Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

Four weeks before the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 an eleven-year-old flees the Soviet Union with her young father. As political refugee determined to eventually settle in the United States they hastily abandon the girl's estranged alcoholic mother, future stepmother, their friends and relatives, their collection of books and all but a handful of family photographs. She eventually attempts to seek out and recover the people, ideas and objects lost on that voyage to America by going back to a much changed Russia and stitching together the scattered and forgotten pieces in between her old and new homes through dream-like snapshots. Two decades after her emigration the author examines the concept of bad luck in one's travels, the significance of the number four, ambivalent attachments, learning to mother from a place of abandonment, the familial legacy of escape and the pursuit of wholeness within inconsolable loss. The un-tellability of the story is considered through the lens of Sappho, Bernadette Mayer, Yoko Ono, Roland Barthes, Doris Lessing, Nico and many other surrogate mothers and fathers brought together as a chorus in a multi-vocal, lyric approach.

Cities in Dust is a collection of 15 short stories and the first two chapters of Biggest Little City, a novel-in-progress. This collection looks at queerness, gender, sex work, addiction, illness, and the effects of displacement--leaving homes, cities, relationships, and theoretical safety before we are ready. Cities in Dust works to tell stories from the space between places and the moment between moments. Transition is a city of its own.

Still Lives and Set Pieces is a collection of stories that explore concepts of identity under pressure, using meta-fictional approaches and various formal strategies, such as borrowing structural traits from other styles of composition, to fracture POV and add dimensionality. One tale explodes the few moments immediately following an assisted suicide as the surviving partner starts the slow process of self-redefinition. Another wonders if a composer's search for the right five notes to complete his project has more to it than pitch and rhythm. A third sees two would-be criminals, stuck in time, playing darts in the back room of a nameless pub, while they await word of why they are there and what's to happen to them.

[No abstract available] / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

[No abstract available] / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

[Abstract Omitted] / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

This thesis/novel, The Marvelous Garden of Marcel Verdell, follows the fictional story of one local government bureaucrat, Jude Wintertour, into the irregular and viridescent town of Garden, wherein he encounters the titular gardener, Marcel Verdell, and, along with a host of other residents, confronts the oppressive, convoluted past, envisions a hopeful future, and lives with the consequences of the blindsight-choices of the present. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The Dreams of Gods is a surreal-realist novel that follows a grieving man in the wake of his wife’s death through a strange conspiracy that seems to bend reality around him, forcing him on a curious odyssey of self-discovery, eventually leading to understanding as he learns how to come to terms with himself and the world around him. It is an exploration of the many faces of god and the universe, as well as humanity's place within it all. Inventive and energetic, the hairbrained plot takes the reader deep into a world that becomes more bizarre with each page, while fantastical characters pop in and out of the story in shocking and comical ways and nothing is quite what it seems. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (MFA)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

A master's thesis.