Theses and Dissertations Collection

There’s a Party at the Graveyard and You’re Invited is a vignette-driven collection of short fiction that deals with violence against women, coming of age, and queer identity in rural America. This collection uses the image, the short form, and the speculative to examine the conflicts that occur when interiority collides with society, specifically in rural spaces, where the gap between the inner world and public performance is explicit. Aesthetically, this work is situated in the tradition of the deep image and short form prose. The stories in There’s a Party at the Graveyard and You’re Invited operate in the small, often strange, moments of vulnerability that voice the spectrum of the inner world—the view behind a screened-in porch or a beautiful, dead hand in a box. Ultimately, the objective of this collection is to create emotional realism through the fantastic in order to give voice to the experiences, memories, and fantasies of women in small-town America. Each piece in this collection is united by a central question: what are the limits of empathy, and what do these limits feel like?