Novel: You & I. 'You & I' is a coming-of-age tale tied up in the themes of trauma, memory and storytelling. It follows sixteen-year-old Esther, who is sent to live on the fictional Cornish island of Little Wimbish following the disappearance of her bipolar mother. Once on the island where her mother grew up, the damaged and reclusive Esther finds herself caught up in the lives, history and folklore of the Wimbish community - not to mention the mystery of her father's identity. As the story progresses and Esther becomes more invested in the fairy tale escapes promised by the island she now calls home, the voice switches back and forth between the second and first person - and we begin to suspect that our narrator may have inherited her mother's illness. This is a novel concerned with how we tell stories - about ourselves, our histories, and the places we live - and why. Essay: The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Turning Trauma into Narrative in Anne Enright's The Gathering, Niall Williams' History of the Rain, and John Banville's The Sea. How do we recover from trauma, and what role can storytelling play in the recovery process? This essay investigates the notion that in Anne Enright's The Gathering, Niall Williams' History of the Rain and John Banville's The Sea, each narrator carries out an attempt at recovery, enacted through a written recollection of their past traumas. Taking inspiration from various trauma theorists and psychologists, along with writer and trauma survivor Edward St Aubyn, this essay lays out the necessary steps which must be taken in order to integrate trauma into one's life story. By writing down their trauma, constructing a narrative which allows for a certain amount of invention, facing up to the dirtier and more difficult aspects of their experiences, and finally, sharing the finished narrative with another person, the trauma survivor may facilitate the beginnings of a recovery.

The problem addressed in this thesis is cultivating an answer to the question: what creates or comprises the sum total of my Blackness as a modern American woman living in our current political climate? I primarily use a read/call and response methodology, responding to both lived and hypothetical experiences that explore or demonstrate the ways that identity, race, gender, sexuality, regionality, religion, and the historical thumbprint intersect. The results are this collection of poems that is at times mythological, at times irreverent, both abstract and formal as it seeks to fit these pieces into a singular mosaic. The conclusion drawn at the end of this thesis is that Black women's lives and stories have intrinsic value, interpretation, and are deserving of further exploration in both bibliotheraphy, mainstream, and academic writing.

This thesis will discuss the making of my short film The Water Clock at the University of New Orleans from its inception to its final short film form. Part One discusses the balancing of content and style and explores the relation between time and water as inspirations for story. Part Two details the preproduction process and major crew members’ collaborations and contributions before filming. Part Three describes daily successes, struggles, and direction while in production. Part Four describes every phase of the post-production process as the film is completed. Lastly, I will analyze my personal growth as a filmmaker.

This paper describes the making of It’s Me, Sarah, a University of New Orleans thesis film. It explores the process of creating the film in three parts. Part one will examine the pre-production, including the writing and preparation for the shoot. Part two will detail the production, including the shooting affairs. Part three will cover the post-production process, which will include the editing. The document will then reference these three segments regarding the film’s theme and will conclude by evaluating whether the final film achieves its intended conception.

The Lemon Tree is a collection of poems that arose from my attempt to capture memories of influential experiences in growing up. The poems are written in prose blocks and move in and out of childlike and adult sensibilities, creating the disillusion of time and memory. The poems themselves are comments on the unreliability and limited scope of memory and compare remembrance to dreams. This suggests that time moves more fluidly than the waking world accepts. Through looking back, through prisms, the speaker remembers experiences that impacted her development as we follow her on a journey to coming-of-age. The Lemon Tree grapples with becoming and expressing her female fertility and growth as a woman. The speaker constantly searches for love in places of religion, marriage, romantic relationships and friendships. At times, the poems decide what love is by what it isn’t. The act of creating itself was the aim of the manuscript more than the finished project. Some remembrances are intentionally left unclear and messy like wild weeds. The poems are confessional and bear resemblances to a memoir in a lyrical fashion. The Lemon Tree focuses on the processes of life: both the barren and the abundance of fruit, light and dark, winter and summer. The speaker tries to resolve the binaries of trauma and of love and in the process, finds her identity as seen through the symbol of The Lemon Tree, which ultimately becomes her personal tree of life.

ME WITHOUT YOU is an interlinked collection of short stories set in the blight of an urban housing project in San Bernardino, California. The stories follow the lives of three students in their year of fourth grade at a low performing school. Narrated from these points of view, the collection amplifies the voices of a community wrought with violence, poverty, and crime while also exploring how children brave the consequences of a world they cannot control. Mesmerizing in its simplicity, and gripping in its detail, ME WITHOUT YOU intertwines themes of identity, family, loss, poverty, and longing for what is just out of reach. It begs the reader to question how one survives a world of violence and disillusionment. The story behind my stories is this: in my nine years in San Bernardino, I have learned that it isn’t just the origin of one’s story that matters, but what one does with it. In this way, ME WITHOUT YOU tells the stories of this region, the dreams of its children, and the journeys they navigate in order to survive.

Whisper was a reject, living in a world so polluted and damaged that many humans and animals alike were born with defects. She'd grown up in an outcast camp far from any village, and those who lived in the camp were like her: disfigured. But on her sixteenth birthday, Whisper's father came to take her back to the village where she was to fill her mother's vacated spot and perform duties for the family. Her job was to cook, clean, wash the clothes, and maintain the family property. At night she was chained to the doghouse. Her uncle decided that Whisper could make far more money for the family by other means. He escorted her to the city where he brought her to the Purgatory Palace which was full of people like her, people with disfigurements who had been abandoned by their families and lived in the city for one reason only -to beg for money. Whisper refused to beg, and instead used the violin she'd received from her mother, and played songs for the money she earned. This became tolerable for a time. But Whisper missed her forest home with an ache as cold as the city and she missed the other rejects from the camp in the woods. When she was accused of attacking a store attendant, she found herself in jail. She was rescued by Solomon, a man who had heard her songs on the street corners and said that she played as only a genius could. He offered her a place at The Conservatory of Music, where she would study the violin with him. Whisper accepted this offer but even though she was warm, safe, and played music every day, she did not fit in at The University and knew that she never would. This is a young adult novel about Whisper, trying to find a place in a world that doesn't accept her. It is a story of rejection, pollution and social status. Whisper discovers that through perseverance, friends and determination, anyone can find a way to fit.

Mixed findings in the research on mental health issues in the lesbian community have resulted in conflicting conclusions as to whether the prevalence rate of generalized anxiety disorders and depression in the lesbian population differs from that of non-lesbians. The variability of findings may be due to factors such as discrimination, coming-out, and self-esteem. Using the minority stress model a framework, the purpose of this quantitative survey study was to examine whether perceptions of discrimination, coming-out, and self-esteem levels predict lesbians' anxiety and depression. Participants anonymously completed online measures of the Outness Inventory, the Schedule of Sexually Discriminatory Events, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Beck Depression Inventory-II, and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. The snowball sample consisted of 105 self-identified lesbian women from the United States. Hierarchical regression was used to test the hypotheses. According to study results, frequency and stressfulness of sexual discrimination, coming-out, and self-esteem levels predicted depression and anxiety, with low self-esteem as the only significant predictor of depression and anxiety. The findings were only partially consistent with the minority stress model because perceived discrimination did not predict depression or anxiety. This study facilitates positive social change by pointing out and focusing on the need for mental health interventions specific to the stresses that lesbians face pertaining to low self-esteem, as that predicts their anxiety and depression.

Gay identity is inextricably tied to the metaphor of the closet. This tie is best exemplified by the act of "coming out of the closet," an act when a person discloses a gay identity to another, an act of self-identification and confession that others can motivate but never force, an act typically thought of as necessary, dangerous, and consequential, and an act often viewed as a discrete, linear process. Gay identity is also frequently framed as a self-contained trait thus making coming out a one-sided, personal affair. In this project, I use autoethnography and narrative inquiry, life story interviews of four gay men, life writings by gay men, mass mediated accounts of the closet, and my personal experience to describe three epiphanies-interactional moments that significantly change the trajectory of a person's life-of gay identity: (1) "Learning the Closet," a moment when a person first becomes familiar with the metaphorical space; (2) "Living the Closet," a moment when a person privately acknowledges a gay identity but publicly discounts this identity by saying and acting as if it does not exist; and (3) "Leaving the Closet," a moment when a person discloses gay identity to others. I conclude by describing the "double-bind of gay identity"-the dilemma that forms when a person cannot escape the closet-and argue that once a person identifies as gay, the closet becomes a formative influence on her/his life; a gay person can never live outside of the metaphorical space again, can never live as an out gay person everywhere. I also use a relational perspective to understand how gay identity and the disclosure of this identity implicate others in a gay person's social network. A relational perspective removes gay identity it from the individualistic realm and situates it among beings-in-interaction. In so doing, the experience of the closet becomes removed from the exclusive burden of the self-contained gay person to one in which coming out becomes a shared responsibility by all individuals involved in a relationship.

Disturbance has been recognised as a presence in Yeats’s poetry for some time, although its discussion has not been extensive. The purpose of this thesis is to explore a particular type of disturbance in Yeat’s poetry that has not yet been investigated: disruption, and its relation to the Bible. I argue that disruption, in its meanings of interruption, disorder, fracturing, and division, is a distinct presence in a number of Yeat’s poems, and that it manifests in three key categories: disruption relating to Yeatsian poiesis, Yeat’s interest in and use of instances of disruption in the Bible, and disruption of the Bible itself. / I begin by considering “The Second Coming” as a notable instance of disruption and its religious and biblical resonances. I argue that this work, in reference to an instance of disruption in the Bible, undergoes textual disruption close to its centre. I develop an account of the poem as divided into opposing texts, identities, and prophetic currents, all in close relation to the Bible. I then turn to a range of contextual matters raised by the discussion of “The Second Coming”. Starting with a consideration of religion and the Bible in Yeat’s artistic vision, I argue that these two factors are important to Yeat’s envisioning of art and that disruption is deeply involved with both. Following this I investigate the relation between disruption and the Bible itself, demonstrating that disruption is a strong presence in the biblical narrative. I then consider Yeat’s reception of the Bible, focusing on Yeat’s perception of the Authorised Version and on Blake as a precursor. I argue that the Authorised Version was significant for Yeats, and that Blake was influential in demonstrating the poetic possibilities of biblically-related disruption for Yeats. / After discussing these contextual matters I embark upon a wider survey of biblically-related disruption in Yeat’s poetry. First, I consider a group of poems from one of Yeat’s earlier poetic books, The Wind Among the Reeds. I argue that these works, through the figure of the biblical wind, explore the conjunction of disruption and the Bible in each of the three categories of disruption outlined above. I then turn to a second set of poems that I group together due to a shared theme of inspiration. I argue that these works also engage with disruption and the Bible, particularly in relation to the category of disruption relating to the act of poiesis. The last group of poems that I consider are concerned with central events in the life of Christ. I argue that these works demonstrate a dynamic exploration of disruption and the Bible in relation to these events, focusing particularly on the nature of Christ as God and Saviour. I then proceed to a consideration of disruption in Yeats apart from its expression in the poetry. Seeking to gain a deeper insight into disruption as an element of Yeatsian poiesis, I consider some relevant theoretical perspectives before suggesting that disruption in Yeats can be constructively interpreted in terms of potentiality.