One Day Your Ship Will Come In

Abstract

My thesis is called One Day Your Ship Will Come In and consists of several pieces of fiction. The setting of most of these pieces is deliberately vague for aesthetic reasons, but any reader inclined to investigate can deduce that they are set in the small-town South. That said, the "Southern-ness" of these stories is restrained; you won't see anything about "Carolina accents as sweet as Karo syrup," but you will see plenty of guns and pickup trucks. The characters in these stories all just want things to get better, one day, but they don't know how to get there, so they do things like buy lottery tickets. My artistic influences are eclectic, to say the least. Not-so-subtle allusions to Chekhov, Hemingway, and other artists are in there, and some of the fictions have dramatically different styles than others--some are straightforward traditional narratives and others self-consciously postmodern. I think I have achieved a degree of unity among these pieces, however, by working through multiple revisions to strip out excess prose and establish a consistent tone.