SOUTH ROAD, a novel told in third-person limited, follows Adrienne Harris as she navigates the trials of her coming-of-age summer and then must deal with the aftermath. 1997: seventeen-year-old Adrienne Harris wants nothing more than to flee her eccentric grandmother’s rule and leave Harbor Point and never look back. When she meets her new neighbors, Adrienne knows her life will never be the same. Adrienne quickly falls in love with the charismatic Quinn Merritt. They decide to keep their relationship a secret since both families disapprove. This secret starts a chain reaction that seemingly leads to the suicide of the troubled and poetic Lucas Merritt. The summer culminates with Adrienne running away, pregnant and heartbroken. 2011: thirty-one-year-old Adrienne is an out of work line cook and single mother. The story opens as Adrienne reluctantly returns home to Harbor Point to care for her ailing grandmother. Once home, Adrienne has to confront the things that haunt her—the summer she met and lost both Merritt brothers, and also her dysfunctional relationship with her grandmother—in order to heal and repair her own life and her relationship with her daughter. In the end, Adrienne discovers many truths that alter her perception of her past in Harbor Point. Adrienne is finally able to move forward and start to build a life for her and her daughter. Harbor Point, the last place in the world Adrienne Harris wanted to be, turns out to be the only place she wants to call home.

Existing literature reveals that atheists are among the least accepted groups in America. This study examined the process atheists go through when disclosing their atheism to their religious family members. It is hoped that the information gained may benefit therapists who work with this population as they go through this potentially difficult time and adds to the currently insufficient body of research on atheism and atheists. Using the guided frameworks of grounded theory and social exchange and choice theory, a focus group was conducted with seven atheists and coded for themes. The data revealed the disclosure process as happening in three main stages which cover how the atheists arrived at the belief system, how it was disclosed and its reception, and how relationships have been impacted since the disclosure. The clinical implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are also discussed. / Master of Science

This study was an attempt to begin to understand the phenomenon of coming out from the parental perspective. Specifically, it focused on the factors contained within a child’s disclosure of his or her sexual orientation and their impact on a parent’s satisfaction with the disclosure. Participants were eleven parents of gay and lesbian children. Participants were interviewed individually regarding their memories of the moment that their children revealed their sexual orientations to them. Participants were asked questions about the parent/child relationship prior to the disclosure, questions about the disclosure as it actually occurred, and were also asked to describe the most ideal coming out scenario that they could imagine. Interview data were analyzed according to the naturalistic inquiry process as outlined by Lincoln and Guba (1985). The results indicate that there are two types of components that influence parental satisfaction with the disclosure of a child’s sexual orientation: relational components and process components. Relational components are those aspects of the parent/child dynamic that influence a parent’s feelings of satisfaction regarding the disclosure experience. Process components are the specific elements of the disclosure moment that influence a parent’s ability to assimilate the information shared by the child and subsequently allow for the integration of that information into their schema of the child and the parent/child relationship. These two categories are discussed along with a proposed framework for understanding them as well as methods of integrating them into an individual’s coming out script. The findings of the current study may be useful in helping gay and lesbian children develop more successful and accessible coming out disclosures which are targeted towards their parents. In addition, these results may guide the interventions of mental health professionals as they work with individuals who are preparing to come out to their parents. Future studies that address the specific components mentioned within this study would be useful, as would studies which address the coming out phenomenon from the perspective of other family members.

Theoretical You is a collection of autobiographical queer love poems told from the perspective of a single speaker. These love poems speak not only to lovers and exes, but also to lust and sex and desire, to the speaker's father (they do not reciprocate the cruelty he has shown her--they are neither malicious nor vindictive), and perhaps most importantly, to the speaker herself--she recognizes herself as a lesbian, as a human, who deserves to love and be loved. While love is the crux of these poems, the collection is just as much about heartbreak (which is, of course, inevitably tied to love, is the consequence of love), heartbreak others have inflicted on the speaker and heartbreak she has inflicted on herself, having walked out on many of the women she addresses in the collection. The poems work to navigate the challenges of heartbreak by confronting homophobia, familial rejection, gender binaries and the appearance norms tied to them, as well as the grief that comes with simply being unable to stop missing someone. Here is a young woman who still loves every woman she has ever been with, who has so much love to give, who has a father who refuses to accept her, in a world that is often cruel. All of this together creates the complicated situation of being perpetually heartbroken, even when the speaker is happily in a relationship, even though she has learned to love herself. / Master of Fine Arts

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As a writer, I feel like dealing with conflict in real life is the best way to deal with conflict in my fiction. Quarter-Life Crisis or How to Get Over College and Become a Functioning Member of Society, while a fictional novel, is very much about many of the conflicts I‘ve experienced over the past few years. Sean Easton is a twenty-five year old college graduate living in Miami, trying to balance out his life in a world that doesn‘t make as much sense to him as it did when he first graduated college, happy and looking forward to the future. Suffering through the aftermath of a major breakup as well as the death of his best friend, Sean is in the midst of a year-long alcohol binge when we are introduced to him, a period of time characterized by sporadic bouts of self-loathing interlaced with sardonic internal dialogue directed towards the world at large. Sean‘s story eventually intersects with the second protagonist in Quarter Life Crisis, Lauren Ellis. Lauren is a twenty-four year old college dropout turned pharmacy technician. When we are introduced to her, Lauren‘s life is characterized by her child—Justin—and her husband Rick. Rick‘s a mechanic, and he, Lauren, and their son are all living a comfortably mundane life until the day Lauren comes home to find Rick having sex with eighteen year old Natalie, Justin‘s babysitter. From there, Lauren‘s entire life is thrown into disarray, forcing her to confront desires and dreams she had previously filed away in the mental category of ―lost.‖ Together, Sean and Lauren represent a large portion of our society, a generation of individuals entering their mid- and late-twenties in the new millennium. Many of them have been told to dream big and aim high throughout their entire lives, that the next four years will be the best of their lives. And then the next four years. A few of us fulfill these dreams. Most don‘t, and iv in a time when acquiring a college degree has become more an expectation than an accomplishment, Sean Easton and Lauren Ellis are two of many that are defined by their uncertainty as to where their place in society is. Quarter Life Crisis follows their journey from complete uncertainty to little less uncertain, bringing their lifelong dreams into direct conflict with what they are actually capable of achieving. Though the circumstances of Sean and Lauren‘s shifts in character are both distinct, their mentality and outlook on love and life are similar. In the end, they both find a balance that gives them hope for happiness which, they both realize, is the most they can really get in the long run. The underlying theme of Quarter Life Crisis or How to Get Over College and Become a Functioning Member of Society is that college has become a fixture in American upbringing. The novel isn‘t saying this is a good or bad thing, just that it is something that hangs over everybody in the current generation‘s heads growing up, whether they attend college or not. The novel is an attempt to examine how people function in the new millennium after reaching the point in their life when college is no longer a factor, when they are thrown into the real world and told to fend for themselves. It‘s the story of how two people end up doing exactly that, and the hellish process they go through to get to that point.

Expectations clash against reality, as a group of boys grow up in 21st Century suburbia.

This thesis comprises two pieces of work – a novel and an accompanying research paper. The novel, Savage Things, is a story of a girl, removed from the home of her vulnerable mother to live with her grandparents for a summer. There, she falls in with various secondary characters: a gang of boys, the college-aged girl who lives upstairs, a housebound neighbour, and her wider family. As these relationships form, the girl feels increasingly conflicted about her own identity and her place in the world. However, the girl’s mother is not finished with her and reappears as the girl begins to find her feet in this new environment, taking her on a final trip that forces them to reconsider their relationship with each other and the world around them. The research paper, ‘She’s Leaving Home’, is an examination of three coming-of-age texts – Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar, and Eugene McCabe’s Death and Nightingales. The paper analyses all three novels via their relationship to the Bildungsroman as a form and questions the role that space plays in each. My discussion defines space in several ways – as a physical, psychological, and social concept. I argue that space is an essential component to the Bildungsroman in that it provides the context necessary for a protagonist to define herself against and within. It considers the prominent role that land plays and how it corresponds to each text’s political context – from the Depression-era transients of Housekeeping to the bitter land disputes of Death and Nightingales – while also arguing that each context assists in its protagonist’s coming-of-age.

The contemporary field �lesbian health� was shaped by a range of social and political changes in the last third of the twentieth century, as well as by discourses originating in the historical regulation of lesbianism. In discourse, lesbians have been produced as invisible, passive victims of heterosexist and potentially homophobic health-care providers. This project sought to understand how lesbians produce and manage their own health, and their interactions with doctors and other health-care providers. The research questions asked how discourses about lesbianism and the construction of the lesbian health field influence the ways in which lesbians construct and manage their own health, and how lesbians position themselves as they negotiate clinical spaces. Using semi-structured interviews, 19 women, aged between 22 and 64 years, who identified as lesbian, gay, same-sex-attracted and queer were interviewed. Interview data were analysed using discourse and content analysis. When they engaged with the health-care system, some participants produced their lesbianism as a social matter of no relevance to health; while for others their lesbianism was central to their health. An analysis of power relations revealed the complexity of ways the participants used agency to speak or remain silent about their sexual orientation. This was motivated by complex embodied understandings about the potential for emotional, physical or ontological harm involved in coming out in clinical spaces. Some chose to remain silent all, or some of the time, others to assertively identify themselves as lesbian. This depended on a range of contemporaneous factors including safety concerns, past experience and personal judgement. Whether to come out or not in the medical encounter was not necessarily a conscious decision, but was shaped by the individual�s embodied �sense for the game�. While the health-care system had frequently provided less than optimum care, these women were not passive, but used agency to decide whether or not their sexual orientation was relevant to the medical encounter.

This report summarizes the process of developing, writing, directing, and editing SKUNK, a short narrative film. The film was produced as my graduate thesis film in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin in partial fulfillment of a Master of Fine Arts in Film Production. This report contextualizes the making of SKUNK, within my background as a youth worker, interest in community-based narratives, and development as an artist and filmmaker. / text