The running trees

This thesis consists of a collection of short fiction called The Running Trees. Comprising eleven stories, this work glimpses at the difficulty faced by varying perspectives and interpretations of truth that compose an average encounter, articulating the conundrum of what is accepted as “fact” and how we go about arriving at any belief or conclusion. My aim is to consider the way personal and interpersonal dynamics—those between parent and child, siblings, lovers and friends, even detective and person-of-interest—are complicated, strained or illuminated by the work of determining what is true, from whom we seek the truth, and why or how we determine it to be so. Each story is composed almost entirely of dialogue, although there are a few exceptions, which is a way for me to examine what can be gathered or learned by words and language alone. By exploring the subjectivism of what constitutes truth, opinion and fact, and by addressing these themes through (often) dialogue alone, this work taps into the zeitgeist of the current socio-political climate of language-based communication (texting, email) and queries to what extent we are comfortable with a poverty of evidence, intentional misdirection, self-delusion and/or an imagined outcome from larger, existential questions (think: the pursuit of self-actualization) to the personal (think: the way a child envisions her future). Research for this project included reading widely in the fields of fiction and playwriting, relying especially on 8 x 10 by Michael Turner for its episodic portraitures of characters and situations and the monologue Blackbird by David Harrower for the dialogue. The Running Trees contributes to the tradition of short fiction in English adding the element of pure dialogue to consider what meaning is lost or gained through this approach to storytelling.Arts, Faculty ofGraduat