English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
Browse
40 results
Search Results
Item The Other Life(2024) Cronan, Anna Patrycja; Casey, Maud; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Other Life is a collection of short stories about identity in between two cultures, Polish and American, and the gifts, pressures, mysteries, celebrations, and challenges that sprout from this experience. Showcased through interconnected stories centering food, language, the natural world, and a child’s perspective, this collection depicts a first-generation Polish-American’s exploration of identity. Three children visit their grandmother’s orchard, where mysterious events unfold that make them realize their grandmother may be a baba yaga. Two Eastern European girls find solace in one another in America, until they don’t. A young woman and her grandmother embark on a foray in search of mushrooms. A village in Poland recounts its complicated history with salt mining. Throughout these stories, the yearning and longing for a life that could have been is explored as a way to make sense of the life that is.Item Mudlarking(2022) Rothrock, Caroline Haley; Mitchell, Emily; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mudlarking is a novel-in-progress about realities and fantasies of queerness in the 1960s. Its two young protagonists, who have immigrated to London from unstable homes in Ireland and Virginia, seek to craft a new home for themselves out of things discarded by larger society, in a place at the fringe of reality and myth. They are “mudlarks” in both a literal and metaphorical sense, picking through refuse along the River Thames for long-lost things that can be made to glitter. Danger comes in the form of the insistent press of respectable conformity, and comfort in fluid transformation, remaking, and crafting a sanctuary out of a once-haunted space. The novel draws from conventions of Irish and Welsh folklore, as well as invented mythology, to emphasize the possibility of impossible transformations.Mudlarking is accompanied by three earlier stories that have informed its construction and themes in various ways. In A Lonely Death, the narrator has a conversation with the long-dead corpse of a stranger, while The Cunning Doll situates a familiar fairy tale in the swamps of Louisiana, and posits that the heroine and the witch are more similar than either would like to believe. Pink Moment is an ode to the color pink in all its forms, but also to the ways that we use color and place to tell fantasies of our own lives. All of these narratives are concerned with the intersection between historical and fantastical landscapes, as well as the unlikely connections that inform our concept of belonging.Item Furrow(2017) Neal, Laura; Collier, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Furrow is a testimony of leaving and returning, challenging the quotidian perception of country life primarily rooted in rural South Carolina. The speaker is a silent observer, a witness, and at times an unwilling participant who interrogates the connections and disconnections between family and the natural world.Item On the Phone with My Mother(2017) Mcdonald, Leigh C.; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)On the Phone with My Mother considers intimacy and its antagonists: technology, physical and temporal distance, and mental disorders and diseases. Landscapes and geographies, mostly of the North American East Coast and Ireland, as well as photographs and domestic objects, provide occasions for the speaker's explorations of family and its matrilineal history.Item A Heart in the River(2011) Dempsey, Jennifer Lynn; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Exploring the boundaries of relationships, A Heart in the River questions the personal connections through which we identify the self. Through poems about war, poker, and family history, the speaker delves into memory and the devolution --then renewal-- of trust. The Midwest, particularly northern Michigan, grounds the manuscript in nature; landscapes with rivers, birds, and a black walnut tree juxtapose with the artificial scenery and actions of civilization. The thesis is organized in three sections, each creating emotional and physical borders the speaker wishes to break, and it is only through sound and movement --both thematically and formally-- that any reconciliation may be reached.Item On Leaning To Play The Piano With A Hammer(2015) Foster, Mary Katherine; Plumly, Stanley; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)By way of a libretto, these poems follow a singular speaker who figures herself within the simultaneous growth, passion, violence, and destruction inherent in the art, mythology, archetypes, dreams, and natural phenomena that she encounters, as a means of negotiating forms of grief and loss. For her, realities of sleep, memory, language, and consciousness regularly collide and threaten to eclipse or ruin one another, from which follows her interest in the unities of musical compositions, Latin language roots, and the structure of storyscapes.Item In The Hall of The Great North American Mammal(2015) Henderson, Mason; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"In The Hall of The Great North American Mammal" is a collection of poems in three parts that examines a speaker as he grapples with the concept of his own inevitable adulthood, finding, ultimately, that the depths of his heart linger in the romanticized promise of perceived adolescence. The dissonance he finds between the two stages of himself is treated as a real geography, a physical space where the forces of "other" and "self" wander and meet, where the unexpected or dangerous environment proves or tests the trajectory of this speaker's growth. Through the narrative of the extended poem in section two, this landscape becomes a way to flesh out the dissonance created by the speaker's maturing, while still attempting to recognize and celebrate the work that comes with forging or finding a path in an unfamiliar world.Item Isamu Dreams of Flying(2015) Kauffman, Ashlie; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Fictionalized events in the life of Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) are woven with the story of a boy fascinated with airplanes, who grows up to be an artist. This section shows Isamu and his mother, Leonie Gilmour, traveling to Japan to live with his father, poet Yone Noguchi. In Japan, Isamu is raised solely by Leonie. He is surprised when she gives birth to his sister, the dancer Ailes Gilmour. Facing racial discrimination and feeling envy toward Ailes, he departs in 1918 for boarding school in Indiana. Interspersed with this is the story of a boy, David, who builds a model airplane that he wishes to show his mother when he visits her for a week. Raised by his father, he is envious of attention his mother gives her boyfriend. As an adult, David begins dating a woman named Elizabeth, before he moves to Japan to teach art.Item Monster Talk(2015) Brooks, Jesse; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The child perspectives in "Monster Talk," "High Stakes on the Mississippi Racino," and "Where the Weird Comes From" are narrated through either the close third or first person point of view. These children encounter terribly real events that are beyond their full comprehension and thus narrated through a fantastical lens in an attempt to explain their experiences with adult mental illness, fundamentalism, and addiction. "A Sad Day at the Glitter Factory," "Worldsick in the Animal Garden," and "The Company We Keep" focus on how characters are affected by, and interact with, their settings. These pieces explore the narratives that result from direct encounters with their surrounding environment. Situations such as economic depression, homelessness, and large disasters caused by human error occur within these settings. The telling is the characters' innate response to their existence that is inevitably influenced by these worlds and it is how they compose personal identity and significance.Item Dogcatcher(2015) Banks, Emily Anele; Arnold, Elizabeth; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The poems in this collection explore the ways that we, as humans, both relate to and attempt to separate from our own bodies, as well as how we are shaped (and sometimes trapped) by heredity. These expansive concepts are reflected in lyric form, with recurring images of skin, water, blood, and birth connecting a range of narrative material. Throughout, an almost tribal identification with familial mythology conflicts with the desire for bodily agency, the need to claim, impossibly, control over our physical beings.