Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / A collection of poems / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

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Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Collection of short stories / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Magister Artium - MA (English) / For a woman of her age, thirty-seven, freshly divorced, she has, to her mind, not solved the problem of her sex very well. So now her work in the escort business all those years ago will be used against her. This warning is in a note from her lawyers. She is sitting cross-legged, trying to warm up, in a book-sized patch of morning sunlight on her bunk, in a fetid cell meant for five but with thirty crammed in. She has earphones in, with twelve bass-heavy tunes on a continuous loop. It is hard for her sometimes to drum out the hum of the lovemaking, man-hating, babyyearning and fatal stabbings of the women around her - all day long. It is just like being free in the real world outside. The letter is typewritten, but has a handwritten salutation, "Dear Soraya," as if to convince her of its authenticity; and her existence.

Magister Artium - MA / This is a novella about homelessness, and the forms of exile, loss and displacement that it creates. Based in South Africa and Palestine/Israel, it is a story about four men who all find themselves alienated and marginalised and who, in their different ways, find themselves lost in their search for a place to belong. Reuben is the primary character. Estranged from the Jewish community into which he is born, he turns his back on apartheid South Africa, expecting to find an alternative home in Israel. But when he arrives there he encounters once again the same dark side of humankind that he thought he had left behind. He is not the first of his family to be driven from a place he calls home. His grandfather, Sam, who has already passed away by the time this story takes place, experienced homelessness after Nazism forced him to flee. The novella opens at the moment when Reuben takes his son Dov to Israel as a young child. But a growing estrangement between father and son emerges over time, as Dov is fiercely loyal to Israel while Reuben becomes bitterly disillusioned. They find themselves pitted against each other politically, until the pathology of Israeli militarism drives Dov to a breakdown. Following Dov's own eventual personal escape into exile, when he decides he must dissociate himself from the Israeli Defence Force, he calls out to his father to rescue him and take him home. Finally there is Haroom, a young Israeli Palestinian whom Reuben befriends, who has his own story of rootlessness and the absence of belonging. In Lost on the Way Home, the politics of oppression, discrimination, dispossession, and violent victimisation underpins each of the four men's individual stories. And despite their differences, all share the experience of being driven from their "homes", or the communities or places from which they originated. It is through their individual relationships that they reach out to each other to find a place to share and establish an alternative to the homes they have lost. In the end it is left to Reuben and Dov to struggle to find a way of finding each other when they set off together on a desert hike with no destination and only the goal of escaping their pasts.

Magister Artium - MA / Nobathembu lifts her hand and waves at her neighbour. She is watering spinach in her garden with a jug from a bucket. At age sixty-nine, her beauty shines. The sun is high on the echoes of Nyanga village – echoes of barking, the neighing of nearby donkeys, a truck against a slope. Two butterflies mate in her thorn tree. In their hearts the story begins. Their wings brighten and in their own time they disappear, following their peculiar rhythms.

<p> <i>Moving Pictures</i> is a body of poems accessing a place-based aesthetic through an ecstatic tone. A concrete image offers a resonant field of memory and imagined properties (as in Rilke&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Panther&rdquo; and Proust&rsquo;s &ldquo;magic lantern&rdquo; in <i>Swann&rsquo;s Way </i>), the tangible qualities of a house are given associative values, contingent qualities. This &ldquo;presence of place&rdquo; composes a place&rsquo;s physical properties and the impressions derived from the surrounding history, culture and mythos accrued. A &ldquo;tapestry&rdquo; that a speaker in narrative lyric performs in a poem seeks to realize as purposeful, felt design, positive or negative providence, a desire to locate the comfort in the predictable, assurance that there is a controlling will and determining voice in living physical experiences. That tapestry and the absence of it either is protective or revealing as a person might see an arrangement of planets at birth as a prophetic determinant of identity and causality, a method to determine identity and consolidate experience. A bright tension is often felt traveling to a distant country or returning home after a long time away. Thus, many of these poems deal with distance and light as allegory, the harshness of exposure, the hope for concealment. Darkness and absence suggest longing for concealment but also a capacity to accentuate light and presence. There is ultimately, the incommensurability between art and thought and act. Like trying to translate the Greek word logos as word. In poetry, the performance is persona, a character applying language as an imperfect lathe to shape knowledge and understanding. That knowledge is limited and poetry is a type of investigative tool. In this way, attention to syntax, lineation, and spatial construction are the needle and thread to stitch the narrative &ldquo;I&rdquo;.</p><p>

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / A collection of 35 original poems written by Kathleen Radigan during the school-year of September 2017-May 2018. / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Creative writing / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Collection of poems / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z