abstract: The American culture of capitalism and consumerism is predicated upon the idea that the individuals inside the system are safe. The years since 2001 have seen such finite illusions of isolation and security irrevocably altered and a collective vulnerability rise in the vacuum. Today, with the birth of social media and immediate information, terrorism—as a form of reprehensible protest and a desperate act of war—has gained a new fundamental resource: violence can be broadcast around the world the instant it happens. But with this technological upheaval, a new rogue brand of vigilantism has been born online, and is continually gaining strength as the reach of the Internet snakes further into everyday life, hypothetically altering the notion of individual power and America’s sense of justice, all while potentially placing more innocent lives in harm’s way. And still, amid the uncharted and ever violent reality of war, technology, and the Internet, there live people: the scarred and delicate tissue of heart and body, ever healing, deceptively vulnerable, and increasingly alone. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Creative Writing 2016

abstract: In The Queen of Technicolor, poems draw from the lives of Mexican-Americans as immigrants and their experience of otherness. Facets of a more complex identity—assimilation, language, and a shared human experience—are woven to suggest the need for recognition. The poems are set in the Southwestern United States borderlands as well as Mexico during present day but with a layer of narrative reaching back to the 1940’s and the 1910 Mexican Revolution. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Creative Writing 2016

abstract: An exploration of the art of writing fiction through the lens of memory, myth, and the fractured psyche, of performance and spectacle: image, projection, and the secret self. The craft of writing is the craft of myth. The very process of storytelling relies on collective, personal, and historical myth-making - stories surrounding the body and consciousness, collective and personal memory. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2016

abstract: Junctions is a story collection about people at a crossroads, people who crave guidance from an absent parent or partner, people who don't know how to make their next move. Many of the stories are set in and around Charleston where characters push back against having Southern traditions dictate the way they live. Ghosts and spirits roam the pages, helping or trapping the loved ones they are haunting. Elaborate meals, simple comfort food, and even the ceremonial sacrifice of a pelican carry the burden of bringing characters back from the brink of self-inflicted madness and isolation. The complexities of mother-daughter relationships are picked apart and cobbled back together over and over. In Junctions the only way for the characters to reach the next step is to wade through the toughest parts of being themselves. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Creative Writing 2016

abstract: The Wilting Tree is a collection of poems that explores family as the first and final frontier of human connection and understanding. Through three primary narrative threads (parents, siblings and the individual member), the poems excavate the love, longing, betrayal, violence, enigma, joy, humor, compromise, ambivalence, resilience and inevitability that’s found within family and family dynamics, and innovate a mythology to concretize and tribute what often never renders or is kept secret in families over a lifetime. The speaker of these poems serves as both participant and spectator as he reckons with his own (and often secret) shifting loyalty and resignation toward family and his own human development, which has no choice but to play out within the audience of family over many departures and returns. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2017

abstract: The year is 1982 and the Mayan genocide is at its bloodiest. Ava, the daughter of a Ladino meat-shop owner and his bed-ridden wife, marries a Mayan radish farmer known as “K.” After K disappears alongside thousands of indigenous Maya, Ava hides with their daughter, Olivia, inside their cornstalk house in the town of Peña Blanca. When Olivia is infected with lesions, Ava must venture outside for the first time in months and bear witness to the lingering spirit of the disappeared. Inspired by the unrelenting immigrant spirit and one nation’s own brokenness, The Quiet Yellowing of Birds is a novel interspersed between Ava’s privileged past and her harrowing present, between the highlands of Guatemala, the refugee camps of Campeche, and the cacti-lined cul-de-sacs of Arizona. Written in both the past and present tense, this novel is a reflection of Guatemala’s fractured narrative, of the nonlinear immigrant experience. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2017

abstract: The poems in sign on the dotted line to release the record force the gaze to the grotesque & complexity in the pregnant body, to the failure of the medical system, to the mother in birth. With hard syntax & unflinching language, the work spools synaptic lyrics into a graphic cesarean birth narrative that places the woman, in all her vulnerability & ferocity, back into the work of pain, of birthing, of body & mother. It returns not just honesty, but the value of honesty to the birth story: however complex. sign on the dotted line to release the record records & sets the record on fire. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Creative Writing 2017

abstract: The Cries of La Corrida is a longing for homeland. These poems, written in a blend of English and Castilian, are about an American discovering a hidden self, what it means to be Spanish having only experienced that part of his heritage in glimpses. Comprised of three parts, The Cries of La Corrida mirrors the three stages of la corrida, the Spanish bullfight, each part exploring different aspects of self as culture, place, and language. These poems visit Andalucía in the south, País Vasco in the north, and Spain’s capital, Madrid, in the center, in a journey of self-discovery and in search of belonging, family, and home. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2017

<p> The goal of this thesis is to elucidate the nature of character perspective in regard to worldbuilding for a setting. My research involved delving into writing journal articles, examining the formatting of stories in how they introduced their settings, and general reading. My main focus was on fictional tales, especially those that used the traveler archetype. Also, I examined how the reader&rsquo;s view of the given world changes depending on the character whose eyes they are looking at the environment through. In my critical introduction, I address the issues and structure related to use of the traveler archetype in stories. In my own stories, I exemplify these characteristics by showing worlds from different perspectives. I conclude that the traveler archetype works well toward building a setting for the reader to explore due to the perspective it offers, because both the character&rsquo;s and the reader&rsquo;s eyes are fresh when making contact with the foreign.</p><p>

<p> <i>Bitter Soil: Mapping Generational Female Experiences Through Poetry</i> is a collection of creative writing made up of a methodological essay and forty-three poems. This collection, produced during my time in California State University, Long Beach&rsquo;s M.F.A. in Creative Writing program, explores both familial bonds and personal growth. The essay portion of this thesis uproots my family tree for closer inspection as I explain my subject matter, influences, and process, as well as the benefits and challenges of being a woman writer. The forty-three poems within my manuscript specifically focus on my grandmother, my mother, and myself, zeroing in on our experiences as women across three very different generations. These poems are broken into two parts: the first half is about the lives of my grandmother and my mother, and the second half is mostly about my own life, as well as the lives of several other women that have moved me. Essentially, the purpose of my thesis work is to communicate female stories, relationships, and power, using my own relatives as proof in a creative effort to honor the women that I know and inspire those that I do not.</p><p>