Digital Commons Network^™

Field Of Play, Lauren Tess

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Breathing Hard In Beautiful Places, Lars Chinburg

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Chinburg, Lars, M.S., Spring 2024

Breathing Hard in Beautiful Places, Abstract

In Breathing Hard in Beautiful Places, Lars Chinburg explores his connections to the people and places that have made him who he is in a collection of personal essays. The collection is inspired by the talents of many writers–Bill Bryson’s wry travel observations, Norman Maclean’s lyricism on the interplay of nature and family, Sigurd Olson’s gorgeous descriptions of place, and David Sedaris’ knack for drawing hilarity out of the prosaic, among many others.

Many of the essays touch on the power of play as a force for good and …

Brat Olympics, Caroline Ganci Patterson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

brat olympics is an exploration of feminine disgust, apprehension, and disorientation contextualized through interpersonal relationships and societal shapeshifting. It pays particular attention to gender performance, surburban queerness, and strangerness. The manuscript plays on the history of the bildungsroman, but instead of one consistent singular timeline, it provides three separate attempts at a characterization of a life. These disparate approaches to a singular life’s characterization stress the mundanity of documentation.

This multinarrative approach satirizes the ideal of the singular confessional, and presents a discursive approach to the way we choose to build our worlds. Building off the works of the New …

A Constellation In Training, Marko C. Capoferri

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Capoferri, Marko, M.F.A., Fall 2023 Creative Writing - Poetry

Light, Loneliness, and Location

Chairperson: Sean Hill

In many better-known works by the 20^th century painter Edward Hopper, I find a locus of visual concerns that overlay the fixations of the majority—if not all—of the poems that comprise my thesis, what I like to think of as the three L’s: light, loneliness, and location (to which I could also add, as secondary colors, longing and landscape). Additionally, there are what Mark Strand identifies as “two imperatives” in Hopper’s work, “the one that urges us to continue and the other that …

Sudden Oak Death, Jeffrey William Guay

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

A novel set contemporaneously in rural Montana, Sudden Oak Death follows two protagonists, Wade and his teenage daughter Paige. Each are fighting different addictions, as Wade is in alcoholism recovery, and Paige recently came home from a drug treatment program. In order to succeed, Paige must reintegrate herself into public high school, despite suffering from undiagnosed dyslexia. Wade is raising his family as a single father, and struggles to maintain his emotional stability in the face of his own recovery.

Green Poems, Lillian I. Emerick Valentine

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

With broad lyric range, the ecopoems in Green center around the ideology and ethics of the American West. The speaker’s position within that as a descendent of settler laborers is interrogated, as well as language itself. Grammar is used as a tool to perform deconstructive work, examining how labor intersects with colonialism and climate change. Melding intellectual analyses of etymology with the physical act of agricultural labor, these poems range from the conversational and playful to lyric explorations of loss.

Interwoven with this is the speaker’s self-examination of femininity and matrilinear inheritance. How do we use the language we’ve been …

Islands In The North, Kirstie Catriona Clinko

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Islands in the North is a coming of age Y.A. novel, set first on the Isle of Lewis in the Scottish Hebrides, then Vashon Island in Washington State. Dwyn is fourteen and three quarters, and she has attended Bridgely School in Manchester, England, since kindergarten. At Bridgely, she can truly be herself. A straight ‘A’ student, an accomplished pianist, a good friend. Dwyn is a stand-in mother for her five-year-old brother, James. Their absent father is a merchant marine who sails the seven seas and is little more than a pen pal for Dwyn. Her abusive mother dates a Scottish …

Against Nightfall, Anna Omara Edwards

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

The Biome Within: Conception And Change In The Paradise Valley, Austin Kirchhoff

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Biome Within is an essay collection that meditates on change. Born and raised in the Paradise Valley of southwest Montana, Austin recounts stories from her childhood, painting a picture of rural life in the Valley that contrasts with its modern-day incarnation as a luxury get-away and millionaire’s playground. Even as Austin pines for a time and a place that no longer exists, embodying the nostalgia that she identifies in the Valley’s transplants, the reader comes to understand that the author – and her family’s way of making a living – are culpable in creating the changes that she now …

Undammed: A Narrative, Mark Abram Schoenfeld

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Having left behind the religious faith of his youth, the narrator charts out a new belief system rooted in learning the manifold stories that make up a place and its people. More and more, the narrator feels drawn to the river, which forces him to confront the impact his city and the seven reservoirs above it have had on the waterway.

Witness This Thing So Tender, Erin Marie White

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

At once fantastical and down-to-earth, the poems of Witness This Thing So Tender are concerned with the convergence of the speaker’s many selves and influences. Gritty and mysterious happenings shape the speaker’s physical, emotional, and psychological circumstances in the world. Whether the triggering topic is ecological, parental, or sepulchral, the work of the poems is to examine and integrate the changeable natures of memory and reality.

Each poem in the second movement of the collection, entitled “Lunar Cycle,” employs the idiom Once upon a time as its entry point. This small, well-worn turn of phrase operates as a springboard into …

Wayfinding, Kalani N. Padilla

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Asked For Another Mountain, Nichole Lynn Moore

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

How To Eat, Brianna T. Franklin

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Under Night's Darkness, Alexandra Fiege Ore

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Under Night’s Darkness follows Landry, who has recently been paroled from prison and returns to his family home in rural Montana. He has recently become a born-again Christian and is in the midst of a frantic final attempt to redeem himself after a lifetime dedicated to bullying and cruelty. He’s not only haunted by the specters of domestic abuse and sexual assault, but also by the ghosts of the recently dead. Enraged at the failure of his tragicomic attempts at redemption, Landry commits the sadistic murder of his own brother. The ensuing cycle of revenge destroys Landry’s family and Landry …

Beulahland: A Novel, Emily Ann Marie Nelson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Beulahland follows Esther and Beulah Baxter, a pair of orphaned sisters traveling across the American west with their evangelist uncle in 1994. Raised on the seedy motivational speaking circuit of small towns and youth groups, Esther is determined to free Beulah from this nomadic way of life under from the neglectful care of their uncle August, a fame-chasing bodybuilder who wants to bring the world to God through his demonstrations of physical strength. This plan is put on hold when Beulah falls ill during a routine performance in the wildfire-wracked town of Orchard, Washington, and almost dies; her near-death experience …

Essays And Novel Excerpt, Mirela Music

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Theory Of Care, Gabriella Ann Graceffo

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

With a backdrop of the body and its inner forms, Theory of Care is a collection of poems and lyric excerpts that explores themes of queer sexuality, physical and mental health, etymology, desire, and physicality. It coheres moments of internal reckoning with an exploration of how trauma lives in the body, particularly the queer femme body. By accessing various landscapes including the medical sphere, family dynamics, and the social environments of the South, the collection grapples with different vernaculars to question how the language used to discuss (or dismiss) trauma dramatically alters the perception of those experiences.

No Other Gods, Hubble Stark

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Water Lake And Other Stories, Allison Rose Levy

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This excerpt from the novel Water Lake takes place at an undisclosed time in an undisclosed American location called Water Town. It primarily follows Jason and Holly, who are employees at Water Hardware and lifelong residents of the insular, religious, isolated town. Water Town is in constant industrial and environmental decay and hosts many mysterious natural and social phenomena such as an unusual amount of animal deaths, a gender ratio skewed disproportionately towards men, and a single seal in a local body of water hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. During an episode of impulsivity induced by neurological trauma, …

Wet Specimen, Abigail Lee Raley

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Cystic fibrosis is a condition which thickens the mucus throughout the body of the afflicted patient. Bob Flanagan, in his book The Pain Journal, ventures to record that sort of physical experience, as it pertains to the daily practices of his art, leading up to his death. Flanagan expounds on given relationships between his sadomasochistic performance art and the pain of his body in his poem “Why.” Richard Siken, too, in his book Crush, explores the embodied violence of gay lust, love, and obsession. WET SPECIMEN finds itself amongst these traditions, as it ventures to explore the animality …

Gigi, Helen Wesley Kapp

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Francis’s grandpa taught her how to wrestle alligators. By the time Francis was sixteen, she could hold her own, but all it takes is one gator. Just one gator who almost gets the best of you, and suddenly you’ve got a dead animal; somebody’s getting stitches; you’re getting haunted by the ghost of the alligator you just killed; and your mom’s making you move to Charleston to attend a swanky prep school where the kids don’t wrestle gators, but surviving the gossip is even harder.

Into The Tidy Shape Imagined, Hope Isabella Ruskaup

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

No Diving From Bridge, Lia R. Mendez

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Lia Mendez grew up on the frontlines of America's breadbasket in the great Central Valley of California where Big Ag and Big Oil reign supreme. When Lia returns home after a long absence and joins local activists in her hometown's fight to reclaim its dying river from agribusiness, she discovers that the land holds secrets whose truths have been long hidden in plain sight. As Lia's love and concern deepen for the very place she promised herself she'd never wind up in, so, too, does her understanding deepen of the systems of oppression and extraction which rule her world. In …

Trailing Fire: Working In The Woods And The Future Of Forests In A Chaotic Climate, Claire Kilchrenan Thompson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Our national conversation about wildfire is shifting. As wildland fires become larger, more frequent, more severe, and more expensive—and as climate change and land-use patterns drive the trend toward more fire—we’re scrambling to find a different paradigm for engaging with fire. Scientists now call this age of increasingly extreme burning the Pyrocene, and we’re just beginning to grapple with its impacts on the way we work, play, and live on the land.

As a longtime trail worker for the U.S. Forest Service, I’ve spent hundreds of days clearing trails in burned forests. In Trailing Fire, I draw on these …

The Waning Days Of Projection In The Mountain West, Samuel Gwinn Dunnington

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Waning Days of Projection in the Mountain West is a novel featuring a young narrator named Argus, who worked for years as an apprentice and assistant to a documentary filmmaker named Max Morgen. The novel begins years after Argus and Max have gone their separate ways. Max has recently died, and his final wish was that his son send Argus all the footage they’d acquired over their years together in order to edit and complete the film Max originally set out to make. Argus must decide how to proceed.

Mother Superior, Brandon R. Hansen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Prologue /The Lake Within

I am a fisherman. Every time I raise my arm to cast, I’m searching for an answer.

What is a lake?

I throw my lure at the lilies of my childhood, the sunken log of my crib. With every cast I hope the truth will follow it back, this little piece of me I offer to the mystery.

My earliest memories are at the bus stop, where a shroud of mist swirled about me and I listed side-to-side, six-AM eyes drooping while I waited for that big yellow ship to bust through the fog and …

Other Orchards, Sam B. Robison

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Other Orchards is comprised of poems each suspect in their own way of those boundaries that might separate humans from nature, rural from urban, worker from scholar, or human from beast. Using the figure of the orchard, a kind of “false forest,” this collection studies the ways we map ourselves onto our work and the way work might inform an understanding of the self. Ultimately, these are poems that emerge from the seams of things—the shoulder of highway strewn with dead antelope, the feral apple tree lost to the woods, the farmer lost in their work, slowing becoming less and …

The Curiosociety, Luke G. Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Traversing Paradigms: An Environmental Journey To Body And Mind, Martin Ceja Mejia

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Traumatic life experiences altered the way I perceive the world. As a result, I embark on a journey to reshape my relationship to self, the built and natural world; to environment. In this thesis I ask: How do I want to relate to the environment? Considering I am a doubly colonized agent, I also aim to decolonize my relationship to environment along the process. Therefore, this work aims to formulate a new, personal, relationship to environment through academic literature, history, psychology, Indigenous knowledge and science, and literary studies, among other fields of knowledge. This work is interdisciplinary in nature; life …