Date of Award

2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

Department

Creative Writing

First Advisor

Michael Castro

Second Advisor

Beth Mead

Abstract

On the surface this particular novel is a fairly simple one to explain. On the surface this novel is more or less a romance novel. After all, Book One is essentially about a man named Thomas Woods who meets and fall in love with a woman named Rosemary. At first his love is returned in kind, but by the end he has lost his lover to another man, a man unworthy of her tenderness. And Book Two is about more or less the same thing except in this Book the woman's name is Violet, and there is a slight question as to whether she has been true or not. Book Three is a little different, but again he falls for and then loses the woman from the Book. The only true difference between a prototypical love story and this one is that in mine the main character does not win the affections of the women by stories end. It is true that he does win something on the last pages, but what it is the reader will probably not find in any other "romance" novel in which he or she reads.

However, there is something deeper hidden underneath, which I, the author, will attempt to explain. What is hidden underneath is a poem, which I have played with on numerous occasions since I first read it, but never before I feel, with as much success as I did here. The poem is a Zen poem, a three word Zen poem to be exact. And it reads, "Snow/ Moon/ Flower". The poem is about the cycle of life with each word representing a part of the cycle. Snow is symbolic of the season of death or decline, while moon is symbolic of fertility or the cycles of a woman. And finally there is flower, which is symbolic of spring, or rebirth. And each of my books is intended to be each of the three words, with the whole of the novel to make up the poem, and be representative of the cycle of life. For example, Book One is the death. It is the death of love, the death of Thomas, etc. While Book Two is the point in the story where Thomas is impregnated with a new idea about what it is he is searching for. And in Book Three Thomas is reborn and blooms like a flower in a garden of love.

And so as you can see, even though this story looks on the surface to be a rather simple one, underneath there is much more going on.

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