Please note: creative writing works are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and fill out the appropriate web form. / A collection of short stories and novel excerpts from the 2021-2022 Creative Writing MFA / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

Failure to Yield is a collection of creative nonfiction that explores themes of presence and emotional connection and expression. The seven essays, which include three flash essays, explore the themes by reflecting on such topics as marriage, parent-child relationships and addiction. The collection is woven together by the author's relationships with her parents and children and by her experiences growing up in a small town in Iowa.

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Jungle Zoo City People is a collection of seven short stories revolving around the central theme of family. Other recurring themes are mental health, self-esteem, violent influences, and the consumption of television and media. The three stories "Stunts," "Hypotheses," and "Comments," are linked by narrators of the same family with the intent of showing family trauma at the generational scale. Two stories, "City Date" and "Illiterate Photographer" are linked by a fantastical setting placed thousands of years in the future in a city cohabited by humans and animals. These pieces heavily rely on the imagery of animals and plants to explore themes of mental health. Particularly, "City Date" compares anxiety and low self-esteem to the state of being prey, and "Illiterate Photographer" follows a character whose mental condition serves as a hyperbolic portrayal of ADHD, trying to rediscover his place in the city's ecosystem. The story "Anthropology Paper" experiments with its form to allow its narrator to examine the value of his family's history. Similarly, "Voicemail: Re-hoarding" uses the unconventional form of a voicemail to experiment with voice and explore the value of physical possessions.

Through my Creative Non-Fiction Writing thesis, I have attempted to challenge the boundaries of the genre, after D’Agata and the works of other contemporary creative non-fiction writers. However, I have also challenged the boundaries of our own frame for reality that defines the human experience. As I began writing this, I asked myself: can we write about spaces or do we write spaces ourselves, interlacing the city into an imagined space? I didn't realize that I had forgotten the most important question of all: do spaces write us? These stories are predominantly about my search for “authentic” space, for the “real” city—and I have tried to challenge the idea of authenticity through the style of my writing, in addition to the narratives, lyric essays, and arguments in my thesis. I’ve lived in six cities over the past five years, and yet, each time, in the end, I return to Munich. There is something about the urban fabric there, a tear I can sense, or perhaps it is inside of me, waiting to be filled. And somewhere along the way, I started to have this idea that I could write about this city, collecting the pieces of my experiences. I was left with a collage of moments, moments of a city that was mine—not knowing that the city is bigger than any of us, a character that cannot be captured by any means. Not knowing the impact the city might have on me.

In 1867, the budding naturalist and future father of our national parks, John Muir, embarked on his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf from Jeffersonville, Indiana, to Cedar Key, Florida. Almost 150 years later I undertook the same journey, retracing the wilderness advocate’s footsteps through the South to catalog all that has changed in a century and a half of progress, to try and better understand the inception of his environmental ethics, and to learn to see the world as he did, harmonious, interconnected, rejuvenating and imbued with a pervasive spirituality. The chapters of this thesis retell selected legs of that journey.

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This collection of personal essays explores the use of symmetry as a metaphor of normality in contemporary American culture. These essays use formalistic exploration to enter into a conversation with the reader regarding the body, sexuality, gender, and mental illness. Each piece aims to dismantle and explode the metaphorical significations of symmetry through the use of interdisciplinary research combined with memoir.

Auto Fem: Essays is a nonfiction essay collection revolving around one young woman’s family and their relationship to the motors that accelerate familial bonds. Each motor-related essay brings readers deeper into the admiration of speed and the environment that surrounds it. The essays span from the author's childhood into adulthood, revealing the different ways a woman is sexualized within these subcultures. This sexualization leads to internal battles for the female participant that result in sometimes toxic eating habits and a complicated body image. The author provides a sometimes brutal, sometimes funny, but always honest view. The essays collected here explore one woman's experience of being a woman within male-dominated spaces-- from table gambling in casinos to Harley Davidson motorcycle rallies. These essays explore over twenty years of one nuclear family's love for motors and each other.

The following Creative Nonfiction Thesis delves into the suppressed past of a girl who experienced brief episodes of adolescent epilepsy. She was diagnosed with Rolandic seizures when she was eight years old and eventually “grew out” of them when she hit puberty. Since that time, the author had not spoken of these events with her family. The topic of her epilepsy remained, somewhat, the elephant in the room until the epilepsy discontinued. She interviewed her mother and her sister to see the perspectives of those people who were closest to her throughout this era. Through these interviews, the author learns of what her family truly experienced and their opinions of these events. These events largely affected the past and future relationship between her mother, her sister, and the relationship the author has with herself.