McKay, Becka

Strategies of Disconnection is short story collection focusing on memes or rather the intersection of modern internet meme culture, meme theory, and Christianity, capturing the realities of an era of memetic upheaval (in 2016 the search term “Meme” overtook the term “Jesus” in popularity) when the digital and the spiritual seem to overlap, both contending for attention. Memes are culturally analogous to genes, both serving as entities driven toward survival and reproduction. Yet, and entities analogous to genes, memes find themselves contending for survival. These stories inhabit the perspective of memes as characters attempting to acknowledge existence alongside their genetic counterparts: An unnamed creator who falls for Lucy, the first set of hominid bones, an actor who avoids notoriety after having played the role of god, and internet troll Anon, who lives on 4chan.

At any moment, a time comes where young women see their mothers outside of their motherly presence. Viewing them as a person beyond what they have done and accomplished beyond their offspring. What could be worse is the young woman sees and considers the realities and decisions her mother - this woman - has made and disagrees with them. It is a difficult place to be, in a position as a young woman and seeing the future laid before you embodied in the mother figure. The daughter can choose to push back and turn against the mother’s role and the woman she knows her mother to be; in order to terminate this prophesied future. Yet, there is promise if the daughter is somehow able to toss this image of the future aside, along with her ego to embrace her mother as a woman and not as an embodiment of the fear of an unknowable future.

Yesterday Will Come is a hybrid collection of linked short stories that focuses on the way a particular family passes down the family history through physical and emotional memories. The collection largely focuses on the process of making and preserving memories and how the lack of control over one’s memory can lead to paranoia and displacement in their life. Particular value is attached to certain memories and the value and emotion attached can at times overwrite the actual content of the memory. The stories center around the Riviera family and particularly Ana Riviera’s life as she considers the many aspects of her family history she continues to inherit and the comfort and paranoia she associates with such inheritance.

About Her is a story of grief, regret, and the lengths some of us will go to avoid confronting and healing from trauma. Charlotte Day is a twenty-year-old college student embarking on her senior year of college when her younger sister Abby dies in a botched fake suicide attempt. In the wake of said tragedy, Charlotte is left behind with her loving, well-intentioned father and sedated, increasingly distant mother. As Charlotte attempts to cling to normalcy, her efforts fail once she returns to school, seeking out a path of unhealthy relationships and partying, which culminates in the former honors student dropping out of her senior year. A coming-of-age story at its core, About Her explores the dysfunctional ways one young woman navigates grief and fractured relationships while learning to forgive herself along the way.

The nature of conflict occupied my mind as I pieced together the 2016 election.
Much of my dazed shock was the weight of hearing all at once a group of people who had
felt ignored. I felt compelled to write about the nature of conflict — how opposing sides
see one another with similar levels of skepticism and derision that comes from fear that
something essential will be lost. I wanted to write about this without directly discussing
politics. Instead, I used nature. I find warmth and stillness when I’m unanswerable to any
other person as the steady and constant presence of trees and sky contrast my frantic
mind until it slows down. This collection uses nature as a vehicle for conflict – a piece of
land at war with itself, and the fragility of the family who tries to make their home there.

MET4MORFOSES is an interactive multimedia project marrying ancient mythic
narrative, tabloid celebrity worship, bombardment of consumerist driven
advertising, social media, high technology, and futuristic forms of communication
with speculative science fiction.

This thesis is a manuscript of poetry written during my time in Florida Atlantic
University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. The included poems focus on my
positive and negative experiences with travel and cultural identity. These themes
communicate with each other to form a cohesive catalogue of poems of a variety of forms
and styles. My emphasis in writing the poems including in this manuscript was to both
share and learn more about how my struggles with displacement, exclusion, and loss have
led to a greater awareness of my voice, heritage, and craft.

The Perpetual Motion Machine is a collection of creative nonfiction essays about the author and her brother as they have experienced growing up both together and then apart throughout the years of their lives. The essays deal with the pair’s childhood, adolescence and adulthood as well as the issues of depression, anxiety and drug addiction. Some pieces are flash-style and others are longer works of lyric essay or general narrative. The pieces can both stand alone and work to create a larger, substantial narrative on how drug addiction affects an entire family, one’s whole world, thus telling a story about how the author must find herself through investigating her brother’s trials and tribulations with addiction.

As a creative nonfiction project, Island Organic is a hybrid of the genre, a collection of autobiographical essays and profiles of some of Hawaii’s most amazing people and places. The goal was to reveal each person’s contribution to the social fabric of Hawaii, depicting his or her unique relationship with the islands and how meeting them influenced the evolution of my own. While much creative nonfiction has been written about Hawaii and its surfing community, much of it glosses over the serious social, environmental, and political issues unfolding there. Few writers, let alone surfers, have written about America’s current role in the Hawaiian Islands as an example of neo-colonialist authoritarianism.

This collection of poetry and accompanying essay recount the author’s life as
she grows up on a farm in Ireland to leaving and living in America. It is a journey that
begins on the physical, external level and moves into a more metaphysical and internal
one: the field on the farm becomes the field of the imagination; traditional sounds and
rhythms become those of a more contemporary mode. Much of her life is viewed
through the lens of the Irish myth, “The Children of Lir,” which encapsulates the
experiences of exile, loss, rebirth and the construction of identity. The author puts her
background and education in poetry to good use as she deals with the challenges that
arise.