Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Still Waiting For A Cure, Uchenna Emenaha

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

Poetry elicits emotions and imagery, which can capture the sentiments of the collective experiences that educators and our society are experiencing during this moment in history. This poem calls to attention the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our country through social distancing precautions put into place to curb the spread of the virus. The verses in the poem speak to the loss of community and celebrations that occurred during this time. The poem concludes by addressing the racial awakening that has also taken place during these unprecedented times. The pandemic reduced many of life’s distractions allowing a …

Balance, Nafisa Choudhury

be Still

As the COVID-19 pandemic grew into a frightening monster to be reckoned with, medical professionals throughout the world had to address a question within themselves: where does the balance lie between our duty to heal and our personal obligations for our individual health and safety?

As personal protective equipment shortages, long work hours, and hospital overflow wreaked havoc on the medical systems nationwide, doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel were plunged into uncertainty and were almost wholly unsupported in this ethical dilemma. Our duty to treat and our obligation to treat the community around us does not often directly conflict …

Dear Future, Sarah Kerby

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Dear Future is a children’s book that gives the main character Lucy, and our younger readers, insight into life during the COVID-19 pandemic through the form of letters. In the story, Lucy decides to question her mother about the pandemic after vaguely hearing about it throughout her childhood. Lucy’s mother was also not alive during the pandemic, but shares letters written to Lucy’s namesake and grandmother Lucille. The letters throughout the story are real letters written by 17 anonymous individuals about their current Covid experiences. Through this book I hope to teach others in the future about the hardships we …

News And Notes

Appalachia

A COVID-19 timeline of how backcountry groups served the public during summer and fall 2020. AMC’s shelter caretaker program reaches the half-century mark. Appalachia archives now hosted on Dartmouth Library’s Digital Commons three months after publication.

Trail Etiquette 201: A New Code For A Complicated Era, Mike Cherim

Appalachia

White Mountain professional guide Mike Cherim sketches a new guide for giving right-of-way to others in the mountains, post-COVID-19.

In Praise Of Poetry: Using Poems To Promote Joy, Community, And Social Emotional Learning During The Pandemic, Jordan Virgil, Katie Gallagher

New Jersey English Journal

No abstract provided.

Subversion Of Form: Mixing Poetry And Prose, Darby Alexandria Brown

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

My honors thesis project is called Subversion of Form: Mixing Poetry and Prose. The purpose has been to research how writers have interwoven poetry and prose, to write a creative nonfiction piece that uses both genres, and to improve as a writer through committing myself to this piece and solidifying writing as a daily practice. In my introduction, I outline the research I conducted on poetry and prose and my takeaways from the writers I read. I conclude that the purpose of prose is to tell, while the purpose of poetry is to search.

The piece that I have worked …

Self-Portraits Of The Byelingual Immigrant, Sujash Purna

MSU Graduate Theses

The following poems chronicle the journey of a contemporary Bangladeshi-immigrant poet living in the United States of America. Divided in three sections, the poems serve as self-portraits that peek into the complex psycholinguistics of the immigrant writing in a second language. The poet offers sketches of different aspects of his immigrant life through self portraits. While mostly autobiographical, the collection offers poems that serve as commentary on the socio-economic reality of workaholic American life. Through exploring the self as a bilingual poet, the poems serve as critiques of the socio-political systems of this country. “Self-Portraits of the Byelingual Immigrant” also …

Let's Do This Again Sometime: A Novel, Caleb Bouchard

Fiction MFA Theses

None provided.

News And Notes

Appalachia

A COVID-19 timeline of trail and outdoor facilities closings in the northeastern United States.

There Was No Mountain: But There Were Memories—Of Shoes, Elissa Ely

Appalachia

Instead of hiking up mountains during spring 2020, a writer and community psychiatrist walked in her memories. The stories in her head start high on ridges but soon sink close to the ground: she thinks about shoes.

The Shaking Trees: In The Forest, Catching Up With Mom By Phone, Andrew Jones

Appalachia

A student navigates his mother’s phone-in advice to stay safe during the COVID-19 pandemic while exploring a suburban fringe of trees in Pennsylvania.

Katahdin: Standing Above Unsettling Thoughts And Emotions, Anthony Emerson

Appalachia

It’s May in Maine, which usually means spring, snowmelt, and restless hikes over blowdowns. But in spring 2020, Katahdin in Baxter State Park is closed, and a young writer must walk in and stay low.

Lockdown In The Alps: All Quiet In Chamonix, Doug Mayer

Appalachia

At noon on March 17, 2020, in the French town where alpinism was born, everything stops. No one is allowed out without completing a form and is forbidden from going farther than 1 kilometer before turning around. Doug Mayor, who lives in Chamonix, describes the seven weeks of le confinement.

Androscoggin Constant: The Town Belongs To Geese And Bears, Judi Calhoun

Appalachia

When the world goes quiet, an artist takes her sketchbook to the Androscoggin River across Route 16 from her Berlin, New Hampshire house. She befriends a gaggle of Canada geese near the empty school fields and quiet streets where bears also wander.

Seasonal Affective Reorder: Which Reality Is Capable Of A Pause?, Sarah Ruth Bates

Appalachia

A young woman has flown home from graduate school in Arizona to suburban Boston for a ten-day spring break. She finds herself living and teaching from her childhood bedroom. She rambles around outside every afternoon, watching old snow melt, crocuses bloom, maples leaf out, adjusting to the cycle of change.

Eight Weeks On Scudder: Writing From The Pandemic At The Fringes Of The White Mountain National Forest, Sally Manikian

Appalachia

On the fringes of the White Mountain National Forest, in Shelburne, New Hampshire, a dog musher forges a close-to-home walking route where she can feel safe, both physically and spiritually.

The Vertical Mile: An Obsession Of Repeated Climbs, Stephen Kurczy

Appalachia

At a secluded 32-foot-high crag in northeastern Connecticut, a climber gives in to his obsessions, tallying 5,280 feet in repeated climbs. Urging him on is legendary repeat climber Ken Nichols.

The Closed Outdoors: A Hiker Quarantines In New York City, Derick Lugo

Appalachia

“My first impulse was to flee to the mountains.” But that is not happening. A hiker copes with quarantines in New York City. Every day brings new extremes and new tests of this Appalachian Trail thru-hiker’s optimism and sense of humor.

Special Feature: Mountains In A Pandemic

Appalachia

Writer-adventurers from New York to the Alps describe how they dealt with the early quarantines of COVID-19.

Three Poems In Search Of Justice: A Postmortem, Dean Rader

Journal of Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Scholarship

Writer, poet, and professor Dean Rader in Three Poems in Search of Justice: A Postmortem, explores the idea of poetry as a form of justice and shares three original socially-oriented poems as part of a poetic/political project or as he shares “outward” versus “inward” facing.

Lawthy: Holding Flowers, Bailey Pittenger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The research and design of this dissertation involves four parts: 1) Bridges to Care Work in the Sick Room, an essay that begins bridges across care genealogies, foundational literature on nursing and sick rooms, and applications of care work and care logic via local protest, civic, and community engagements; 2) “Writing Lawthy,” which is a process-based approach to literary and social sciences research on “writing on memory loss” and dementia narratives that center personhood and autonomy; 3) Lawthy: Holding Flowers, a fragmented novel created by first-hand accounts of caregiving, a 1981 journal, and fiction; and 4) appendices of local city …

Occluded World, Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The poem is part of a manuscript in progress loosely tethered to the Agoo apparitions during the early 1990s.

A Father At 1.5 Metres: Poems Of Pandemic And Fatherhood, Edward J. Leeming

Theses : Honours

'A Father at 1.5 Metres: Poems of Pandemic and Fatherhood' is a 36 poem collection with a connecting theme of uncertainty informed by John Keats‟ concept of negative capability. Negative capability, a term introduced by Keats in 1817, suggests that a writer is benefitted by a refusal of the formation of concrete ideas, that being in uncertainty without needlessly chasing after truth allows for a better understanding of the world, and of more perspectives in their writing. The negatively capable writer is more open to possibilities and of exploring new ideas; this allows them to pursue what Keats calls “beauty”, …