A Novel Thesis

Ted is joined by Patrick Carey, a 2023 graduate of the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing program at Colorado State University.Patrick’s work in progress is the thesis he wrote as part of that program. Tentatively titled Keepers, it’s a novel set roughly 25 years in the future when the United States is mired in a second Great Depression. This has prompted the government to basically invent jobs for people to do, including reinstalling lighthouse keepers across the Great Lakes.The book follows three such keepers working on an island in northern Lake Michigan who are instructed daily via fax machine to build parts of something without knowing what it's going to become. Not knowing why they’re really there, they start experiencing things suggesting there might be a supernatural presence or an unacknowledged human history on the island.Patrick and Ted talked about the process of choosing a thesis/novel topic, the different considerations that would lead you to write in past versus present tense as well as first versus third person, writing workshops, crafting a story about lighthouse keepers when you yourself are not one, and how there’s no one way to write a book.More information about Ted and his books is available on his website, thetedfox.com.