Strangers on Earth: a Creative Short Fiction Collection

This presentation concerns my thesis project, a creative fiction project titled Strangers on Earth. Structured as a series of short stories accompanied by several illustrations, these pieces of fiction follow the stories of several protagonists, all in the middle of the transitional period of their lives between high school and college, told through the lens of their time serving in a missionary program in near-present day rural New Jersey. Each story stands on its own and focuses on one character at a time, although their overarching stories recur between chapters. My purpose in writing these stories was to push myself in narrative and character development, taking notes from other similarly structured short fiction collections. That being said, the collection is thematically consistent, exploring ideas of responsibility, the weight of expectations, anxiety for the future, and the process of forming and better understanding one’s own identity. Due to the context and setting of the story, religious themes are present as well and intersect with the other themes. Although many of the stories are open ended in how they respond to the ideas they touch upon, each one focus on a critical moment of change for one or more of the principal characters. These small moments of interaction between different characters who are often strangers to one another are what give the project its title. There are seven stories altogether. The purpose of the presentation is to give people an idea of my purpose with the project, as well as what the writing process was like.