Bucak, Ayse Papatya

Animalization is a creative nonfiction manuscript comprised of essays which are able to stand on their own, yet gain complexity as they inform one another. Each essay epitomizes the narrator’s attempt to reconcile with emotional instability, self-destructive behaviors, dangerous relationships, the ethics of who has to suffer, and a masochistic brain disorder. This manuscript follows its narrator’s young life as she attempts to understand herself through lived experience, as well as the lives of some extroadinary family members. The narrator’s lifelong fascination with animals supports her desire to understand pain as an applied ethical consideration and an enactment.

Feed is a novel set in a fictional post-revolutionary Nebraska, at a time when the developments and progress of the revolution begins to come into question. The former revolutionaries must dive into an internet-like database, referred to as the Feed, in order to unearth memories critical to their survival.

Hoops and Other Essays is a collection driven by form and lyricism threading themes of grief, fatherhood, joy and anxiety. I place myself within an American landscape spanning South Florida, Northern Alaska, and Montgomery County, Maryland. Anchored by non-linear structures, an exploration of trauma, and a delight for language, these essays depict the coming of age of a thirty-year-old man who seems to be still coming of age. Poop is a theme; Nature is a theme. Speaking aloud to no one is a character trait, and iguanas are a motif. Hoops and Other Essays pulls free the particulars of the universal struggle of trying to be okay when things hardly ever seem okay. The collection comments on the inevitably of dying shared among the living and the pleasure and pain that emerges from loving what has to end. The essays were written over the course of two years after the sudden loss of my brother which was quickly followed by the birth of my son. In the end, Hoops and Other Essays tries to unravel how one fits between the polar opposites of human existence, with the hope to uncover more likeness than difference in the way we enter and the way we leave it.

This thesis is composed of a collection of essays on the themes of motherhood, loss, and grief. Through the use of innovative form, these essays thread together personal narratives and research to find language for complicated manifestations of loss. These essays experiment with structure and form to grapple with the illusive nature of memory, loss, and healing. The essays in this collection attempt to find healing and meaning through language and meditation. This collection is also an attempt at categorizing grief when normative societal ideas are challenged by complicated loss. This work serves as a call to action that there should be better recognition of uncommonly recognized manifestations of grief.

All Return is a short story collection centered on nostalgia, and the desire of going back to a place or time, which sometimes doesn’t exist anymore. The characters that populate the collection, are all returning or trying to go back, either to a physical place, a language, to an age of innocence, or to loved ones.
While the book tries to portray stories of immigrant lives in parts of collection, the desire of immigrants to sometimes return to their countries of origin are not exclusive to them, but universal. The stories in All Return remind us that we are all going back, or long for a place or time that exists without us.

The story, This Kind of Trouble, follows the life of its protagonists, Margaret, a 65-year-old woman living with schizoaffective-disorder in 2012 Nigeria, and her estranged husband, Benjamin, a White presenting man born to mixed raced father. Although Margaret exudes class privilege, she pursues in her retired years a kind of desperate anonymity, often complicated by echoes of her past: an ex-husband, and the haunted past of an unforgivable crime from which they must now seek absolution.
Indeed, the story attempts to invert the discourse on illness and assimilation, as well as on race and citizenship. It does this by tackling the themes of colonialism, cultural identity, and the formulations of the Immigrant v Expatriate trope. Essentially, through this work I ask two critical questions: how has colonial mental constructs travelled over time, and how does a person become Black in the global Western imaginary?

Hostis is an epistolary memoir navigating the web sexual violence weaves and examines it as a communal problem of those caught in the threads who become victim to the vibrations of that violence.

They Don’t Disappear is an alternate history novel following Bess and Harry Houdini’s lives after Houdini does not die from appendicitis in 1926. The novel addresses themes of belief, and the hope that intimacy—in all its forms—might be an antidote for trauma, violence and hate.

Rat Mouth is a collection of fictional stories that speak to the absurdity of girlhood. These stories focus on the precarious situations women are put into when their physical bodies are valued more than their internal lives.

Home Home is a collection of nonfiction essays addressing themes of mental health, popular culture, queerness, setting, and sexuality.