Sewanee: School of Letters Theses 2012
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Withhold Not Correction(University of the South, 2012-05) Clark, Christopher D.This collection of short fiction explores the notion of correction centered in an attachment to the Proverbs 13-24 accounts involving discipline: restitution as punishment, restitution as loving response or as intended guidance. The stories take on the various forms and repercussions of correction. Each character encounters these in meaningful ways and at different times. Occasionally the characters exist as the acting agents of recompense and at other times the objects. The work is written in the Southern literary tradition: mostly local, working-class, and agrarian. They attempt to contend with the significance of faith, family, place, and the harsh realities of life involving cultural and generational shifts. The work hopes to encompass a modern existence in the American South without arriving at a caricatured representation.Item Thresholds(University of the South, 2012-05) Parker, DonaldThis collection of poems is about thresholds, some crossed naturally in the process of birth in a particular time, family, place, and with certain accompanying circumstances. Other thresholds are approached knowingly, with a conscious decision made to cross or not. Some thresholds open doors, bring joy, life; others close doors, bring pain, death. In every case, we are shaped by the thresholds we cross or turn away from, and by our memories of them: beginnings, pauses, stops on the journey between first and last breaths. The arc of the collection moves within the two main dimensions of time and place. It moves from longing for the past in That Road, That Roadside to accepting the past in the final companion poem, Beyond Blackberry. In each section, explicit and implicit thresholds are being crossed that represent physical and emotional life snapshots. The movement builds from the first section’s mostly nostalgic mood with memories of a Southern childhood, family warmth and tragedy with hints of a darker side in Saturday Outings, to the world beyond family in A Day in the Life of A. Stone. The second section places increasing emphasis on the rhythm of life, including its fragility and mortality, its uncertainty, its moments of pleasure, and the senselessness of life lost in war, as seen in Marcellin and Blood Chit. And yet hope triumphs in the concluding poem, Snow on a Robin’s Wing. Section three continues the focus of section two in a general sense, and also presents some very personal thresholds crossed in Alabama Summer 1944 and in the culminating poem, Easter Sunday. The final section reprises earlier themes: the transitory nature of life, the need for choices, war, and, in the collection’s closing poem, Beyond Blackberry, the present pushing out the past, with memory functioning as a positive catalyst for living in the present.Item Dollars and Nonsense: Women at Work(University of the South, 2012-05) Grissom, CandaceDollars and Nonsense: Women at Work is a collection of creative nonfiction essays based on the personal experiences of Candace U. Grissom and the women in her family. Intended to be both truthful and humorous, the four essays each explore the challenges of a different occupation in which the author has been engaged. The first essay, “On Top of a Goldmine, But Still on the Ground,” describes lessons that the writer learned while working in her family’s jewelry store in a small Alabama town. Next, in “The Reluctant Advocate,” the author chronicles her unfulfilling legal career, including struggles with an overbearing senior partner at a law firm. In the third essay, “The Room Where Songs Go To Die,” the writer gives readers an insider’s look into the business side of Nashville’s Music Row. Last, in “Cruise of the Rolling Adjunct,” the author describes how her six years of teaching as a part-time adjunct instructor almost ruined her dream of becoming a college English professor. Culminating in an ending that is hopeful without being sentimental, Dollars and Nonsense shows how being a young working woman can be a difficult, yet rewarding, experience.Item Casting Nets(University of the South, 2012-05) Gunkel, Kay ExleyCasting Nets is a collection of thirteen short stories each with a protagonist who clings fiercely to her (or, in a few cases, his) individuality. Ten of the thirteen stories are set in Savannah, Georgia, a coastal small city whose history, architecture, salt water creeks, and grace are as unique as the characters portrayed in the tales. Savannah becomes a player in nearly every story; she influences the personalities of the characters, as other human beings in the stories cannot. What is the isolation of the individual soul, and how can a longing for love affect that soul’s uniqueness? Is there a community of life that betrays individuality, or can community enhance a person’s rareness? The protagonists of the stories range in age from eleven to sixty-nine. From the youngest to the oldest, they look death in the face and defy it. They each protect their personal freedom but hold out hope for keen relationships with other people. A spider entraps prey in her web; a shrimp net tucks crustaceans into a snare; mirrors reflect images of reality with smudges; repentance lives in quiet, shadowy places.Item Singing Iris(University of the South, 2012-05) Dunmeyer, Wendy“Singing Iris” loosely interprets the concept of Dreaming to examine how ancestry, places, losses, and rebirths echo within a person’s life. “Dreaming” refers to an indigenous Australian tribe’s or individual’s unique creation stories, which relate how ancestral Spirit Beings created everything from Australia’s landscape (generally called “Dreamtime” or “The Dreaming”) to each individual and his/her specific relationship to the Spirit Beings, the land, and his/her tribe. With their representations of how each living thing influences every other and the perpetual natures of time and of creating, Dreaming stories are the foundation of all aspects of an indigenous Australian’s life and are passed from generation to generation in tribal rites, dances, stories, songlines, and art. In keeping with how indigenous Australians understand, own, and respect their Dreamings, I based this collection on my maternal ancestry and my own life. I combined fact with fiction to create emotional truths about how heritage, home, and physical, emotional, and spiritual losses and rebirths reverberate in one’s life. In addition, I utilized the free verse and traditional poetic forms in various accentual-syllabic and syllabic meters used by the American and British poets who form my literary heritage. I did not retell any indigenous Australian Dreamings, tribal or individual; these stories are not mine to tell. The spirituality inherent to Dreamings, however, offered me a way to cross generational lines and reconsider family stories from broader perspectives to better understand my grandmother and thus myself. “Singing Iris,” then, is the beginning of my Dreaming, my first uncertain steps toward appreciating the various influences that resound throughout my life and poetry. The collection’s opening epigraphs, as well as several poems, acknowledge a few of the many poets who have influenced my poetic development and this work. Section I, “My Grandmother’s Last Letter,” relates the places and the physical, emotional, and spiritual losses and rebirths that shaped and echoed within my grandmother’s life, starting with her homeland and birth and concluding with how her death prompted my Dreaming. Section II, “On Seeing the Hunt at Dusk,” relates the places, losses, and rebirths that have shaped and continue to reverberate in my life, starting with my childhood and concluding with one of the lessons my grandmother taught me. Section III, “Terpsichore,” depicts various literary characters or themes that demonstrate how home, loss, and rebirth shape every living thing’s life, starting with an echo of one of my own life’s losses and concluding with the echo of my grandmother’s spirit, reborn and still singing. Throughout the collection, I employed various points of view to manipulate tension and utilized those poetic forms that I felt most naturally reflected an individual poem’s era, emphasized its theme, or suited a speaker’s voice. The chronological arcs of sections I and II and the thematic arc of section III reveal parallels that resound within each story. Finally, the collection’s title acknowledges how my grandmother and her “songline” helped shape the woman and poet I am.