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DescriptionThe stories in Backyard Cannibals examine the thin line between connecting with another person and consuming them. They dwell in the intersections of natural and manmade worlds, exploring dislocated bodies, unexpected wildernesses, and the consequences of hunger.
ContributorsDell, Angela (Author) / Turchi, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
In this collection of stories, people find themselves face to face with great trouble: a house lost to flood, a brother lost to the river, a girl on the edge of an adulthood she can't possibly survive. Set in Northern California along the banks of the Sacramento and American Rivers,

In this collection of stories, people find themselves face to face with great trouble: a house lost to flood, a brother lost to the river, a girl on the edge of an adulthood she can't possibly survive. Set in Northern California along the banks of the Sacramento and American Rivers, the stories feature characters who live below the radar of the middle-class. Central to the narratives are notions of loss, lust, pleasure, and struggle.
ContributorsFowler, Courtney (Author) / Mcnally, T.M. (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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DescriptionRest for Machines is a fragmented novel about a woman named Tina Medina
ContributorsFore, Chad (Author) / McNally, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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DescriptionHolidays. Anniversaries. Cocktail parties. In No One Wants to Be Here and No One Wants to Leave, loneliness surfaces in crowded rooms across America. Having gathered to mark special occasions, the people in these stories instead encounter moments where celebration and sadness intermingle.
ContributorsAlbers, Jeffrey (Author) / Mcnally, T.M. (Thesis advisor) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
A collection of six stories. Each story features a different cast of characters, ranging from high-school-aged girls to 70-year-old women in retirement communities. Most stories are told in the third-person limited point of view, and adhere to a traditional narrative structure, occasionally utilizing "found" text, such as letters and an

A collection of six stories. Each story features a different cast of characters, ranging from high-school-aged girls to 70-year-old women in retirement communities. Most stories are told in the third-person limited point of view, and adhere to a traditional narrative structure, occasionally utilizing "found" text, such as letters and an entry in the DSM to advance plot and set the tone. This collection explores the lives of characters afraid to articulate their desires and unable to communicate as they grapple with loss, suicide, trauma, illness, and the dissolution of family.
ContributorsReese, Lyndsey (Author) / Turchi, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Mcnally, T.M. (Committee member) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
This thesis contains stories about loss and the trauma that's felt in its wake. Within all of these stories, characters struggle with the notion of "healing" and "moving on." Whether it be a young boy who deals with his grief by cannibalizing his mother in "A Simple Request", or a

This thesis contains stories about loss and the trauma that's felt in its wake. Within all of these stories, characters struggle with the notion of "healing" and "moving on." Whether it be a young boy who deals with his grief by cannibalizing his mother in "A Simple Request", or a teenage girl who wishes her chronically suicidal mother would finally kill herself in "Little Accidents," all stories within this collection explore the very unique, and human ways, in which people deal with grief.
ContributorsAshworth, Laura (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
These five stories present and trouble a question that has been posed in literature from courtly love poetry to Romantic anti-heroes to the writing born of Twentieth Century human and civil rights movements: what if one's individual desires are greater than or different from what she is allowed by her

These five stories present and trouble a question that has been posed in literature from courtly love poetry to Romantic anti-heroes to the writing born of Twentieth Century human and civil rights movements: what if one's individual desires are greater than or different from what she is allowed by her world, or half her conscience? Where should her fidelity lie? Unrepentant transgression and the penance one must endure after such a choice: in one way or another that recognition and impulse, and the aftermath of following it, is the force that moves characters through these stories. The stories are of romantic love, and the love is both literal unto itself and an allegory: the question of fidelity has to do with the self, as the characters' choice to attain the lover, in each case, is also an attainment of the self because it is an assertion of the "rightness" of individual desire against the decrees of a greater system. The "crossing" thus refers to that of boundaries: the characters make choices to push or break through what is sanctioned and what is untried; they transform; they become from one self into another as they resolve to defy, love, and simply be, drawing new lines through and around their worlds.
ContributorsBoyer-White, Branden (Author) / McNally, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Rusalka and Other Stories is a creative thesis composed of short fiction and the first section of a novel. The two stories - entitled "In Deep" and "The Rain" - are concerned with the troubled relationship between childhood and adulthood, and the complicated network of influences that construct us as

Rusalka and Other Stories is a creative thesis composed of short fiction and the first section of a novel. The two stories - entitled "In Deep" and "The Rain" - are concerned with the troubled relationship between childhood and adulthood, and the complicated network of influences that construct us as human beings. Combining the tools of psychological realism, philosophy, and fabulism, these stories explore the boundary between objective reality and the imagination. The novel, entitled Rusalka, traces four generations of women from pre-World War II Poland to contemporary Chicago. The story begins in 1921 with a powerful Polish woman outside Warsaw making a devil's bargain: she must sacrifice her honor to give birth to a daughter, who will be beautiful and musically gifted. Each subsequent daughter born into the family is a refinement of the woman who came before, including the novel's narrator Luscia - an operatic soprano and new mother, raised in Chicago to see herself as the zenith of her family's strange legacy. In this novel Luscia shares the stories - both historical and fantastical - that shaped her childhood as she struggles with the decision of whether to allow her daughter to be tied to the same birthright.
ContributorsCelt, Adrienne (Author) / McNally, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
This project explores the cultivation of artistic methodologies centered in embodied movement practices. I worked in collaboration with dancers to inform the development of a movement vocabulary that is authentic to the individual as well as to the content of the work. Through the interplay between movement and subconscious response

This project explores the cultivation of artistic methodologies centered in embodied movement practices. I worked in collaboration with dancers to inform the development of a movement vocabulary that is authentic to the individual as well as to the content of the work. Through the interplay between movement and subconscious response to elements such as writing, imagery, and physical environments I created authentic kinesthetic experiences for both dancer and audience. I submerged dancers into a constructed environment by creating authentic mental and physical experiences that supported the development of embodied movement. This was the impetus to develop the evening length work, Flesh Narratives, which consisted of five vignettes, each containing its own distinctive creative process driven by the content of each section. This project was presented January 29- 31, 2016 in the Fine Arts Center room 122, an informal theatre space, that supplemented an immersive experience in an intimate environment for forty viewers. This project explored themes of transformation including cycles, concepts of life, death and reincarnation, and enlightenment. Through the art of storytelling, the crafting of embodied movers, and the theory of Hauntology, the viewer was taken on a journey of struggle, loss, and rebirth.
ContributorsGerena, Jenny (Author) / Standley, Eileen (Thesis advisor) / Rosenkrans, Angela (Committee member) / Britt, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Personal experiences with body image dysmorphia and an eating disorder necessitated that I do a thorough investigation into why they happened and why I felt this way about my body. For this project, not only was I motivated by my own struggles, but I noticed that these experiences were shared

Personal experiences with body image dysmorphia and an eating disorder necessitated that I do a thorough investigation into why they happened and why I felt this way about my body. For this project, not only was I motivated by my own struggles, but I noticed that these experiences were shared among my family, my friends, and my fellow peers in the dance community. We had been struggling since childhood. I began to realize that these behaviors and thought patterns were manifestations of apology, an apology that women have been learning, living, and spreading since our beginnings. Why do women apologize? How does this apology affect how we view, treat, and navigate our bodies in space? In what ways can dance be the mechanism by which we remove apology and individually and collectively find joy, freedom, and liberation? Not only was I interested in understanding the ‘why’, but I was deeply interested in finding a solution. Research for this thesis came from written materials, stories that the dancers and I shared, and choreographic research in the body. The final goal was to create a community-based performance of dance, spoken word, and storytelling that demonstrated the findings from each of those questions and catalyzed a conversation about how we can liberate ourselves. We used rehearsals to explore our own experiences within apology and shame, while also exploring how the ways in which we practice being unapologetic in the dance space can translate to how we move through the world on a daily basis.

Through a deep analysis and application of Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not An Apology, I discovered that apology is learned. We learn how to apologize through body shame, the media, family/generational trauma, and government/law/policy. This apology is embodied through gestures, movement patterns, and postures, such as bowing the head, hunching the shoulders, and walking around others. Apology causes us to view our bodies as things to be manipulated, discarded, and embarrassed by. After recognizing why we apologize and how it affects our bodies, we can then begin to think of how to remove it. Because the body the site of the problem, it is also the site of the solution. Dance gives us an opportunity to deeply learn our bodies, to cultivate their power, and to heal from their traumas. By being together in community as women, we are able to feel seen and supported as we work through uncharted territory of being free from apology in these bodies. By dancing in ways that allow us to take up space, to be free, to be unapologetic, we use dance as a practice for life. Through transforming ourselves, we begin to transform the world and rewrite the narrative of how we exist in and move through our bodies as women.
ContributorsWaller, Marguerite Lilith (Author) / Fitzgerald, Mary (Thesis director) / Britt, Melissa (Committee member) / Lerman, Liz (Committee member) / Dean, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05