English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Fords of My Dreams: Stories(2014) Dorland Perry, Dawn Chryselle; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Fords of My Dreams: Stories is a literary manuscript-in-progress featuring girls and women rising up from rural poverty. These linked stories bear witness to coming-of-age as a ritual marked by extreme rejection of others and even violence; to the adulthoods shaped by invisible pasts of need and neglect; and to the survivor's guilt that plagues those who sacrificed or abandoned others whose futures weighed less in order to rise. In the tradition of Dorothy Allison's Trash, these stories complicate the assumption that arriving at a higher economic class always outgains the emotional cost. With Fords of My Dreams, the author seeks to open a new set of questions around the American dream of class ascendance.Item The Waterpark(2014) Kipp, Katherine; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In The Waterpark, the Mississippi river offers the promise of escape while also freezing the fictionalized version of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, forever bound to that body of water. The novel begins with Helen detailing her father's desire to create a waterpark in the middle of Midwestern fields. In her mid-20s in the main storyline, Helen begins to learn that family responsibility and the desire to please one's parents never stops, even after death. As she takes control of her father's waterpark, she is conflicted by contrasting memories of the waterpark of her childhood and the realization that the park will ask for more of her than she is prepared to give. Furthermore, Helen realizes the consequences of her self-created loneliness as she isolates herself continually from the people around her, purposefully or not, and begins to thrive more in the memories of the waterpark than in her current life.