Sewanee: School Of Letters Theses 2021

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The Give
(University of the South, 2021-09-01) Pedigo, DeAnna Marie
This manuscript represents a progression from adolescence into adulthood with branching poetry narratives that focus on cultural and family dysphoria, the grief of loss, and coming to terms with sexuality and same-sex attraction. I began writing the poems of this manuscript four years ago in my advisor Nickole Brown’s poetry workshop during my first year at the Sewanee School of Letters. The actual manuscript project began in September 2020 at the start of thesis work. I produced many new poems during this time and began organizing and placing them in an order that I hope flows like a book. I don’t feel the manuscript is quite at the point of being a finished, publishable book, as there are some loose ends and empty spaces I would like to expand on in the future. I also have a difficult time ever feeling like a poem is completely finished, and I often spend years revising, especially as my writing style evolves and improves constantly. Since that first term at Sewanee, my writing style changed entirely. I entered the program knowing that my biggest strength is my ability to write metaphors; however, this served as a double-edged sword because my biggest challenge in poetry writing is also the tendency to hide behind metaphors. Nickole was quick and gracious in pointing this out and helping me develop more honest ways of getting my intent and vulnerability onto the page and creating a balance between the metaphor and “saying it plain.” I had been so concerned with the appearance of my poems, making sure everything looked and sounded pretty, that I’d failed to open up with the emotional truth of them, thus keeping readers at an arm’s length. The poems in this collection are a labor of my attempt to stop hiding. They are sometimes dark, full of grief, and deal with uncomfortable subject matter. However, they are also honest, coming from a deeply emotional and personal core, and hopefully they speak to others going through similar experiences. Another challenge I struggle with craft-wise is giving my works an effective title. There are several works in this manuscript that remained untitled for a long time. It is often difficult because creating a title generally takes lots of meditation and reading/re-reading the poem as I dig my way to the truth of the piece. I often feel like my poems must be neatly wrapped packages, and the title is the bow. Even now, I struggle to tell myself that poems don’t have to be clean stories with bookended beginnings and endings and that it is ok if a poem doesn’t answer all the questions or give everything away. I feel a challenge of mine is conveying a story; though I have gotten better at it, and many of the poems in this collection reflect my growth in narrative through poetry. The biggest form of inspiration when writing poetry for me is simply reading the works of other poets. These works and poets include Richard Siken’s Crush, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Julia Koet’s Pine, and many others. There have also been specific works that challenged me, particularly Nick Flynn’s Some Ether, which is a book about suicide. We were assigned this collection my first semester at Sewanee, and to this day, it has been the most difficult collection of poetry for me to get through because of the emotional weight of its content. However, the deeply dark and personal concept of the book really resonates with me in my own writing style, as I write about the death of a close friend and my own struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts; I find that writing from such dark and emotional places creates a difficult balancing act of trying not to hurt myself in the process of getting out my poems. I never finished reading Some Ether, as just getting through a few of the poems would throw me into deep, deep bouts of depression. I hope one day I am strong enough to finish reading the collection and incorporate more of Flynn’s technique into my own writing, but at the moment I must prioritize protecting myself from such a mental state, as I already push pretty hard at times trying to get out emotional honesty in my writings, and finding my limits has frequently been a difficult process. I would also like to give a special acknowledgement to the poets Ross Gay and Claudia Emerson and their respective collections Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Late Wife. I read these books during the thesis writing process. Ross Gay’s I read for the third time, and Emerson’s for the first time, and each writer significantly influenced my work. Ross Gay’s ability to achieve emotional honesty and devastation in his poems while simultaneously carrying such joy, texture, and color is truly something I strive for every time I sit down to write. Claudia Emerson’s beautiful embodied language and imagery, particularly of nature and animals, also struck a deep chord of longing within me and an aspiration to achieve such levels of embodiment in my own writing. My poems have always been colored by the rural Appalachian landscape where I grew up and still live, but I haven’t always known how to write about it in a way that evokes a sense of embodiment. To me, embodiment evokes a sense of deep immersion, of writing a scene or image using all five senses; it’s a slow observation that takes in every detail available, then reinvents that observation in a poem to give readers a sense of authenticity. Another big struggle in writing my poetry has been just that: an oftentimes subconscious revulsion of being embodied, of sitting in my own body and letting my senses speak to me. I was diagnosed years ago with major depressive disorder and often catch myself dissociating as a defense mechanism to hide from pain, whether it be physical or mental. In the process of writing this thesis, Nickole had me do daily embodiment exercises: 50-word writings on something embodied, whether it be the snow on the ground, a housecat’s playful behavior, or even the aches and pains of living with chronic illness. I found these exercises exhausting, small as they seem, but at the same time they invigorated my poetry, kept me grounded as I wrote, and reminded me to get out of the stars and back on my own two feet. This is definitely a practice I will not abandon, even beyond this program, as it pushes me to slow down and pay attention to my senses, which is something I think all people should practice more, whether they be writers or not. I would also like to give my thanks to Tiana Clark, who led the poetry workshop for my last two years at the School of Letters. Her encouragement and positivity has meant the world to me; she taught me not to be afraid of traditional poetry forms nor be afraid to subvert those same traditions and forms. She taught me the importance of communing with significant literary influences on the page, most notably Emily Dickinson, whose life and works haunt me in the best way and who, to this day, continues to be a great muse and joy to study. And finally, I would like to give my last heaping of gratitude to Nickole Brown, without whom I could not have achieved this collection. She has been an endless source of support and calling me out on my own nonsense, keeping me firmly on the wild and winding path, and helping carry me to the end of this four-year-long trek. This collection has been a deeply personal journey of self-discovery and self-improvement in the craft. It was often filled with tears and sleepless nights, feeling like a failure and feeling like I could soar. I am so excited to present these poems, these tempestuous poems that have changed and shifted as I have changed and shifted, all in an effort to achieve nothing more than a simple honesty.
Listening to the “Roar Which Lies on the Other Side of Silence”: Narration, Subjectivity, and Selfhood in Villette and Middlemarch
(University of the South, 2021-04-19) Keim, Carita Beth
This is a thesis about women authors and the subjectivity of their protagonists and narration. In looking at Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and George Eliot’s Middlemarch, I seek to answer a few questions. How does subjective narration change the relationship between the narrator and reader? Why do the protagonists express themselves nearly exclusively in subjective language? Why do the plots of these two bildungsroman lack the linear nature of other novels? In the modern age, how does an authentic self express itself? What is the relationship between subjectivity, desire, and narration? In this paper, I demonstrate the role of subjective communication and the presence of listeners as the fundamental building blocks of nineteenth-century women’s selfhood. First, I discuss what a novel about selfhood (bildungsroman) looks like, keeping in mind Nancy Armstrong’s argument in Domestic Desire: A Political History of the Novel. She writes about the subversive ways women write novels about desire. Next, I look closely at the novels in turn, following a basic pattern found in most bildungsroman—first paying attention to the undeveloped self; next, to the developing selfhood; and thirdly, to the full self. Finally, I consider what implications of each novel’s narrative voice and role of desire have for the reader. In doing so, I hope to encourage a reading of Villette and Middlemarch that harmonizes with the subjectiveness of each text, one that pays tribute to the forms of desire. Villette, especially, has been decried by many as too full of desire. Matthew Arnold called it a novel full only of “hunger, rebellion, and rage” (qtd. in Cooper xxiii); William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë’s hero and friend, commented on her singleness, and even the feminist Harriet Martineau, a dear friend of Brontë’s, called the book “almost intolerably painful” (qtd. in Cooper xxii). In the same vein, critics Gilbert and Gubar call Middlemarch a “Satanically ambitious book, a “home epic” (Finale) that tells the story not of great men but of a “foundress of nothing” (Prelude) (531). These criticisms are addressed fully in this thesis, and the futility and hunger found in both are given context. The joy of Villette and Middlemarch lies in their subjectivity. Their protagonists’ goals are undefined, and their success is felt rather than known. Both narrators of the novels, Lucy Snowe and the omniscient narrator of Middlemarch, seek to transcend the words on the page and reach directly for the passions and desires of the readers through the tools that subjectivity offers. Lucy Snowe does this through symbolism and trance-like writing that seeks to circumvent analytical, detached readings of her story. Middlemarch’s narrator does so by sympathetically bridging the gap between characters, calling upon the readers to feel universal human emotions and conflicts. The narrators of Villette and Middlemarch are best read by readers who suspend judgments and enter into the desires, the interiority of their heroines. Villette does not seek to change the social order of its namesake town, but rather to tell Lucy’s story to the world. In the same way, Middlemarch’s narrator does not seek to change its namesake town, but to justify its characters to the sympathetic reader. In these pages, I present a case for a different reading of women’s novels in the nineteenth century, one that allows for more personal, visceral responses to the texts. This is not to say that scholarly readings are of little or no value, but rather to carve out a place for reading with desire. Brontë sees the need for community, one that requires both listeners and speakers, in the growth of Lucy Snowe. In the same way, Eliot’s narrator creates a community of listeners and speakers, listeners who learn, through the narrator’s gentle guidance, to read between the lines of dialogue, to sympathize and realize the desires of each character.
Christopher Sinclair
(University of the South, 2021-04-24) Cotten, Andrew Peabody
Home after a year-long mission abroad, the novel’s eponymous hero is eager to continue his work with the Sons of Liberty, but a radical splinter group within the organization threatens to erase everything he and his colleagues have worked tirelessly to accomplish. Racing against spies, soldiers, and duplicitous allies, Christopher Sinclair will use his experience as a ranger and his expertise in espionage to stop these extremists before their incendiary plots destroy the very town they claim to be saving. I spent a great deal of time researching the people, events, and places represented in this story. At times, my fascination with the subject led me to overload the text with tangents, unnecessary backstory, and microscopic detail. In The Art of History, Christopher Bram said, “There is pleasure in recovering old things from the junk shop of History, but an overload of details can clog a narrative.” The thesis process allowed me to identify and cut anything unrelated to Sinclair or the central conflict. For example, when Sinclair enters a room, I describe what Sinclair would see, not everything as a means of establishing my knowledge of the era. Setting is an integral part of the story, but I learned through trial and error that “place”—what Welty calls a “lesser angel”—should be secondary to character and conflict. Every historical fiction writer should ask themselves, “Why tell this story, and why tell it today?” This is especially true of the stories ingrained in our public consciousness. The American Revolution, for instance, is brimming with story, but we, for the most part, have stopped exploring the vast history in favor of preserving the narrow myth. Christopher Sinclair takes place during the events leading up to and after the Boston Massacre. Despite being a piece of fiction, I hope to bring to life a complicated story that’s been reduced to Paul Revere’s famous engraving. Since its publication at the end of March 1770, Revere’s “The Bloody Massacre” has transformed from a blatant piece of propaganda to an integral piece of the glorious story we tell about our nation’s triumph over tyranny. I want to tell a familiar story differently, and by doing so, invite the reader to re-evaluate what they know about our supposed “history.” Hopefully, by re-examining the events that inspired the American Revolution, we can better understand the traditions and beliefs we hold so dear today.
Unto Thee Shall All Flesh Come
(University of the South, 2021-08-13) Burger, Timothy Hinton
This thesis was born from two summers on The Mountain, one learning via ZOOM, an Independent Study with the Director, inspiring classes and faculty: and a supportive, nurturing, challenging, and inspirational advisor. It was also born of life experiences, a love of literature and writing, of poetry, people, places, and intellectual endeavors. It is my hope that these weavings come through, a literal textually in the text, containing in it an underlying element of spirituality and embodied thinking, an attempt to veer from any threat of religious dualism that splits the human person into “sacred and profane.” Nearly fifty pages attempts to subvert this habit in Western thought, whether ruminating on Mary Oliver in the Ogeechee River, or recalling a Eucharistic celebration when I could not stop thinking about Jesus’ own body as the location of absolutely everything. This began the thinking of my own body as a particular location for events¬—life-changing, healing, traumatic etc., as a resting place of sorts within myself. The thesis itself is divided into five sections, each with an image of a tattoo, one of my tattoos, as the site of what I have called “exquisite pain.” The act itself is a re-claiming of the body, specifically a queer body that it deeply devoted to “the church,” or the “ecclesia,” the body, and not necessarily the institution. They represent struggle and launching places, and places for memory. The collection weaves with the images and their meaning, but practices what in liturgical language is known as “anamnesis,” or the process of remembering and looking forward. It would have been easy to take the poems and match them all with the particular image and themes they represent, or simply to order them based on topic, though that felt inauthentic to the journey. What is more, in my life as a priest and essay writer of theology, I have woven some prose in the collection to provide context, offer some explanation (loosely), and give voice to some of the poems in a broader way. They reflect the liminality and hybridity of the body, and connect in that way as a part of the manuscript. It is important to note that the collection carries through with both theme and context, style and feeling, image and word, and most importantly, looking back and pressing forward. This is the “anamnesis” spoken of earlier. When first ordering this on a dining room table with painter’s tape keeping pages together, I thought of Susan Grimm’s “Ordering the Storm” and the multiplicity that exists for this—sometimes making sense and sometimes looking like all life’s events falling from heaven during the arc of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. The reader may think they’ve moved from religious “stuff,” and then be startled back to it in another section, because that is the scope of my life. Things are not linear (necessarily). Many of these poems were composed while visiting Georgia while I lived in Massachusetts, and when my life fell apart. They were written from memory, from a deep part of myself that was able to speak out of trauma and pain, and eventually gratitude. As I finish this from Savannah, where I now live, and where I am learning to heal, this collection has given me that gift.

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