Altar Call
Date
2018-06-14
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Publisher
MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa
Abstract
"Altar Call and Other Stories" shows the division inside and between characters. The
collection explores this relationship through prideful siblings, oblivious parents, and troubling
neighbors. It contains themes of death, betrayal, moral duty, and mercy.
The stories often feature the struggles of growing up as an older sibling through “Golden
Hour,” where a sister struggles to process her relation to her ill brother, and “Brothers,” where
the older brother must decide if he will defend his younger brother who is getting bullied. It
features themes of physical deformity boys born with no arch to their feet in “Sins of the Father,”
a father who has lost his eye to cancer in “How to Kill a God,” and a young man who tries to
atone for his sins by plucking out his eyes in “Dust.”
The stories are grounded primarily in reality with occasional diverges into the fantastical
when the characters imagine events playing out, experience events half asleep, and go on bad
drug trips. The language is focused primarily on metaphor, and each of the endings move
towards an epiphanic moment, without stating each one explicitly. The stories attempt to draw
from theological principles, but are grounded often anagogically rather than in parable or direct
allegory.
The characters are often unsympathetic and operate at odds to their own beliefs, resisting
their own systems of thought. While they often move towards self-realization, they seldom
experience a change in themselves, but there’s a change outside of them that transforms
something or someone else, such as the unnamed man in “Asher” or the neighbor in “August.”
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Keywords
Fiction, Short stories, Relationships