Creative writing

This thesis is a collection of essays related to place, including meditations on different landscapes, examinations of historic place-based research, and an exploration of environmental and cultural issues.

This creative thesis is a collection of poems and lyric forms that explore queer identity and difference through the fraught navigation of heteronormative spaces and institutions such as the American school system, the Catholic Church, and marriage. Included are letters-as-poems, journal fragments, and extended lyrical sequences that serve to highlight the significance of community and chosen family to queer identity. When they aren’t addressed to an imagined recipient, they are dedicated to or in conversation with friends, family, lovers, strangers, past selves, and other writers. Although the three sections (LETTERS, FIRE, and HEARTH) that demarcate this work chart a thematic chronology that organizes stages of a queer life, memory isn’t cleanly linear. Poems pour into and echo each other, signifying embodied history in the present and the past’s bearings on queer (re)imaginings of the future.

Self-Gardening seeks to explore the oftentime selfish rationale behind seemingly selfless decisions. In dissecting my motivation, I found insecurity. I don't garden for the joy of it, I garden to feel valuable. Beneath my desire for children, lives the terrifying hesitation of putting more bad into the world. While this thesis does look to shine a light on uncomfortability and insecurity, it has no interest in poking or prodding them. Acknowledgement and awareness are enough.

The stories in Nameless in Z take place in the fictional city of Z, located on the northwestern coast of the US. The throughline of this collection tracks alternate versions of the same male narrator as he subconsciously pursues relationships in an attempt to supplant his own destructive addictions. The first half of this book dwells more in the relationship aspect, while the second half owns up to the consequences of the first half.
Each story involves the titular city tormenting the narrator in a way that physically and/or spiritually manifests his specific addiction. Speculative fiction elements hang around the fringes of each of these stories, typically through different forms of the supernatural. The purpose of this work is to give a voice to underrepresented aspects of addiction and to disentangle my own demons; the ones I’ve inherited as well as the ones I’ve created as a direct result.

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.

Imagine Me Like That offers an exploration into an experience of one coming to terms with one’s unique trans and queer identity through ecological and nature-based connections, as well as through interpersonal connections. This collection utilizes both poetry and lyric essay to offer insights into the joys of queer ways of living, while also acknowledging the difficulties of occupying a marginalized identity. Ultimately, Imagine Me Like That seeks to affirm and acknowledge the multi-faceted modes of queer existence.

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.

body as / is a collection of poetry exploring the body, mental health, spirituality, environment, and family.