Graduate student Connor White’s creative dissertation imagines what may lie below the surface of life on Long Island.

A former drug dealer hires a videographer to film him riding a jet ski over the edge of Niagara Falls. The victims of a serial killer converse by the side of a Long Island highway where their bodies have been abandoned. This is the narrative world of Connor White, who’s pursuing a PhD with creative dissertation in the UT Department of English. “I definitely like the abnormal,” he observed. “I gravitate towards moments that are not quotidian or everyday, the kinds of inciting incidents that make that day different than others or make a shift in a character’s life or a scenario for a group of characters. Sometimes it tends towards the uncanny; sometimes it trends towards horror or the sublime.”

White grew up on Long Island, New York, and he credits the attraction and menace of the ocean that surrounded him there for the things his characters have to face. The story collection he is currently completing for his creative dissertation is rooted in the land and people of Long Island. “Each story peels back the surface of ordinary life to reveal something unsettling, strange, or unexpectedly beautiful just beneath the surface,” he said. “I play with point-of-view throughout, which lets me explore how truth warps depending on who’s telling it, and how place shapes not only what happens, but how it’s remembered. The region becomes more than a backdrop; it’s alive and haunted. Through all of it, I’m trying to show that even the most familiar settings can crack open into something unrecognizable, depending where, when, and how you look.”

After earning a BFA in film and television production at New York University, White worked in a variety of positions in film, video, and television. As an editor and filmmaker for the marketing and event company Superfly Presents, for instance, he produced short-form documentaries for the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. Returning to school, he earned an MFA at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop and taught there before joining the UT English doctoral program. 

As White sees it, the work he did editing videos and films has important similarities with his work as a writer. “Once I have the raw material to work with, I love tinkering with it and moving things around and rearranging the building blocks of my sentences in a way that I think has parallels to film editing, where you’re editing the transcript but also editing for shot composition and how one shot will blend with another shot if you cut them together,” he said. Of the dozen or so short stories he’s published, all went through at least 20 drafts. Things may change in an instant for the characters in these stories, but the experiences they undergo are minutely crafted.