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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
I Have Questions, Lorena Matejowsky
I Have Questions, Lorena Matejowsky
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The poems in this thesis explore mid-life feminism, family, mental illness via anxiety and panic, identities of southern girlhood/womanhood, and the challenges of a social media saturated life. Mothering plays a large part in many of these poems, both embracing it and confronting gendered expectations about it. Telling the truth is explored through poems about white women's complicity in racist systems in the southern United States and how being quiet about it benefits us. Fear and the myriad ways it has manifested in my life is a common thread in this work, especially the fears that accompanied white girls growing …
Assisted Living: Stories, Donovan Swift
Assisted Living: Stories, Donovan Swift
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Assisted Living is a collection of stories that explores themes of parenthood, brotherhood, old and new love, adultery, financial strife, and the many faces of loss. The collection offers different points of view, which allow the reader to experience these themes within varying lives and situations. For example, the eponymous "Assisted Living" is from the perspective of a pet-sitter at the brink of losing both her job and husband, while "Holy Mother" explores the point of view of a wife coming to terms with her affair and the physical injury that has changed her husband. "The World of Reptiles" follows …
Latchkey: A Memoir In Essays, Nicole C. Pendleton
Latchkey: A Memoir In Essays, Nicole C. Pendleton
Honors Undergraduate Theses
"Latchkey: A Memoir in Essays" is an essay collection that follows the narrator through her childhood as it relates to being raised a latchkey kid in the 1980s. The lack of published academic studies that follow children through their experience as latchkey kids and into adulthood leaves personal exploration as the primary means through which a child, specifically a young girl, can seek understanding as to how her view of the world develops. Each of the five essays explores issues of autonomy, self-efficacy, sexuality, addiction, and familial bonds. It is through her reflection of specific events – the loss of …
Trauma, Thomas Sokolowski
Trauma, Thomas Sokolowski
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection of stories explores the intersection of emotional and physical trauma. In the title story, a rookie EMT relives his brother's death while caring for a young patient who may be permanently paralyzed. "The Rounds at Blanding" follows a military policewoman at a National Guard training base who confronts a strangely determined trespasser as well as painful memories of her son's absentee father. Other stories, such as "Men My Mother Loved," "Watching Mr. Pete," and "Fighting for Faran," consider trauma-as-heritage by asking young protagonists to navigate the loss, wounds, and abuse of their parents. In the collection, pain is …
The Poems You Don't Own, Emma Reinhardt
The Poems You Don't Own, Emma Reinhardt
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Poems You Don't Own is a collection of poems whose speakers explore the journey from the simplistic perspective of childhood to the confusion of adolescence to the first experiences of sexuality, heartbreak, and grief, examining the religious, societal, and gender expectations that influence those experiences. The collection's reverse-chronological order allows readers to travel back through the many experiences that shape a present moment. In poems such as "The Game of Life," the speaker considers the gender roles that begin to influence our perception of relationships from a young age, while poems such as "What to Know Before Writing about …
The Long And Short Of It, Ciera Mcelroy
The Long And Short Of It, Ciera Mcelroy
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Long and Short of It is a collection of ten stories, spanning centuries and continents, illustrating the universality of loss. Here is a war-haunted Korean vet, brainwashed Nazi brides, a neurotic Soviet ballerina, and a re-imagined Ethan Frome. In these stories, anxiety waits in the wings: will Ethan's wife discover his affair? Will the brides acknowledge the dark truth behind their training? Will a mother recover her kidnapped baby? Characters grapple with grief and anxiety in various ways. Two mothers mourn missing babies: one turns to the occult, the other heads to Mars. Children reel with abandonment: one obsesses …
The Knitting Witch, Katherine Ervin
The Knitting Witch, Katherine Ervin
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Dangerous, magical women live in a world which explores queerness and antagonistic female relationships against the backdrop of Midwestern crafting culture. Craft magic is beauty and cruelty entwined, a perfect tool for witches to use against each other. After her mother is murdered, the eponymous knitting witch inherits a kidnapping and extortion ring, the victims sewn into enchanted quilts and hidden. With her mother dead, political squabbles consume the knitting witch's coven and rival magical families put pressure on her to give up the quilts, including the dangerous Ma family, whose daughter the knitting witch loves. The knitting witch must …
The Storm, Kara Delemeester
The Storm, Kara Delemeester
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Set in a world where natural disasters start increasing in both intensity and frequency, this work examines what it means to be self-reliant when the world is falling apart. As the largest recorded hurricane heads for the eastern coast of the United States, Sierra Egan evacuates her Florida home with her boyfriend and makes her way toward safety - a shelter in Atlanta, Georgia. When Sierra and her boyfriend breakup and part ways along the evacuation route, Sierra assumes her history of self-reliance will work to her benefit. But an anti-government couple, a beach cult, a lonely storm chaser, an …