UC Irvine

A View of the Pondby Jacob Hyatt Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing University of California, Irvine, 2023 Professor Michelle Latiolais, Chair “A View of the Pond” is a short story that deals with the persistence of grief and the difficulties people face when trying to comfort and connect with others. The story is told partially in the form of a journal and partially in prose. The first movement of the narrative, which takes places in the year 2014, details the excitement of the main character, Julie, as she prepares for college. However, the journal does not proceed past her arrival at the college, and the story resumes ten years later, after Julie has finished college and found work in a small Maine town. The story picks up with her helping the townspeople to search for a missing child, and this passage—told in third-person point-of-view prose—chronicles her relationships to the townspeople as well as some of her past relationships with others. Julie is ultimately the one to find the missing child’s body. Preparing to move away from the small town after this horrific event, Julie rediscovers her journal, and she writes a single entry in it, which makes up the story’s final movement. Here she recalls her experiences with her first-year college roommate, whose declining mental health after the death of her mother led to suicide. Julie reflects on her failure to save her roommate and her failure to be of any help to the deceased child or the boy’s father, whom she was unable to comfort. In the end, she decides that people cannot adequately be comforted by others and that people are not even up to the task of comforting themselves. This story, inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in Maine, is concerned with the effects that remoteness and grief can have on the human psyche. Genre elements, principally those associated with the horror and crime genres, are utilized to emphasize the outsized nature of human emotion in the face of persistent tragedy. Surreal, oneiric imagery is also incorporated so as to show the (un)interpretability of human suffering and the difficulties that come with reckoning with an uncaring, random, and frequently hostile universe. It is ultimately important to emphasize, however, that the narrative herein is meant to convey the experience of a particular individual undergoing particular circumstances and is not intended as a certain commentary on the world entire.