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

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

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 short stories / 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

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University

N/A

"Arbeit Macht Frei," which is translated, "Work Will Make You Free," is a surreal drama that sporadically and without regard to traditional chronological order spans the years of 1931-1947 in Nazi Germany. It is many stories of humanity and its strengths and weaknesses, its triumphs and atrocities, melded into theatrical representation as men and women who are interred in a concentration camp unwillingly build the walls that hold them under Nazi oppression. It is also the specific stories of four individual characters. Heinrich is the camp commander whose work is to construct and run the camp. Herta is the German doctor who is charged with furthering the false science of "eugenics" by experimenting on both her Jewish victim, Rachel, and the commander's wife, Klara. Rachel and Klara are characters who lead parallel lives with the exception of their perceived racial impurity or purity as seen by the culture which surrounds them. Although "Arbeit" looks closely at the stereotypical roles of Nazi commander and doctor of macabre experimentation and successfully attempts to subvert these stereotypes, it is essentially the story of the Jewish and German women and their similarities under oppression, degredation and horror that is worth of minute analysis and representation in the modern theater.

Sandy Kolman Laycox received her Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A few years later, she began her writing career at Walkabout Press, a publishing company in Charlotte, North Carolina. At this time, she also began working on her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans, which she subsequently received. She currently works as an editor in Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband and their dog.

Lady Grimm is a conceptual assemblage. A substrate of fairy tales, fables, and nursery rhymes provide a basis for transformative and macabre frames, specifically concerning a stillbirth in 1940s Scotland. The collection utilizes the folklore genre to navigate a world of uncertainty and realities too difficult for its speakers to face. It further critiques the assumption of voice being restricted to human cognition. Animalistic totems as sea lions, peacocks, rabbits, and iguanas are some of the spirits summoned in order to explore themes such as motherhood, irreversible loss, abandonment, and choice within choicelessness. The collection begins in tragedy but gestures toward redemption as it maneuvers through strange & haunting imagery, mystic & surreal narratives. Ultimately, Lady Grimm illuminates a path towards perseverance in a coldly indifferent world.

This is a memoir, lyrical in prose and unconventional in form, that interrogates illusions of control through lenses of ecology, recovery, and family dynamics.