SOUTH KINGSTOWN — In Brian Sousa’s fictional world, Portuguese immigrants struggle to find footing on New England’s chilly shore.

They watch soccer in dark bars, learn English from TV game shows and cook arroz con galinhas (rice with chicken) in tiny kitchens.

At one point, a father and his son lust after the same young woman, Catarina, a new arrival from Sintra, near Praia da Adraga.

Questions surface and nag Sousa’s characters, inspired in part by his family’s ties to Portugal:

How do we define a good person? A bad one? What happens to our ties to one world when a new one replaces it?

Sousa fleshes out this human landscape — three generations spanning 60 years — in his first short-story collection, Almost Gone, which will be published in 2009 by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, under its “Portuguese in the Americas” series. The book, says author Lise Haines in an early blurb, “is an evocative, sensual journal that carries us from Portugal to America, by way of the human heart.”

“I like the idea of the immigrant family as a framework for telling stories,” says Sousa, whose grandfather was born in a little town north of Lisbon, Portugal’s capital city.

The extended family allows him to deal with time and memory — “what changes and what doesn’t, what is lost from generation to generation and what is kept, and how the past affects our present and future lives.”

Extended families also allow Sousa to explore “the lengths we go to for each other, the white lies we tell, the secrets we keep.”

SOUSA, WHO GREW up in North Scituate but summered in Snug Harbor, wrote the stories as his master’s thesis at Emerson College in Boston. Prof. Ben Brooks, a novelist and O. Henry Prize-winner, encouraged him to submit his work to the university press in Dartmouth.

This summer, in a foggy subdivision in Snug Harbor, the 27-year-old is expanding his early vision. He’s living with his parents — and working on his first novel. The main character lives in San Francisco but has ties to Portugal.

The publishing world has taken notice. A story, “One Last Thing,” was published last year in Gavea-Brown, Brown University’s bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Letters and Studies.

Sousa’s interest in immigrant families sharpened when he and his family visited Portugal three summers ago. Suddenly, Sousa was walking in Lisbon with his dad and grandfather — three generations of Sousas.

That started him thinking.

Often, he says, later generations go through the motions, but they don’t “have a deep understanding of place and sentiment.”

Sousa, who received his bachelor’s degree in English from Boston College, and a master of fine arts in creative writing from Emerson, has also been published in The Writer magazine and Redivider, Emerson’s literary journal. This year, the Rhode Island Council on the Arts awarded him a 2008 fellowship for his writing, which the judges called “confident and courageous.”

In addition, Sousa is working with a New York agent, who has encouraged him to work on a novel.

SOUSA, WHO ALSO surfs and plays guitar in a band called Ocean Transfer, gets up early and writes into the afternoon on his laptop. After surfing or a run, he goes back to work in the evening.

He didn’t always want to be a writer. In high school, his first love was soccer.

“I wasn’t really going in the direction of math and science,” says Sousa, who counts Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, John Cheever and Tim O’Brien as early influences.

His interest in writing occurred in college. Now he’s a writing instructor at Boston College.

“Writing and music — they’re both really lucrative fields,” Sousa, who earned $9 an hour working at a Boston book store after graduate school, says with a laugh.

“My dad says I’m crazy to want to be a writer and a rock star,” he adds. “But my parents are very supportive. This is the second summer I’ve been able to stay here.”

pdavis@projo.com