Sewanee: School of Letters Theses 2024
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Item Arkansas Psalm: A Childhood(University of the South, 2024-08) Castleberry, Michelle LynnArkansas Psalm is a written hymn to a home state, along with the changeling experience of moving out of childhood. Combining fallible and polyphonic memory with deeply embodied image, the work reaches to address adoptee themes with observation of a place and its inhabitants. Through the eyes of Daughter, Arkansas becomes its own narrator, harboring the human and non-human lives that animate it.Item mixtape(University of the South, 2024-04-23) Huberdeau, William RaymondI was advised to know why I wrote these stories during my defense. It doesn’t really matter what the answer is, but I should be prepared for questions. That’s fair. And I’ve already gotten these questions. My fiancée hates this collection. Earlier visitors to my bedroom have snooped and thought I was writing erotica. Exes think I want to make fun of them. Many others point out that the characters are gross, homophobic, misogynistic, and worse. And I’ll admit, when I read Lolita and even my beloved Catcher, I don’t really separate the authors from Humbert or Caulfield. Martin Amis has had this problem, I hear. If ever I am dually blessed and cursed with public exposure, I will have the same problem. The reason I write anything is to see if I can make x happen, to see if x could be made plausible, sympathetic, even likeable. I think of a bad idea, and I go for it! I say YES! That’s my answer, I guess. There’s a good part of me that’s nervous. I’m a child of the 90’s, and I’m still living there in a lot of ways. It was cool to push boundaries. It’s not right now. But the pendulum swings, and I’m not about to bother with such calculations to publish at the right moment that sales match the public collective consciousness. That’s not my job. My job is to write the stories. To make them the best I can. I did that, and now it’s your turn to read and decide. I do think you come out smarter and wiser for it. I really do think that. But it’s reasonable to disagree.Item Elegy for the Living(University of the South, 2024-04-26) Konradi, Anna KatherinePoetry, writes Audre Lorde in “Poetry is not a Luxury,” is the “way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives." "Elegy for the Living" is grounded in articulation of radical hope. The thesis considers, but fails to answer, the questions: How do we hold hope in a grief-filled world? And, what is the process by which hope becomes radical? Looking toward the self, the world, the abstract, and community, this work is a practice of radical imagination.