Say When: A Novel

Abstract

Say When (novel) is a creative writing dissertation that follows transgender protagonist Tommy Catalano on a cross-country road trip to find his father’s lost time machine. Tommy hasn’t seen his father in ten years when he receives a call telling him the man has committed suicide and given Tommy his entire multi-million-dollar tech company. Only ninety-days sober and working a dead-end job, Tommy barely has time to process his sudden inheritance before he receives one more surprise: a time traveler from 1969 who claims Tommy’s father sent him to the future and he needs Tommy’s help to return to the past. In thirty chapters that navigate several different points of view and timelines, Say When maps the story of a family, a company, and a legacy, as Tommy and the time traveler road trip from California to New York to find the machine that will put their lives back on track. The critical introduction of this dissertation covers themes of queer temporality, the road trip genre, queer history from the 1950s onward, and the tech industry under late capitalism. The creative work in this dissertation is suppressed in the UH institutional repository, ScholarSpace, https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/. Inquiries about the creative work should be made to Alexander Casey.