Matching Items (2)
Description
In Memory of an Emily is a piece of creative nonfiction and a short film that together detail the author’s experience with mental illness in the collegiate environment. In its 45 pages, Jackman begins to detail the realities of living with depression, anxiety, and anorexia nervosa. The piece includes five sections of writing, including a preface and four portions describing freshman to senior year. Each section endeavors to explore simplistic and purposefully cliché events common in young adult/collegiate life and juxtapose the banal nature of these events with the experience of the mentally ill. Her story endeavors to explore the emotional truths of pain and suffering, revealing that beneath her tender façade lies a very different existence, one tangled in eating disorders, panic attacks, and overwhelming sadness. While maintaining a story-like quality traditional to creative non-fiction, Jackman ventures to warn with a cautionary tale of pathologizing abnormality and exploring the long lasting effects of childhood trauma. Weaving careful storytelling into an exploration of the mentally ill mind, Jackman keeps the reader both terrifyingly close and far away, whispering painful secrets and then desperately running away with the truth. She speaks frankly of all aspects of life, ranging from far more mundane events, such as break ups and college rejection letters, to complicated issues, such as the suicide of her grandfather and her admission into an eating disorder facility. The author attempts to establish a balanced rapport with the reader, recognizing the need to maintain distance and elicit emotion simultaneously. Jackman writes In Memory of an Emily as a heartbreaking but authentic tale, playing with stream of consciousness and paralyzing emotional description. She opens the door and invites the reader into her mind so as to share in the physical and emotional discomfort of the storyteller, but then promptly slams the door once inside.
ContributorsJackman, Emily Deprey (Author) / Soares, Rebecca (Thesis director) / Barca, Lisa (Committee member) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
In the event of a climate disaster, everything changes, but the places we’ve romanticized as a frontier will become new to us once again. New Sonoran is, in essence, an American story on a global problem. It draws on American pioneer/Old West/cowboy culture, the lasting effects of climate change denial, and the individualism that pervades American culture. I want to use this project to underscore the actual isolation of individualism, as well as create a new story that speaks to a problematic but evocative cultural history while accessing an uncertain future. For this project, I drew from a varied palette of media: comics, video games, and the pervasive cultural malaise that surrounds my current generation.
The work is based in anxieties, but its media influences are a strong indicator of tone and concept. At the very least, they helped me articulate why I wanted to work on a graphic novel on a post-climate change Sonoran. This desert that I’ve grown used to will change irrevocably, but it will be a new frontier to explore while the old will become a loss to mourn. This cycle of change is something I want to highlight in my work: we can worry, mourn, and fear, but there’s going to be something new.
New Sonoran is a graphic novel based upon the journey of Sage, a cartographer and anthropologist who travels the desert, annotating maps and studying a desert irrevocably affected by global climate change. As she catalogues the changes and losses in this new landscape, she learns how residents have adapted, and how people may still relate to the land.
The work is based in anxieties, but its media influences are a strong indicator of tone and concept. At the very least, they helped me articulate why I wanted to work on a graphic novel on a post-climate change Sonoran. This desert that I’ve grown used to will change irrevocably, but it will be a new frontier to explore while the old will become a loss to mourn. This cycle of change is something I want to highlight in my work: we can worry, mourn, and fear, but there’s going to be something new.
New Sonoran is a graphic novel based upon the journey of Sage, a cartographer and anthropologist who travels the desert, annotating maps and studying a desert irrevocably affected by global climate change. As she catalogues the changes and losses in this new landscape, she learns how residents have adapted, and how people may still relate to the land.
ContributorsBarbee, Amelia Bernadette (Author) / Soares, Rebecca (Thesis director) / Schmidt, Peter (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05