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- All Subjects: Creative Project
- Creators: Department of English
For this Creative Project, I decided to explore the elements that set novellas apart from other genres and then experiment writing in the form. In doing so, I took into account three main categories: Plot Structure, Character Development, Style/Format, and then used my findings to write 45 pages of a novella titled Emmy and Me.
The COVID-19 Pandemic has provided a challenge for educators to create virtual learning materials that are engaging and impactful during times of high stress and isolation. In this creative project, I explore the variety of virtual tools and web applications from Esri by creating a Story Map on the Verde River Watershed. This Story Map is intended for an audience of students in late middle school and early high school but can be a resource to teachers for a wider age range. The integration of interactive technology and virtual tools in educational practices is likely to continue past the immediate circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this Story Map is to showcase one of the many uses for geospatial web applications beyond the immediate realm of GIS.
In other stories (wherein Paul tries—and often fails—to figure himself a secondary character), the tangled lives of his immediate social circle unravel, overlap, and disintegrate amidst the decaying milieu of the Scene and the maddening sprawl of Phoenix. A brief sampling of happenings: Sophie confronts ideological qualms with capitalism by way of a summer gig selling knives to depressed housewives; Brett nearly burns a house down on the Fourth of July; hallucinogenic kombucha is foisted upon a hapless Alex; black mold overtakes Paul’s residence; etc.
The core text is followed by an afterword supposedly written by (the perhaps psychotic) Saul P. Thomas Marton, Ph.D. and acts as an academic analysis of the nonexistent film adaption of Miserablists. There, Marton places Marston’s work in conversation with many influential critical text and works of fiction that shaped the formation of Miserablists (including Roland Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse, Slavoj Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad).
In “Playing the Changes,” we meet two men stranded in a small desert town in 1972, a time when their attraction to each other is still dangerous. Nile Walker is a jazz musician, running from a spurned lover and the law. Benji Garza is a once-devout Catholic, fixing cars and caring for his orphaned nephew, Hector. Walker and Garza’s affair will spin both lives and their heredity into sweeping tragedies that characters battle with lust and melody. Walker has a son he never meets, a drifter who finds connection with another lost soul at an airport in “La Petite Mort.” Hector is forced into early adulthood in “The Words,” when his ailing uncle’s health fails due to a mysterious disease not yet called AIDS. Later Tre—a young man struggling with the weight of his own lineage—meets him in “PHX.” These stories examine questions of death’s causes and its myriad effects, and offer this solution: Knowing that we cannot know everything, and living, loving, and singing anyway.