English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item How to Leave Your Life Behind: Stories(2024) Daschle, Edward Sebastian; Mitchell, Emily; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The stories in this collection, How to Leave Your Life Behind: Stories, feature characters seeking purpose and authenticity as they navigate queer worlds and queer identities. In the titular story, you learn how to disappear into a new life through the process of jumping off a building, a magical escape from a dull life that creates complications for international and personal relations. In “Thistle Land,” an old woman seeks to return to the portal fantasy world she explored in her childhood while navigating the emotional baggage of her mother and daughter who respectively saw her and see her as failing their high intellectual standards. And in “Who I Am Dead,” a dead boy making an existence for himself in the afterlife seeks to discover who he was when he was alive, and what knowledge of this past life might offer him, if anything. These stories alongside three others match purpose with aimlessness, authenticity with conflicting identities, and fantasy with reality. Throughout the collection, there is trauma and pain, but always with the acknowledgement that what they are experiencing is not all there was, is, or will be.Item The Family Sadness(2019) Fruchter, Temima Sarah; Fuentes, Gabrielle L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Family Sadness is a novel-in-progress that spans four generations of women in one Eastern European Jewish family and engages the idea of a speculative queer lineage. The story zigzags geographically and temporally, moving from Poland in the 1920’s to Brooklyn in the 1950’s, to Maryland in the 1980’s, and finally to contemporary Warsaw. The characters communicate across space and time, and their stories are woven through a body of invented Jewish folklore that collages age-old Jewish folk tropes with a contemporary queer sensibility. The narration of this book is polyphonic – humans and other creatures, animate and inanimate, contemporaries and time-travelers all participate in building this universe. Shiva, the youngest in this lineage, travels to Warsaw amidst ancestral refractions. This is, in part, a story about how stories are made. About how what feels impossible is sometimes truest, and about what is visible when we start to pay attention.