We Hereby Recommend That the Thesis of Trevor Dawson Entitled I Feel

We hereby recommend that the thesis of Trevor Dawson entitled I Feel Gone be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. __________________________________________ Director, Sarah Shotland, MFA __________________________________________ Reader, Ben Gwin, MFA ___________________________________________ Reader, Sheila Squillante, MFA I FEEL GONE A Thesis in Fiction Writing By Trevor Dawson Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts Chatham University April 2019 ii Special Thanks There are so many people responsible for the existence of this manuscript that sometimes I don’t even think I wrote it myself. We’ll start with my wonderful thesis board. Ben — you’re the writer I want to be when I grow up. Sheila — I have rarely met anyone with your compassion and warmth. Sarah — where to start? Without exaggeration, I can say that this manuscript literally would not exist if you weren’t my director. You talked me down from so many ledges, and in the end helped me produce something I’m actually proud of. To all three of you, I want to say how inadequate the words “thank you” are in print, but I’ll still say: thank you. There are a few other professors I need to mention: Marc Nieson, Dr. Sheryl St. Germain, Teague Bohlen, Drew Bixby, Dr. Nicky Beer, Dr. Joanna Luloff. It was an honor to work with all of you. Marc, thanks in particular for making us write so many hundred-word stories. “The Lord of Dragon Island” is one of my favorites. Amanda Berney — somehow, during all this, you kept me sane. That’s no mean feat. Let’s hope I can stay that way. To Alyssa Guelcher, Lily Wasserman, Mel DeStefano, and Dmitra Inteuse- Gideon — you four are better friends than I deserve. Thank you for making me feel less alone. I also need to thank Matt Merendo, who assigned us the flash prompt that became “The River Troll.” Thank you to Stuart Hunt, who assigned the flash prompt that became “Me and My AnimaTron.” Rest in peace, man. I hope you’ve found comfort wherever you are. Obviously, thank you to Bob. iii To Pa and Papa Rick — I really wish you could read this. To my parents, Lisa and Dave. Again I find myself lost for words. For as long as I can remember, you have both nurtured and supported my love of writing, and I know sometimes (okay, a lot of the time) I was a big pain in the ass about it. Writing is a pain in the ass, I don’t know what to tell you. But I never doubted that you believed in me. This isn’t exactly a lucrative field, but you always encouraged me to follow my heart, and I hope I can make you proud. Gamma — good lord, what would I do without you. Even at my lowest moments, the sheer joy in your voice can pick me up. You told me once that my stories scare you, so come to me and I’ll tell you which ones here you should absolutely avoid. Caleb — thanks for always being so encouraging, for being genuinely happy for me, and for making sure I stuck to what I came out here to do. You’re not just a good brother; you’re a pretty damn good friend. Miles, Casey, Mikey — sorry I’ve been gone so long. I might have left California, but I never felt as though I left you. I love you guys. To Sammi Toner, my little bird — I love you more every single day. Meeting you was the best surprise of my life, and falling in love with you was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. iv Acknowledgements To Cheryl Bannes and the New York Mills Cultural Center, where I was the Artist in Residence in February 2019. Thank you, Cheryl, for believing in my project, and for giving me space to fall in love with words again. I needed it, and I think the stories I wrote during my two frigid weeks in Minnesota might be the best work I’ve ever produced. Thank you to Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, which published “My Father’s Monsters” in June 2018. v Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... vii The Lord of Dragon Island ................................................................................................. 1 A Sad and Lonesome Day ................................................................................................... 2 In the Lake ........................................................................................................................ 21 Me and My AnimaTron .................................................................................................... 40 The Gunfighter .................................................................................................................. 43 My Father's Monsters ........................................................................................................ 52 1-Up .................................................................................................................................. 58 Remains............................................................................................................................. 60 As Soon as the Dark Clouds Lift ...................................................................................... 71 The River Troll ................................................................................................................. 80 It’s Rough Out There ........................................................................................................ 84 The Lord Byron Thing ...................................................................................................... 99 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 128 vi Introduction There is a story, almost certainly apocryphal, of an unnamed sculptor being asked how he carved an elephant out of a hunk of marble. “Simple,” the sculptor replied. “You just chisel away at anything that doesn’t look like an elephant.” That story is indicative of the way in which I wrote my thesis, entitled I Feel Gone — although I can assure you, I had a much more difficult time carving my elephant than did the sculptor. I Feel Gone is a collection of twelve stories, four of which act as interstitial pieces of flash fiction, in the style of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time. The stories are arranged in sections I refer to as the triplets. I use the word “triplet” in both a musical and a familial sense. I want these four sections to act in concert, like a trio of siblings or music notes, but I also want them, when viewed from afar, to be part of a cohesive whole. It is for this reason that the sections of the book are titled “Beat 1,” “Beat 2,” and so on. They are fitted into subcategories, all of which speak to the central theme of the book: obsession. In I Feel Gone, I present characters dealing with different kinds of obsession, and the dehumanizing effect it can have on people. Here you will see a man struggling against a new impulse towards necrophilia; a man who wants to set off fireworks in a living room that may or may not be his; a detachment of Confederate soldiers destroying themselves on a mission that turns out to be purposeless; a woman going to a party and transforming into the concept of storytelling itself; even a man so fixated on the idea of ruling an island of Komodo dragons that he loses his wife, children, cat, and mind in the process. As a writer, I take inspiration from a multitude of sources. Film, for instance, is hugely important to me, and I try to write with a cinematic eye. In “The Lord Byron vii Thing,” I looked to Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017) and David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017) for inspiration, and tried to replicate those films’ feelings of chaos, loss, and solitude. Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft”(2001) was a big part of my process as well; three of the stories found here are ekphrastic responses to songs from that album (one of them, “A Sad and Lonesome Day,” also draws from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; another, “It’s Rough Out There,” was written with the films of the Coen brothers in mind, specifically the flowery, antiquated dialogue found in True Grit [2010] and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs [2018]). As far as writers go, my biggest influences are Stephen King, Raymond Carver, and George Saunders, all men I have in the past tried (unsuccessfully) to emulate stylistically. I was still carving my elephant. The main challenge of writing this thesis was not only discovering what it was about, but discovering what kind of writer I am. It’s one thing to be talented. That’s fine for an undergraduate program. But in a graduate program, you have to be talented and also purposeful. What does my writing say? Why am I saying it? What is the story about, and why am I the one to tell it? These are all questions I asked myself over and over. The book changed with each subsequent appraisal of myself and my work. I feel as though these questions deserve to be answered. What does my writing say? I want to show that loneliness is the human condition, that society makes no sense, that weirdness and oddity are not incompatible with humanity. That there is magic in the mundane and the splendid. Why am I saying it? Because I approach life, and writing, with a morbid sense of wonder. I look at a situation, or I think of a character, and I think of all the wonderful ways things can go spectacularly wrong. In certain stories I really twist the screws on my characters, to the point where even I don’t know how they’ll get viii out of it. Why am I the one to tell these stories? In a lot of ways, I feel that these characters are all shards of my personality. Tommy Mercer in “As Soon as the Dark Clouds Lift” just wants to go back to a time when everyone loved him. Alec Sutton in “My Father’s Monsters” wants to connect with his son, but can only do so through prevarication and tall tales. Abel Mackendrick in “The Gunfighter” is driven to a strange kind of violence, through an impulse that he recognizes but cannot comprehend. I Feel Gone is the fifth or sixth title for this work, and “obsession” is the third theme I have worked around. At first I wanted to write about illness, but found that I lacked the passion for it.

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