All My Sins by Craig Ryan A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Fine Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL May 2019 Copyright 2019 by Craig Ryan ii All My Sins by Craig Lee Ryan This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Andrew Furman, Department of English, and has been approved by all members of the supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. Andrew Furman, Ph.D. Thesi Advisor Eric L. Berlatsky, Ph.D. Chair, Department English ~ ~A? LA Michael J. }jidrswell, Ph.D. Dean, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters Apci\ 17, '2.019 Khaled Sobhan, Ph.D. Date Interim Dean, Graduate College 111 Acknowledgements The author wishes to express sincere gratitude to his committee members for all of their guidance and support, and special thanks to my advisor for his persistence, patience, and encouragement during the typing of this manuscript. The author is also grateful to the English Program faculty for all their faith. iv Abstract Author: Craig Ryan Title: All My Sins Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Andrew Furman Degree: Master of Fine Arts Year: 2019 All My Sins is a collection of short fiction. The stories feature characters from Florida struggling with family, sexuality, masculinity, ethics, and themselves. v Dedication I would like to dedicate this master’s thesis to my family who’ve given me all of my stories, and to the workshopers, professors, colleagues, and students who’ve given me the courage and intelligence to tell them All My Sins Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 The Master ................................................................................................................................ 6 Infinity..................................................................................................................................... 15 My Brother Sweet Joy ........................................................................................................... 27 King Zero ................................................................................................................................ 35 My First Driving Lesson ........................................................................................................ 49 All My Sins ............................................................................................................................. 64 vii Introduction We live in confusing and desolate times. I say that not out of jest or to make light of my situation, nor to justify to you, the reader, the absurdity of my thesis, which I do believe to be at least a little bit absurd (what great art is not a little absurd?) but to explain, right from the onset, what you’re in for, which is a series of stories that delve so deeply into my personal life and my personal thoughts as to (I hope) make us friends. My writing is always, inescapably autobiographical, and, in this sense, one may get the feeling, coming into this graduate level thesis, that I am a nonfiction writer, but I think that to be an oversimplification. No, this is not nonfiction, and, in fact, most of it could never have happened on this real world (although such a blanket statement is always up for debate). Rather, this is simply what I see when I close my eyes. I’m trying to make that stuff come alive on the page. Maybe that’s all any great writer (or aspiring great writer) does, or tries and fails to do. There’s nothing hopeful inside of me that makes me think that any of this succeeds in life—for we could debate on that word all our lives (the sweet irony!) but I do think that the heart beats in it occasionally with all my breath. I think it writhes—is that close enough? I think that my writing squirms, I think that it reaches. What I hope a piece of my writing may do before I die is grab, snatch, snare, bite, tear, and rip! But that’s neither here nor there. I write the people I love. My father, my mother, my brother, my friends (what few I have left!) my professors, my students and myself. Oh, I’m a great lover of myself, in 1 spite of the enormous insecurity, and the occasional nihilism. I write myself, in the great spectrum of myself that has existed since I was a little boy. It’s my belief that each piece is a little part of not just my own existence, but my own perspective, and it’s with that hope that I send these pieces your way, dear reader. For you see, a lot of this never happened. Or, if it happened, it happened after I wrote it (my brother, for example, in “Sweet Joy” was actually beaten up with a baseball bat, though that’d happen months after I initially submitted the piece to my first workshop in 2013). Or, it probably happened completely differently than I remember it (which is why I’m not entirely convinced I should ever be trusted with the label ‘nonfiction’ in my title. Then again, I’m not entirely sure I should be trusted even with a grocery list!) and thus I submit it, in tandem with stuff I feel comfortable calling ‘fiction.’ I write the working class, blue collar, edge of nowhere gritty surrealism that has been my experience these thirty years in South Florida. I no longer concern myself with questions like ‘truth.’ My truth is infinitely different from yours, and vice versa (Ralph Emerson: “There are no facts, there is only art.”) It’s my belief that every human on this planet carries with them a truth, incalculably different from day to day, and in the overarching narrative of their decisions there is something intrinsically unique about them—even those who’ve never contemplated a single introspective moment in their lives (perhaps more so in the unexamined life does this phenomena occur!) in that they’ve never had a moment to question their existence and thus have led something close to absolute purity: the monkish purity of the drone! Those who’ve given their lives over to hedonism, to self-sacrifice, to religion, to work, to money, to companionship! 2 I write about those people, because they are my people, the people I love most in the world. I can’t help it (can anybody truly help who they love?) that I love wanton reckless abandon. That the question of their lives being a farce never enters their heads just makes them that much more endearing. There’s something majestic in their pursuits. There’s something glorious in their achievements and in their failures. I’m speaking of course, again about my family. My terrible, broken, loving, kind, angry, vengeful, distraught, psychotic, enabling, tender, beautiful family. I could go on. Whoever escapes their past? I tell my students that fifty years from now they’ll still be caught, unwittingly at a grocery store, in line someday, bored out of their mind and staring at the back of somebody’s head and wham! There it’ll come. A memory from when they were five years old. The smell of somebody’s hair or scalp will do it. They’ll remember holding their father’s hand, and the way he smiled down at them, nudged them forward, and caught them with a little joke: “A little day-dreamer, aren’t you?” Really, it’s a combination of memory and fantasy that has crafted them together. I try to write with all of my enthusiasm, with all of my zest, with all of my heart and brain and groin and guts—everything intrinsically “Craig” so that the distinguishing of what actually happened and what I’ve made up is so interwoven that even I can’t distinguish the two apart anymore. That’s what I think a writer has to do to bring to life these blank pages. You’re a bit of a conjurer, a bit of a magician, a bit of a necromancer (if you’re one of those who believes that the past is gone forever) and a whole lot of showman. But which is better? Memory or imagination? That’s the question these three years during my MFA has kept bringing up (I never wrote a word of ‘nonfiction’ before this MFA). If I had to choose one, I’d choose imagination. Why? Because it’s your own. 3 Real life belongs to the world, real life belongs to the events and to the factual (as best as you can remember) real life belongs to those dry, drifting pages, which sit still as concrete, still as tombstones. But imagination has wings, has feathers, has stars and blood and beats and pulses and rages! A writer with imagination needs nothing else. Besides, people read to get at the secrets of events, not to get at the factual. People read to fall in love, to be swooned, to be swept off their feet and left stranded. People read—do you not—for escape, but also to be entrenched and entranced, and I’d argue that there’s nothing more powerful in the world—no great showman or politician, not great scientist—as there is who’s able to capture the imagination. And so I’ve drifted, during my MFA, into the realm of nonfiction, into writing my life as it actually happened. I don’t regret my decision by any means, because I think that the other thing a writer or an artist needs is to live without secrets or shame. A writer’s life is bared naked on the page, free and unencumbered. This often has drastic consequences (we are not a species that ever particularly trusts anyone who’s unencumbered—take a good look at any of your favorite artist’s lives, nor are we a species that’s ever particularly comfortable with ourselves, take a good look at what our favorite artists have done to themselves) but it is non-the-less a crucial one.