Mercury is a collection of short stories based in the fictional town of Mercury, Georgia. Set over the course of several decades, the stories trace the events that changed individuals, families, and a whole community for decades. Loosely based on the author’s real-life family history, the stories, both humorous and heartbreaking, show characters caught between the past and the present and searching for a way forward. A girl who makes friends with a ghost, a woman who can’t help but run from crying babies, a man forced to face the town’s darkest side—these and other characters respond in surprising ways to circumstances that are both ordinary and extraordinary. Most of the stories in the collection are linked, showing the interconnectedness of the lives in this small town. The pieces work together to present a larger narrative of how the characters and the town struggle to change, survive, hope, and face the future.

The short stories in this collection focus on young individuals’, especially women’s, experience and development as they navigate personal relationships and search for a place in the world. Both longer stories and flash fiction are included, and stories are told in past and present tense, and from first, second, and third person point of view. However, the narration of all of these stories stays close to the characters’ points of view, inhabiting their visceral experience. These stories take place in a variety of settings, including a beachside motel, college campuses, bars, and offices. All of these characters, though, struggle with questions of identity, intimacy, and purpose. These conflicts are revealed through the characters’ interactions with others and reactions to their environments, especially focusing on the small details of ordinary events and settings. By depicting these characters’ encounters with the everyday, their sense of self and experiences are shown, and thus the particularities of women’s relationships with their selves, their bodies, and their relationships are represented. In addition to this collection of short stories, the Writing Life Essay in this thesis discusses my development as a writer, my aims, and the writers, such as Dylan Landis, Joy Williams, and Mary Gaitskill, who have influenced my work. A Reading List of influential works, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, follows.

This collection of seven short stories details the emotional triumphs and complications of characters whose lives are altered by issues of sexuality and disconnection. An adolescent girl feels her father slipping away from her and, in turn, willfully destroys the imaginary world of the boy she babysits; a speech therapist struggles to make headway with a young patient while finding himself unable to communicate with his ex-lover; a gay poet cheats on his boyfriend in a desperate attempt to fuel his failing art. The dramatis personae of Two Blades Come Together is comprised of individuals who struggle towards grace and happiness but are thwarted by their inability to fit neatly into the lives of those they love. Several of the stories approach these issues through the framework of contemporary myth, exploring how fairy tales and the supernatural act upon the characters' relationships and the way they perceive their situations. The heroines of "Proof of Snow" and "The Pill Woman" are both affected by the unseen; one suffers under the strange influence of her brother even after his death, while the other must make a decision to uphold her fairy-tale world or dismantle it. In these stories, the tangibility of the supernatural is elusive and unproven, but the altered perceptions of the protagonists and their actions because of it are extremely real, with extremely real consequences. The collection also explores and tests the boundaries between poetry and fiction, pushing always towards language that is aesthetic and musical while not sacrificing the momentum and architecture of prose. Two Blades Come Together incorporates linguistic ideas from poets as varied as contemporary surrealists Laura Kasischke and Mary Ruefle to the grounded wryness of Tony Hoagland and Lynda Hull, weaving poetic language with narrative, hybridizing the qualities of fiction and poetry in an attempt to create a unique, musical vision of short fiction that is both functional and artful.

Broken Open is a collection of short stories, four of which deal with culpability and the unexpected transformations that occur when blame, either unintended or deliberately invoked, is exposed and finally understood. The remaining two stories concern relationships that turn out to be gifts, as well as painful learning experiences. In "Other Living Creatures," one family contends with post traumatic stress disorder as another implodes following the death of a young soldier in Vietnam. "Hunters" deals with the unconscious motivations that leave a father resentful and unable to forge a relationship with his son. In "Bardenbrook," an accidental death is the impetus for blame and, finally, forgiveness. Rage acts as a catalyst in "The Summoning," the story of a lesbian couple's struggle to accept the reality of breast cancer shortly before one of the partners undertakes a transformative journey as her death approaches. The two remaining stories in Broken Open deal with the protagonists finding their voices. In "Sunday Wars," a girl begins to think for herself, and in "Beyond the Parking Lot," a woman comes to terms with the restraints, self-imposed and otherwise, that have held her captive for most of her life. Each character in Broken Open struggles, perseveres, grows and, ultimately, flourishes. Despite sorrow, pain, and unexpected loss, being broken open leads them, as it does us all, if we let it, to the richest places within.

The field of writing studies has long inquired about how writers engage in individualized writing processes. As an extension of this inquiry, contemporary scholarship in writing studies began to study collaborative writing through the understanding of writing as a social act. Our understanding of writing processes and collaborative writing has expanded through studies of writing as it occurs in the academy, the workplace, and extracurricular settings. Still, to a large extent, inquiries about writing processes and collaborative writing activity centered on alphabetic texts and focused on writers. Rarely do studies engage"in addition to writers"artists and designers as authors in the collaborative writing process. Composing, as understood by scholars and teachers of writing, is changing due to technological shifts in media and yet, as a field, we have failed to question multimodal composing as an individual or collaborative process.<br />    To extend previous writing studies scholarship, this dissertation engages qualitative case study methodology to explore three unique multimodal collaborations of comics authors. As a visual rhetoric scholar with a personal focus on teaching students about composing in all media, I am drawn to asking questions about how arguments are composed using multimodal means. My personal and scholarly interest in comics led to inquiries about how comics are composed and initial research found that comics are often composed in collaboration, with writers and artists who with them carry multiple and varying literacies (alphabetic text, visual, spatial, etc.). Comics provide a rich subject of study to address this inquiry because of their inherently multimodal nature as a medium that incorporates both word and picture in diverse combinations and for a variety of rhetorical purposes. For this study, I have chosen to focus on comics texts that differ in terms of subject matter, genre, and collaborative makeup in order to examine multimodal collaborations and create distinct cases. Through three cases of multimodal collaboration"Understanding Rhetoric, the Cheo comics, and Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline"this study argues for a further complication of our field\'s understanding of writing processes and collaborative composing. / Ph. D.

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

This fiction novel focuses on the Sankofa philosophy that we as human beings must learn from our past to better understand our current existence and future; however, sometimes we choose to ignore or suppress the past because remembering it may be too hurtful. When we forget what happened yesterday our outlook on today and tomorrow becomes distorted. Contact is a novel that attempts to explore how 'living in the now' alone becomes problematic because the past'if not remembered'will come back to haunt you. The erasure of the line between Diasporic Africans and their African past is the primary theme explored. The writer deconstructs how living in the now is indeed living in the past because the past and present, in the life of Tufa, become one. Reincarnation serves as the vehicle to explore this theme. Tufa, known for her aberrant behavior, is the reincarnation Afua Ataa - an Ashanti woman who survived the Maafa, or Transatlantic Slave Trade. Past love, hate, dishonor, rivalry, pain, and hope complicate the 'ordinariness' of Tufa's teenage life. The novel is divided into a prologue and eight chapters. The bulk of each chapter follows Tufa's current life and ends with a vignette told by five African women, one being Afua Ataa. Each vignette paints in broad strokes the landscape and historical moments of the Maafa. The present becomes complicated when traces of the Maafa seep into Tufa's life. Some of these traces are culturally specific rather than unique to Tufa. However, other traces are uniquely shaped by Tufa's former life. People from her past disrupt her current life by their presence. Their disruption takes many forms'some of it brings pain and some of it brings joy. By reading Tufa's story, others may find the strength to confront their past when it makes contact with their present. Like Tufa, we must confront the pain in our past to experience its joy.

In July 2012, I left America for the first time to travel to Madurai, India, for a month-long journalism internship. The inspiration for the poetry in this work is deeply rooted in my experiences while in India, mentally, physically, and spiritually. Not knowing why I chose India to travel to for my first time abroad, I realized much later that I needed to be there in order to transition into the next stage of my life. I always wanted to experience what life was like without the amenities the Western world is accustomed to (hot showers, washers and dryers, reliable electricity, etc.). Through isolating myself from the familiar I woke up to a simpler, happier perspective on life. This isolation also stirred mixed emotions in me that I wasn't aware of until I began writing about the experience in these poems. The feeling of being watched by everyone was common and sometimes frightening or disturbing. This vulnerability was uncomfortable even though the experiences and realizations I had outweighed the negativity while I was in India. The intent of this thesis is to explore how I've grown and what I took from the trip while comparing my Indian experience to life before and after my visit. With unconventional structural elements, I set out to put life and movement on the page to represent the chaotic, beautiful India and the emotions that carried the weight of each poem. Just from one month of being surrounded by strangers who stared with stone eyes, a language I didn't understand and memories of a life I didn't miss as much as I thought I would, this thesis follows the imaginative perceptions of a sleeping person through her evolution into a waking life.

Translated from Latin, Imago Dei means the image of God. In the very beginning of the Torah, the writer says that God created humanity in Their own image. According to the text, woven in the fabric of who we are is God. In a post-secular society, the concept of God brings a lot of weight and baggage. Which God are we talking about? Can God be talked about it? Is God or thinking about God even relevant anymore? Hasn't science taken care of it? What good can discussions on faith bring us? These are the questions explored in Imago Dei: Stories. Within the collection is a story about a group of college students in the Bible belt struggling with sorting through emotions in the aftermath of their pastor's suicide. There's a husband search for grace and acceptance in the midst of a looming divorce and a dying father. Finally, there's a letter from a youth pastor who is publically accused of abusing a transgendered student. The collection was written under the guidance of Dr. David James Poissant with the help of Professors Laurie Uttich and Nathan Holic. In the directed readings portion of the program, I read Marilynne Robinson, Bret Lott, and Flannery O#Connor to get a better picture of faith and moral fiction. For craft guidance, I read works by Bret Anthony Johnston, Junot Diaz, David Foster Wallace, Vanessa Blakeslee, and John Henry Fleming.

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