Research Overview

Thomas Gavin's most recent novel, Breathing Water, grows from his meditations on Soren Kierkegaard's claim in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript that "Truth is subjectivity." He is currently at work on Bridge of Lost Boys, a novel exploring the roots of war in a failure of the moral imagination. In Gavin's Structure of Stories course, graduates and advanced undergraduates closely analyze the fictional strategies of masters such as Kafka, Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner, and Katherine Anne Porter and employ them in their own creative writing exercises and stories.

Taught at Delta College, Middlebury College, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Indiana University Writers' Conference, Brockport Writers' Forum. Author of Kingkill,The Last Film of Emile Vico, and Breathing Water. His most recent publication "The Classics of Comics" can be found in the August 1997 edition of U.S. Airways Attaché. He is a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Fellow, NEA Creative Writing Fellow, Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Mellon Faculty Fellow, winner of the Lillian Fairchild Award.