwhile, is influenced by the societal expectations of sexuality that the boy perpetuates by striving to achieve them. And both boys are affected by Suzy Mitchell’s presence as a popular social figure in their world of elementary grade school. Suffice it to say that the boy’s construction of unreality is based on a separation between expectations and reality. That is, because the boy cannot really grow up faster than he would like—and because he is unlikely to actually become the muscle-clad Fabio that he anticipates—it is easier for him to manipulate the reality around him so that it meets the various expectations at play. As a fiction writer, I believe every story and every character is a byproduct of this separation. Some accept it and move on with their lives. We might call them happy characters. We might also call them very boring to read about, because the flip side are characters who, like the boy, are unwilling or unable to accept the separation between 9 their expectations and reality. They act against it then—dramatize, if you will—and the result is a conflict and fullness to the world that creates compelling change. When a character like the boy constructs his unreality, there is a second life that is born on the page. It is neither real nor unreal, and it can manifest itself as a simple determination or utter delusion. In every story, there are layers of this unreality, and they must often be stripped away for the characters to complete an emotional arc. What I’m interested in is the types of layers that can be applied to fiction.

Load more

  107

Copy Link