The Inevitable: Withdrawn is a critical preface and collection of non-fiction writing: personal essay, lyric essay, fragments, and experimental forms. The work’s cohesive subject matter is the author’s European vacation directly following her divorce. Within the pieces, the author attempts to reconcile who she is when starting over and she begins to ask questions regarding the human condition: How do I learn to exhibit intimacy again, not just with romantic partners, but with also in a familial way with my father, and how does absence in these relationships affect my journey and how I write about it? How do I view, and remake myself, when finding my identity that was tied to another individual compromised? How does a body, both physical and belonging to me, and physical as text, take certain shapes to reflect my understanding? How do I define truth, and how do I interpret truth and authenticity in both experience and writing? How do I define and know the difference between belief and truth? And finally, how does narrative and language protect, or expose me? The Inevitable: Withdrawn considers debates regarding the definition of narrative in order to address a spectrum of non-fiction writing. The collection takes into consideration non-fiction conventions, form as functionality, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, prose and poetic theory, and the works of other notable writers.

A Forecast is a manuscript of poems that explores themes of longing, loss, uncertainty, time, place, and love. The poems also attempt to explore and adorn these themes through inventiveness and imagination. While inhabiting this imaginative landscape, the poems play with notions of perception, acting as objective witnesses to very subjective persons, places, and things. These poems are held together by their movement through stasis, fascination with weather, seasons, and the future, and the fragmented yet illuminated spaces they occupy, where the extraordinary seems ordinary and the ordinary seems extraordinary. What results is a series of explorations through a dreamlike world, led by a voice who wonders, hesitates, and hides, all the while trying to say something, to shape the world and tug you into it. / Master of Fine Arts

HUNGER: ESSAYS is a collection of lyric essays that present the coming-of-age story of a young woman growing up in a Panamanian family where identity is defined by patriarchal notions of femininity (e.g., physical appearances) and economically-oriented career aspirations. In an attempt to fit into this family rather than explore her difference, the narrator undergoes psychological trauma that results in anorexia during her young adulthood. As she works towards healing, the narrator grapples with Western dichotomies of body and mind in an effort to become a more integrated self.

OFFSHORE is a collection of lyric essays that examines the intersections between human cultures and the natural world. The essays inspect issues of identity and belonging in different geographic, cultural, and political landscapes. Part one of the book centers on the cultural and natural landscapes of Hawaii and Japan. Part two explores interpersonal relationships in Montana. And part three focuses on social justice issues in Nicaragua and Florida. Each of the essays in this collection balances intellectual exploration with personal narrative and poetic description, allowing the essays to be simultaneously concept-driven while maintaining lyric force.

The Bass & The Boogeyman is a manuscript of poems that explores issues of sexuality, gender, and identity. The poems also attempt to reach an understanding of what it means to be a member of a largely marginalized social group (homosexuals). In this explorations and a attempts the poems are also engaged in finding the origins of fear. The poems follow one narrator from childhood into adulthood. While the poems do not provide the type of clear narrative and story arc one would expect from a novel, they do offer a sense of trajectory and reward the reader for reading from cover to cover. This manuscript is very aware of itself as a book and strives to exist as such (rather than as a stack of poems who happen to be in the same place at the same time). The manuscript features several connected poem series that work to provide cohesion to the collection. The poems Boys, Men, and Fags are an example of this connection between poems. Each of these three poems can be read as individual pieces, but when taken together they offer a commentary on all three groups that cannot be gained by reading them separately. The manuscript also employers a cast of repeating characters (the boy & the boogeyman among them) to give the collection the sense of narrative trajectory mention above. Lastly, the manuscript combines numerous traditional poetic forms with a wild and unruly use of pop culture and humor. The end result is proof that funny and serious are not always contradictory terms. / Master of Fine Arts

Where Light Is and The Definition of Snow are linked manuscripts in which a world is held in lyrical suspension. In the process of speaking alongside one another, the stories and poems in these collections explore the repercussions of grief, loss, and loneliness and how these are affected by relationships and gender dynamics. “A Feeling" gives voice to the female narrator’s sense of disembodiment in “Series of Doors." “Fishtails" and “At Watch" probe into the kind of complex familial relationships brought about through addiction and loss, just like the young girls’ relationships with their parents in “All Around Us" and “Vesuvian Summer." Throughout these collections, the genres are connected by form. Modes overlap, allowing lyric stories to speak alongside narrative poems. There is an attempt to fuse interior and exterior landscapes, a desire to rework memory, to hold on to something already acknowledged as being lost. These stories and poems meet in a space of simultaneous loneliness and illumination: where bad things are about to happen, but beauty is still insistent. / Master of Fine Arts

My purpose in writing this collection of lyric essays is to examine my evolution during one decade, from age 19 to 29. Essential questions have guided me: What stimulated change? What formed my decisions? What predisposed me to my relationship with my partner? Why did I want to have a child? What kind of relationship do I have with my son? How did my relationship with my partner evolve? Why did we decide to leave Miami? Hopefully, I have given the reader a glimpse into my movement from self-centeredness to motherhood, from aloof adolescent to committed partner, from timid daughter to self-aware individual. The nature of my inquiry led me to confessional conclusions that clarified my reactive behavior or lack of initiative, which my initial memories of the same events often disguised. These confessions are sometimes as satisfying as the more celebratory moments themselves, because they challenge older notions of self and invite the possibility of change. Specific authors who have provided models of substance and style include, but are not limited to Annie Dillard, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sharon Olds, Michael Ondaatje, and Richard Rodriguez. I use lyrical techniques to translate my experiences into crafted prose. I incorporate recurring lines to create links between essays that stand alone, thereby forming a sequence. Some experiences are so personal and specific to me that using an adopted form, such as a repurposed fairy tale, a cento, and the inverted pyramid, has allowed me to create a measure of distance from the subject, which I found necessary for rendering it clearly. I allude to specific songs to help me establish exposition and lend tone and texture to my scenes. I chose to use the second person and direct my words to a specific audience, such as my mother, my partner, or my son, because at times it feels more authentic to let the reader listen to the way I speak to that person than to tell about the relationship. I also chose to capture the voices of certain people speaking directly to me in order to establish the most authentic speaker. My effort to answer essential questions sometimes conjured scenes from the distant past. I use line breaks to let the reader fill in the gaps or make the leap to explore connections across time. Juxtaposition and prolepsis link these tableaus so the reader can see my life and uncover the answers along with me.

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