Date of Award
Spring 5-3-2024
Level of Access Assigned by Author
Open-Access Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
Advisor
Hollie Adams
Second Committee Member
Gregory Howard
Third Committee Member
Heather Falconer
Additional Committee Members
Ryan Dippre
Abstract
Object (of) Permanence is a collection of flash and short fiction that interrogates how the body, the mundane, and the spirit of playfulness operate in space. These stories create space for women’s voices to exist and be heard: a mother searches for her daughter, a girl struggles to play, a sex worker writes a letter to her murderer, a woman grieves her father’s death with the help of a junco. This collection reveals how little space is required to construct compelling and complex narratives. While some stories employ traditional plot structures, others innovate narrative form. Each story contains the defining components of a plot (a protagonist involved in some action), but several works challenge the presentation of these conventions. The protagonists in these stories range from a mycelial network to a frog living in a human stomach to a body abstracted from its consciousness. Other stories obscure the mundane, dissecting the intricacies of the view from an office window, or an exchange between spouses at a crosswalk. This collection operates across genres, seamlessly shifting from speculative fiction to surrealism and back to realist fiction. Together, the stories included in Object (of) Permanence offer readers an innovative approach to the fictional story collection. By working across form, narrative structure, and genre, and by centering and empowering female voices, this collection invites readers and writers to play, to feel, and to observe.
Recommended Citation
Hoeckel-Neal, Michelle B., "Object (of) Permanence: Stories" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3955.
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/3955