Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10217/100417

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Geometry of the altar
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Cate, Chase, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
Geometry of the Altar is a poetry collection that probes the nature of the divine. Through the intricacies of interpersonal relationship, personal history, and spirituality, the poems unfold the experience of recognizing one's conconstitution with other beings. It is through this coconstitution that divinity, that holiness, arises. The poems utilize a variety of forms and voices to explore how one might understand the divine after deconstruction of religious fundamentalism.
Open Access
Constructing stability: IPPC's climate discourse and the challenge of fixity
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Martinez, David, author; Szymanski, Erika, advisor; Amidon, Timothy, committee member; Gallo-Cajiao, Eduardo, committee member
As climate science circulates across scientific, policy, and public domains, its terminology must strike a delicate balance: stable enough to retain authority, yet flexible enough to be understood and acted upon in diverse contexts. This thesis examines how that tension plays out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6)—a consensus document that synthesizes complex knowledge and makes it communicable across discourse spheres. Using Bruno Latour's concept of immutable mobiles, I analyze how the terms risk, vulnerability, and adaptation are circulated and framed across three AR6 enactments. Through qualitative coding and critical discourse analysis, I trace how these terms shift rhetorically across different sections and uses. The findings show that even when definitions are fixed institutionally, key terms shift in response to political and rhetorical demands. This study calls for a reconfiguration of the tools we use to stabilize knowledge: immutable mobiles should be more narrowly defined, and glossaries must evolve into dynamic, source-linked frameworks that account for context and audience. By identifying where stability fractures and proposing new models for definitional accountability, this research offers a revised understanding of how terminology operates in scientific consensus reports—moving beyond the illusion of immutability toward a more adaptive and transparent model of climate communication.
Open Access
Gender dominant interaction design in the Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Lovell, Carrie, author; Amidon, Timothy R., advisor; Szymanski, Erika, committee member; Arthur, Tori, committee member
Interaction Design (IxD) implements rhetorical concerns in the design of digital interfaces, usually used to consider how websites are designed to improve user experience. This thesis applies this concept to the design of interactions in video games, specifically concerning how IxD is engineered to convey gendered experiences. The work with IxD done in this thesis uses Sano-Franchini's concept of Feminist Interaction Design (F-IxD) as a starting point for conceptualizing other ways in which gender impacts IxD and user experience. Specifically, the research question addresses how game design imposes gender and gender ideologies through various interactions and how that impacts player experience through The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (2024). This research was conducted through an exploratory case study, using qualitative coding analysis to identify how the larger community experiences the game within the r/echoesofwisdom subreddit, and using close reading analysis to identify how my positionality impacts my gendered experience through gameplay video capture and field notes. Through this research, it was found that The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom demonstrates shifts in game design that appear to be connected to the implementation of a female protagonist. This thesis (1) problematizes existing research, illustrating that not only is the field viewing gender in video games at a visual surface level, but would also benefit from specific definitions of key terms, such as passive gameplay, and (2) proposes the implementation of Costanza-Chock's existing design justice principles to mitigate existing and future gendered IxD paradigms.
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To the place of no beginning: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Friedman, Jake, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille T., committee member; Orsi, Jared, committee member
To The Place of No Beginning: Poems is a collection of documentary poems exploring a critical history of the American West. Ranging from the Spanish Conquistas in the 15th century to the end of the so-called Indian Wars in the end of the 19th, my work seeks to excavate the founding injustices of America's colonial heritance. As documentary poems, each piece is composed of found text from primary historical sources, which is transcribed, broken down, and rearranged to create something new. In doing so, my goal is to turn the words of empire against itself—to enact some kind of critical, literary resistance, to perform a rhetorical analysis or deconstructive reading.
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Sedimental: a geomemoir
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Tabb, Rebecca Lynn, author; Dungy, Camille T., advisor; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, committee member; Lajarin-Encina, Aitor, committee member
This Creative Nonfiction MFA Thesis is a book-length work comprised of two essays which are modeled after the process of sandstone formation. The work covers the first two of four sedimentary phases, Erosion and Transportation, using sedimentation to understand the limits and impossibilities of preserving memory. The writer, also a climber and painter, uses the sandstone formations around Horsetooth Reservoir, where they love climbing, as an entry point for grief, eventually exploring what it means to construct a more ecologically-centered life experience. The work is hybrid-genre, including paintings, and photographs from the writer's father, speaking to the aesthetics of geomemoir, visual collage, and, more broadly, the intangibility of grief. The essays, Erosion and Transportation, are the writer's attempt to understand what preserving love and life means, how they got to be where they are, and, principally, who has influenced their journey.
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To own your name in gold
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Palacios, Ainhoa, author; Altschul, Andrew, advisor; McConigley, Nina, committee member; Quijada, Martin, committee member
To Own Your Name in Gold is a collection of interconnected stories exploring the intricate relationship between identity, migration, and the pursuit of the American Dream. Through the lens of a mother and daughter navigating their new lives in the United States, this collection examines the emotional and cultural costs of assimilation. The stories trace their evolving relationship as they balance nostalgia for the home they left behind with the pressures of adapting to an unfamiliar world. By centering the experiences of first- and second-generation immigrants, the collection interrogates both the promises and illusions of the American Dream—what it offers and what it demands in return. At its core, this work considers the weight of names, language, and heritage in the process of self-definition. The stories highlight the tensions between survival and belonging, between remembering and reinventing, and between the narratives imposed upon immigrants and the stories they craft for themselves. To Own Your Name in Gold ultimately seeks to illuminate the fractures and resilience found in the immigrant experience, portraying not just what is gained, but also what is lost in the journey toward belonging.
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The way blood dims: a novel
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Dykstal, Henry Burke, author; McConigley, Nina, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; Mansfield, Mike, committee member
The Way Blood Dims is a novel chronicling the early life of Southerncross Kite, from his boyhood raised by an artist collective in Alabama to his teen years as a member of a secret military unit in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. Blessed with an unusual appearance and a talent for violence, Kite begins to interact with the world in a story of how history shapes humanity, and how humanity shapes history.
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Rupture
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Bucheli Peñafiel, Carolina, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Dungy, Camille, advisor; McConigley, Nina, committee member; Martin Quijada, Carmen, committee member
This collection of short stories is tied together by the genre known as Andean gothic which fuses the indigenous and mestizo cosmovision, myths, symbols, believes, worldviews, legends, and imaginaries of the Ecuadorian geographic area, with the realities of Ecuadorians' everyday lives. Rupture is a collection of eight short stories that center around these realities in terms of gender, power dynamics, self-discovery, the paranormal, religion, culture, race, politics, gender, loss of innocence, migration, and dislocation. In addition, they circle around mysteries detonated by these intersections, realities, and sometimes even around violence and horror. The title comes from the concept of capturing decisive moments in all the characters in this story collection life, where something about their worldview got disrupted, and they had to move out of their zone of familiarity (not necessarily comfort). All of them are traversing the known into the unknown and are learning lessons from the world that surrounds them. All of the stories border a tangible world, an internal space, and oftentimes a paranormal space as well. I didn't make the distinction of whether or not an otherworld or a paranormal world exists or if it's a product of the character's minds and beliefs, since that is not precisely the point of the stories. The point is on how they shape and intersect with the lives of the characters. I wanted to pay homage to the stories I grew up hearing where all these elements mixed in a natural unquestionable way, where they are not mutually exclusive.
Embargo
Digital network composing practices: digital removal in the Try Guys media ecology
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Banuelos, Mia, author; Amidon, Timothy R., advisor; Doe, Sue, committee member; Elkins, Evan, committee member
With an increased accessibility and democratization of digital editing tools, recomposition has the potential to occur to any text or artifact circulated in a digital space. One form of recomposition that must further be considered is digital removal practices, including erasure, deletion, deflection, and exclusion of human or non-human objects in a digital composition. These practices have the potential to impact digitally networked composing practices and how we think about rhetoric and writing in media ecologies. This thesis focused on the intersection of digital removal practices and Ridolfo and DeVoss' theorization of rhetorical velocity, which considers composing for recomposition, and its co-influence on digitally network composing practices. Through a case study of The Try Guys, a group of popular YouTube personalities, this thesis explored the influence of a participatory culture in a media ecology and the role recomposition plays in a public scandal. Data was collected from The Try Guys media ecology surrounding the removal and/or revision of a former member, Ned Fulmer, and the larger medial ecology comprising The Try Guys' social media presence. These data illustrated the significant influence of participatory culture, as an influx of users associated with The Try Guys fandom contributed to the rhetorical velocity and recomposition of information and context produced by the Try Guys. Specifically, data illustrated that participatory cultures can and do shape how digital removal unfolds within and beyond digital networks. This thesis (1) emphasized the increased influence of a participatory culture on the curation and circulation of content in a media ecology and (2) explored how digital removal practices have the potential to influence how we theorize rhetorical velocity and how we must be strategic for composing as authors, writers, users, creators, inventors, teachers, and students.
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Sung ritual
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Culbertson, C., author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member
Sung Ritual is an ecstatic record of the queer, neurodivergent poet's coming-to, as if waking to the present from an oracular dream made up of repeated memories of the past. Part confessional and part self-reckoning, this collection tries to account for the facts of one's life and how those facts come to shape present-day relationships with the world and others. The tradition of the ode after Whitman becomes a ritual in which the poems form a chorus resolved by taking-up of the proper pronoun "I" only in the collection's final pages. The song there formed anticipates future(s) wisdom informs cannot be imagined without the poet's attending to living's antecedents.
Open Access
Impacts of trauma in school environments on ELA teachers: an interpretative phenomenological analysis
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Robinson, Kit M., author; Ginsberg, Ricki, advisor; Nam, Rosa, committee member; Kennedy, Alexis, committee member
This study was conducted as an interpretative phenomenological analysis of five secondary English Language Arts Development teachers in Colorado. The study aimed to understand the impacts on ELA teachers, specifically their perceptions of their instruction and ability to remain in the classroom, following traumatic experiences or exposure at work. By using an interpretative phenomenological analysis we can see the spectrum of perceptions and insights ELA teachers have into navigating through trauma as professionals charged with supporting the academic and social development of our students. Data was collected in the form of one-on-one interviews with the participants. The interviews were guided by questions designed to investigate the forms of trauma exposure or experience in school environments they had as teachers, the impacts these events had on their instruction and desire to remain in the field as a classroom teacher, and overall observations and perceptions into what supports were provided or desired. Interviews were recorded and transcribed and the data was coded inductively. This study was then organized as a narrative to examine the intersections and revelations found in teachers' various perceptions of shared traumatic events. While not generalizable, this study aims to elevate these insights to further conversations on trauma in school environments and how we comprehensively support those in charge of supporting the students.
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Love is a series of vaultings
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Grabowski, River, author; Candelaria-Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Payne, Sarah, committee member
This creative writing MFA thesis, Love is a Series of Vaultings, is a book-length collection of poems and essays that seek transformation by resacralizing the speaker's queer body and metabolizing the violence of white, evangelical Christianity toward a more ethical, ecological ritual consciousness. The writing is hybrid in medium and genre, which speaks to its attempts to defamiliarize easy boundaries of time and space, prose and poetry, text and image, body and world, nature and culture, spiritual and material, and male and female, ultimately disrupting an organizing hegemony of dualism that categorizes, oppresses, and generally tells an uninteresting story of the world. The method of the book's inquiry is an essay, in the old French etymological sense—an assai—an attempt, an experiment, a verb: how might the queer body recover from ecstatic wounds, illness, and isolation? The book is this speaker's attempt to become embodied in the world, to seek an alternate sense of spirituality that will satisfy the highest frequency of their (be)longing.
Open Access
Crossroad of change
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Melendrez Valenzuela, Bianca, author; McConigley, Nina, advisor; Ginsberg, Ricki, committee member; Aragon, Antonette, committee member
Crossroads of Change is a collection of eight short stories. The collection is comprised of characters who are of Latinx/e ancestry and who are, for the most part bilingual in English and Spanish. My goal for this collection was to create something that spoke to me as a reader who grew up in America wishing to see more stories that had characters that lived in similar spaces as I did as a child. Each story represents its own unique setting that represents different aspects of the character's lives, some characters are traveling through the United States and Mexico, others live in the US and others live in Mexico by the US border. This collection represents a culmination of my creative writing effort across the three years I've spent in this program—most of that effort spent in this last year was fine-tuning the language used by these characters, and the different ways I could present these Latinx/e characters while staying true to the medium in which I am writing in. I wanted to see what the limits of translanguaging was when it came to creative writing and the different ways, I could incorporate the language barrier that some of my characters exist in and portraying that to my audience without taking my character's identities as Spanish speakers away. My influence for this was from reading excerpts from author Gloria E. Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera. She was a huge inspiration in deciding to write about my culture while also adding in my native Spanish language. Amongst the language aspect of my writing, I also played around with the narrating POVs. This collection hosts stories that range from first person narrator to second and third person narrators, in my attempts of telling a variety of stories with different perspectives, as I wanted these Latinx/e characters to be viewed in varies angles and perspectives that counters the one-sided narratives often portrayed in contemporary writing.
Open Access
Transgressions
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Zero, author; Limlamai, Naitnaphit, advisor; Doe, Sue, committee member; Coffino, Kara, committee member
Transgressions aims to use poetry to explore the intersections of transgender and transitional identities in education spaces through the lenses of queer theory, literature studies, and autoethnography. I address the lack of representation of transgender voices and experiences in historical literature and poetry (the classroom content) in addition to my experiences in the classroom itself. The objective of this study is to use evocative methods that intentionally resist hegemonic expectations to highlight the importance of trans*poetry as an essential tool for self-reflection and identity formation and to point toward new methods for teaching writing that reflect the lived experiences of learners in the margins. The methods used in this study are autoethnographic and involve self-reflexive analysis of my own post-secondary academic experiences and literature-based analysis of my own poetry (written throughout my academic career). My study reveals insights into the nuanced experiences of the learner and educator in post-academic spaces, and the results of my research indicate that trans*poetry has the power to challenge dominant narratives; the power to ground, historicize, and contextualize self-narratives; and the power to create space for marginalized voices to be heard in and out of the classroom. In conclusion, Transgressions offers a new perspective and framework to study identity and history in post-secondary education spaces. It highlights the importance of experience and creative expression as sources of knowledge and understanding and proposes a new historiography that centers the voices and experiences of transgender people. While this study has its limitations, it is hoped that it will inspire further research into the intersections of poetic expression and self-identity in post-secondary classrooms.
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Pardon blooming
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1983) Hayden, M. D., author; Ude, Wayne, advisor; Tremblay, Bill, committee member; Mitchell, Carol, committee member; McMurray, George R., committee member
A toad, a butterfly, a human being, a philodendron, all need sustenance, need air; all grow and change. Clamp a bottle over a living creature and it suffocates, its movement restricted, its possibilities limited. For an individual, rigidity becomes a glass bottle, and those who struggle to escape the bottle must experience something painful in the process. Glass bottle. Rigidity of society and tradition. For some, rigidity comes from their own acceptance of society's rules or tradition's importance. A creature raised in the confines of a glass bottle is uncomfortable with sudden freedom, as uncomfortable, perhaps as a free creature confined. For others, rigidity is imposed from the outside. These rigid boundaries of society and tradition may not be apparent until they conflict with the individual's inner needs for growth, but when they do conflict, the individual must find air to breathe. Some escape the glass bottle; most don't. Glass bottle. Rigidity of linear time. Although the concept of time as linear is arbitrary in Western thought (some American Indian tribes do not have such a concept), most of us assume our past happened to us in the time line before now. If we remain always the same person, the past, the memories happen continually. But if we have grown and changed, we are not the same person as the child of ten, the adolescent of fifteen, the young adult of twenty. The memories we hold happened to a different person because we are always becoming someone else. Linear time does not allow this idea, but circular time, or even spherical time, does. Glass bottle. Rigidity of gender. Separation of the sexes by innate differences or by imposed societal roles creates a rigid boundary that obscures the commonality of human experience, that denies the similarity of emotion and need in men and women. The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are 'the opposite sex'--(Though why 'opposite' I do not know; what is the 'neighboring sex'?) But the fundamental thing is that women are more like men than anything else in the world. 1 Glass bottle. Rigidity of language. The boundaries of our language define the boundaries of our world. Those things we cannot perceive, we cannot say, and vice versa. The stories in this collection seek to express what our language has no way of saying, to escape a rigid structure, voice or time, to break glass bottles.
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Immeasurable mouth of night
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Seebeck, Tashiana, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; DiCesare, Catherine, committee member
This thesis is a collection of poetry concerned with the unconscious interior: dreams, nightmares, memories, and the liminal space between. The poems are committed to a necessary logic of surreality and formal experimentation.
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Coraline Connors, a catechism
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Clark, Megan, author; Altschul, Andrew, advisor; Vara, Vauhini, committee member; Diffrient, Scott, committee member
Below is the story of Coraline Connors, a sixteen-year-old Catholic, lesbian runaway. Coraline is mouthy, irreverent, and acerbic, but, above all else, Coraline is a lost kid looking for a place to belong. Told in first-person point of view, this novel follows Coraline's journey from her childhood home in rural Pennsylvania to the Cambridge, Massachusetts radio station in which she was conceived. This thesis is interested in girlhood, coming of age, queer identity, and religion—in particular how the latter two intersect. It is dedicated to all the real-world Coralines.
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Eldest daughter
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Emerson, Anna, author; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Shutters, Lynn, committee member; Gerst, Katie, committee member
Eldest Daughter is a memoir in essays that explores the boundaries of home and self, braiding together threads of the Midwest, horses, grief, illness, water, and family. By structuring itself into three "waves," Eldest Daughter underscores the currents of mourning, loss, and becoming. When we meet the narrator, she is stuck in the middle of a Midwestern flood, trying to wrangle horses from the mud as her mother seeks to save their home from destruction. This starts the work off with the explicit statement that this is a narrator at a crossroads—or perhaps a series of them—as we watch her navigate the intersections of grief and family, femininity and masculinity, horse and human, and landscapes of both the Midwest and Colorado. By the end of Eldest Daughter, the narrator has a better understanding of the contours of her grief, anger, and role as the eldest daughter. As such, the pieces in Eldest Daughter attempt to answer, in sixteen pieces and just over two hundred pages, questions of: How do I grieve loss? How can I attempt to name the unsaid, to give it life and depth? How and where do I feel at home? Or, more specifically, how, and where, do I feel like myself?
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Terminator: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Roth, Laura, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Osborn, Erika, committee member
Fittingly, the first seed of Terminator is rooted in an ending. Before I knew "terminator" as the line of separation between the illuminated and unilluminated parts of the Earth, before I knew that I wanted to pursue an MFA in writing, I found myself split by the sudden loss of the hearing in my left ear and the resulting onset of my chronic tinnitus. This event, which took place years prior to any inkling of these poems, feels like an important place to begin. Unexpected and inexplicable, partial deafness was a "little-a apocalypse," one that revealed much to me about the subjectivity of perception, the body's volatility, and my own mortality. Perhaps this is why when, in the first semester of my master's degree, I stumbled upon the astronomical definition of a "terminator," a shock of recognition bolted through me. Like a planet, my body understood what it was to exist continuously in the space between two different qualities of light, what it was to live past the boundary of my reality. Though I didn't immediately latch onto the "terminator" as the structuring metaphor of my thesis, the poems I wrote for workshop naturally grew out of questions about the gray areas within my own being— between self and other, subject and object, subconscious mind and waking mind, human and more-than-human. These concerns are reflected not only in the content of my poems but also in their formal experimentation, which often approaches the page as an illustrative canvas where the black text can flow into organic shapes or trace stark boundaries. For the permission to be explorative in my composition, I am indebted to Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" and Lyn Hejinian's "The Rejection of Closure" as well as the countless poets who have laid their own foundations in "field poetics." Through the reading I've done in this program, my concept of the "terminator" has also taken on more sociopolitical dimensions. In particular, the pre-Socratic philosophers, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Prismatic Ecology, Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects, and the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty have helped me to see this project as a lens through which to think about human induced climate change and all the "endings" (and beginnings) it entails. At the same time, Terminator continues to be extremely personal to me. During my third semester of the program, my own world ended and renewed once more as I came into my queerness, a shift that continues to transform my close relationships, my embodiment, my value system, my orientation to the past and the future, my creative ethos. Affirming my gender and sexuality after a lifetime of suppressing them has opened fresh inquiry into my "shadow selves"— what parts of my identity do I allow myself and others to perceive? What parts are concealed? How are these unilluminated aspects of myself stored in the body? Once again, the terminator has come to represent an internal boundary for me, between who I believed myself to be and who I am becoming. As a result of these changes, I have had to reconsider how to situate myself in my world and, therefore, in my poems. In the past year, my poetic practice has expanded to encompass more intuitive and playful components, ones that honor pieces of myself that I'm not fully conscious of. When I find language by drawing words from a bowl, performing an erasure, or making a kind of "mad lib" out of a poem's syntactic structure, I am often surprised by my own instinctual knowing. "Origin of Blue," "Frequency," and "Worries" are all examples of poems that have emerged from these kinds of procedures. Despite the progress I've made, what you'll find in this manuscript is, as of yet, incomplete. As a recovering perfectionist, that's something I'm proud of. I'm excited to continue learning on the "terminator," to continue realizing some of the themes that interlace through this collection. In the immediate future, I plan to travel to Cleveland, Ohio in order to witness the last total solar eclipse that will pass through this part of the world during our lifetimes. I can't say exactly what will come out of this experience, though I admit I'm nursing a poem— a long one, perhaps bound by formal or temporal constraints (thinking about Alice Oswald's "Tithonus: 46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn"), that might divide this collection down its center. That would seem very right to me. My hope is that Terminator can offer a space where macrocosm and microcosm intersect. Like the Fibonacci spiral, which represents at once a seashell and the shape of our galaxy, I intend for this collection to touch deeply human concerns and deepen them still by contextualizing them within the reality that we live in a universe, a universe that moves in cycles that are both predictable and beyond comprehension. Humans have invented all sorts of explanations for our improbable existence— mythologies, religions, political regimes. No matter how advanced our technology or grandiose our scripture, all the intricacies of human and non-human life are conditional on something entirely out of our control: a cosmic agency that brings both light and dark, summer and winter to the face of this planet. We don't get to choose when or how the sun rises and sets. We don't get to choose our bodies, how they change, how they age, how they die. And maybe that's a good thing. It might be the one experience that we all have in common.
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American feral: a novel
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Freedman, Benjamin, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; MacKenzie, Matt, committee member
At its core, this novel centers around Pep Olsen, a fifteen-year-old boy living in the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State in 2004. He navigates his overactive mind and anxiety, absence of his dad who works on a nuclear submarine, seeking popularity in school, adolescent relationships, burgeoning bicurious desire, and fascination with a stranger who has recently been going around town, violently killing and displaying animals. Eek! The backdrop to this local violence is the Iraq war. A different sort of violence, but no less gruesome. The war has taken over the consciousness of the community and is usually present, humming in the background of the novel. Pep navigates his own still-forming thoughts on the U.S. and its invasion of Iraq, which is put in conversation with other main characters—Grandma Bee, Ken Olsen, and Vice Principal Sanders—who each see the horror of war but react in radically different ways. Often times, characters like the Vice Principal, Clint Shackton, and others act or say things with direct allusion to historical events or speech. There's also some philosophical references and literary allusions going on, though I hope it's not too heavy-handed. I think there's also this recurring theme of human and animal, how slippages between the two can occur, and how this period makes "animals" out of folks, and what that allows to be viewed as "legitimate." The way in which stories are constructed, how the media describes violence, and the mythmaking of war are all important. It's probably worth mentioning that I also recently read a ton of weird, early 20th century American political thinkers like Walter Lippman and Edward Bernays, who sort of professionalized and developed the idea of propaganda as a "necessary" means of controlling public opinion. Those ideas are present throughout, as I see a direct intellectual through line between that era and how the Bush administration riled up war support. Grandma Bee's leftist political tendencies are a nice foil to this. It also pretty explicitly deals with the somewhat uniquely American phenomenon of both being one of the most destructive, violent international forces, and yet almost uniformly not viewed as such within the country. Delusion and how such a picture of the world is formed seem to be important questions. Thematically, one of the things I attempted here was put the early aughts nostalgia of boyhood and dial-up internet and old video games and high school culture in direct proximity to the horrors of this period. I try and let the two bounce off one another, and hopefully this helps contribute to the slightly eerie, off-kilter atmosphere of the book. On a craft level, there's a few things I tried. First, the whole book takes place over roughly two and a half days, so naturally there is a lot of expansion of moments here, living inside the head of Pep and others. There's also an abundance of dialogue, at times spanning pages. I wasn't expecting this when I started, but it quickly grew to become an essential part of the pacing of the book as well as deepening the characters. And it was also, well, fun as hell to write. There are also some bigger ideas I played with—reality and distortion, the function of language, and what the line between mind and world is when you're writing from the perspective of within someone's head, etc.

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