This thesis takes the form of a collection of short stories titled Tenderness, and Other Stories. The stories represent a conscious effort to vary perspective, style, voice and character. For example, the collection includes a first-person narrative told from the point of view of a somewhat unreliable young Indian-Canadian female philosophy student, as well as a fairly straight third-person objective narrative, focalizing on a young male traveller of indeterminate origin backpacking through southern Africa. In Tenderness, the longest and most ambitious of the four stories in this collection, the setting and the number of characters are deliberately restricted, in order to present a controlled environment in which to experiment with perspective, and to give each of the three characters reasonably even-handed treatment.
These stories are often preoccupied with identity, contingency, and the boundary between truth and storytelling (or mythmaking). Three of the four stories use the existing canon of literature, philosophy, and even cultural anecdote—i.e. D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex; a famous remark by the British explorer David Livingstone—as echo chambers in which to amplify the story’s particular thematic concerns. In writing short fiction this way, I am attempting to use stories as conduits into the broader conversations raised by existing (and often very old) cultural works, as well as reframing these works in a way that is contemporary, and hopefully meaningful.