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.

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Scissors Paper Rock is based on the true story of Amy Biel, a young and idealistic American woman who went to South Africa to support the political effort against Apartheid. She worked there as a volunteer organizer during a time of great political turmoil, and was days away from returning home to the United States, when she was violently killed in a riot. While Amy's death was not an accident--four men were found guilty for taking her life--it is certainly possible to think of her death as a tragedy. Amy's idealism and belief in her power to do good, allowed her to put herself into the midst of forces over which she had no control, and which ultimately overwhelmed her. In this novel, a fictionalized version of Amy's story, a young American woman named Miya Clare goes to the African country of Oneg Kempo in the hope of making a difference. While there, she is killed during a political action against white oppression that escalates into a riot. Although Scissors Paper Rock does not focus primarily on Miya's death and the events leading up to it, those elements are certainly part of the story, and are presented in the novel as testimony in an amnesty hearing for one of the men implicated in Miya's murder. But the real heart of this work is the story of Miya's life, not her death, and the main narrative of the story investigates how she came to be the person she was. What were the complex threads of her personal history, the disparate collection of events, people, and interactions that formed her? How did they shape her world view? Why did they lead her to make the choices that she did, and to take the actions that that ultimately led to tragedy?Miya Clare's death was an accident, but her presence in Oneg Kempo was not. She was there by choice, or rather, by a multitude of choices. What those choices were, and how they made Miya into who she was, are the engine of this story.

This is a coming of age story about two very different boys – Jason, a Northerner who ends up stuck in a small Southern town and Billy, a Southern boy with an abusive father. The boys become friends and grow up learning the dark secrets that are allowed to fester in a tiny southern town ruled by the Good Ol’ Boy System of justice. The story chronicles how their shared experiences change them in ways they never imagined and ultimately destroys their friendship and their lives. Through a history of violence and prejudice, Billy and Jason learn who they really are and just how far they’re willing to go to get what they want. They discover the true meaning of strength and weakness and how to survive in a world where they don’t fit in. The story explores the issues of violence, drug abuse, and murder that often lie hidden beneath the façade of fanatic Christianity, propriety, and status in seemingly innocent, charming Southern towns.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Jerrilyn McGregory, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 12, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2010. / Title from screen (viewed on July 19, 2010). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Robert Rebein, David Beck, Terry Kirts. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 16-17) and annotated bibliography (leaves 100-108).

This is a reflection paper on the process of creating a multi-media art installation that dismantles traditional, patriarchal notions of female coming-of-age stories in film and presents alternative, feminist narratives to these stories through the voices of the women present within the author's own life.