The Lowest Basin, Arizona Stories: On Being From Arizona, On Writing About Arizona, On Identifying and Contributing to an Arizona Literary Regionalism

In Arizona: A History, Thomas E. Sheridan writes that Arizona isn't something real but "only a set of arbitrary lines on a map." I disagree with that statement. Writers such as Jane Allison, Jerome Stern, and Peter Turchi have all written craft books analyzing the structures of narrative, and it could be argued that at the core of their individual arguments is the shared sentiment that it is the shape of something which gives it meaning. As such, those "arbitrary lines" which Sheridan dismisses have created geographical perimeters in the real world, which have fostered historical, cultural, political, ideological, familial, artistic, and literary perimeters as well. So arbitrary or not, those lines have created boundaries which have given real meaning to people's lives. This dissertation attempts to explore the lives shaped by Sheridan's arbitrary lines. Based on what historian Robert L. Dorman calls the "localist west" in Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West, this dissertation uses fiction to investigate the state of Arizona as its own unique yet limited knowledge apparatus, specifically how the state's mostly forgotten cowboy heritage, both real and mythic, serves as an underlying ontological practice for part of its population. The stories presented here attempt to be reflective of the metaphysics for that population and are constructed from an assemblage of the region's territorial-to-present history, literature, conservative politics, economies, racial discourses and populations, and its arid yet diverse desert ecologies. There's also some Waylon Jennings. While this work examines existence within a limited Arizona population--mostly lower to middle class conservative white folk living within the mythos and realities of the Western tradition and its associated spectrums of masculinity--it does not prove a thesis for it. I did not collect quantifiable data or make conclusions about how and why a particular population acts they way it does. Instead, I've simply tried to undertake what Milan Kudera writes in The Art of the Novel is the writer's purpose, to be an "explorer of existence."