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- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
DescriptionI Hate Everyone But You bears witness to the quiet moments that force us to confront ourselves. In these stories, people in search of connection--to lovers, to family, to strangers--instead discover their own secrets: truths both haunting and empowering.
ContributorsGoldman, Rachel (Author) / McNally, Mike (Thesis advisor) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This essay is an exploration of Michael Holladay's interests in style and influence related to his writing and overall writing process. I've chosen a selection of books that both reflect my interests as a writer, books that I've loved and have informed me in the past which continue to inform and inspire on each re-read (Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, for example) and also books I hadn't read and needed to in order to challenge myself with writing I haven't been exposed to yet so I can continue to grow (I hadn't, for instance, read Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson or Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel before preparation for this essay.) The fiction I've chosen to discuss strikes a balance between favorites that have formed me up to this point and new work to "fill in the gaps" of books I needed to read. Additionally, I've chosen a selection of books on craft to provide a lens for thinking about writing. Finally, I've also included work in other genres that inform my fiction (Ryan van Meter's creative nonfiction essays, If You Knew Then What I Know Now and Andrew Haigh's film, Weekend.)
I've intentionally chosen work that is diverse in both form and content. I have more linear fiction represented (William Trevor, for example) matched with work that's fragmentary and language focused (Christine Schutt's Nightwork among others) since I'm interested in how linear form and fragmentation can intersect, and I've been experimenting with both during my time in the program. And in terms of content, the majority of the work speaks to my interest in how region, specifically the South, impresses itself on sexuality and gender, specifically queer or decentered sexuality and gender. So I have books with a heavy focus on region (Daddy's by Lindsay Hunter and Girl Trouble by Holly Goddard Jones) and work that explores the complexities of sexuality and identity (Michael Cunningham, Edmund White, Alexander Chee, and I'll mention Haigh's film Weekend again because it's always worth mentioning again.) These works will help synthesize and bring together my interests in style, language, structure, and form, and in content.
I've intentionally chosen work that is diverse in both form and content. I have more linear fiction represented (William Trevor, for example) matched with work that's fragmentary and language focused (Christine Schutt's Nightwork among others) since I'm interested in how linear form and fragmentation can intersect, and I've been experimenting with both during my time in the program. And in terms of content, the majority of the work speaks to my interest in how region, specifically the South, impresses itself on sexuality and gender, specifically queer or decentered sexuality and gender. So I have books with a heavy focus on region (Daddy's by Lindsay Hunter and Girl Trouble by Holly Goddard Jones) and work that explores the complexities of sexuality and identity (Michael Cunningham, Edmund White, Alexander Chee, and I'll mention Haigh's film Weekend again because it's always worth mentioning again.) These works will help synthesize and bring together my interests in style, language, structure, and form, and in content.
ContributorsHolladay, Michael (Author) / Ison, Tara (Thesis advisor) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The American culture of capitalism and consumerism is predicated upon the idea that the individuals inside the system are safe. The years since 2001 have seen such finite illusions of isolation and security irrevocably altered and a collective vulnerability rise in the vacuum. Today, with the birth of social media and immediate information, terrorism—as a form of reprehensible protest and a desperate act of war—has gained a new fundamental resource: violence can be broadcast around the world the instant it happens. But with this technological upheaval, a new rogue brand of vigilantism has been born online, and is continually gaining strength as the reach of the Internet snakes further into everyday life, hypothetically altering the notion of individual power and America’s sense of justice, all while potentially placing more innocent lives in harm’s way. And still, amid the uncharted and ever violent reality of war, technology, and the Internet, there live people: the scarred and delicate tissue of heart and body, ever healing, deceptively vulnerable, and increasingly alone.
ContributorsGarrison, Gary Joshua (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
An exploration of the art of writing fiction through the lens of memory, myth, and the fractured psyche, of performance and spectacle: image, projection, and the secret self. The craft of writing is the craft of myth. The very process of storytelling relies on collective, personal, and historical myth-making - stories surrounding the body and consciousness, collective and personal memory.
ContributorsHutson, Elizabeth (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Junctions is a story collection about people at a crossroads, people who crave guidance from an absent parent or partner, people who don't know how to make their next move. Many of the stories are set in and around Charleston where characters push back against having Southern traditions dictate the way they live. Ghosts and spirits roam the pages, helping or trapping the loved ones they are haunting. Elaborate meals, simple comfort food, and even the ceremonial sacrifice of a pelican carry the burden of bringing characters back from the brink of self-inflicted madness and isolation. The complexities of mother-daughter relationships are picked apart and cobbled back together over and over. In Junctions the only way for the characters to reach the next step is to wade through the toughest parts of being themselves.
ContributorsHickok, Chelsea (Author) / Ison, Tara (Thesis advisor) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / McNally, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The Book of Mortimer is a satirical account about the rise of a new modern day Mormon woman prophet named Champ. The mother of six—and wife to a very codependent man that can’t be left alone with a comfortable couch—believes a new testament is buried in a small field conveniently next to her kids’ bus stop. Taking place in a lower class area constructed entirely of beige apartments in Mesa, Arizona, The Book of Mortimer plays on similar themes of the early day Mormon Church and reimagines this American religion if it were discovered in the 21st century. Complete with an elite Home Owner’s Association, a corrupt frozen pizza company, a ten-year old capitalist, a trio of milk purveyors that hold a group of unfortunates hostage in the biggest grocery store in The United States, and an elementary school that is quite possibly run by a Neo-Nazi principal hiding his identity, The Book of Mortimer is an exhaustively entertaining novel, exploring themes of poverty and class, relationships and commitment, and figuring out one’s self-worth in an overwhelming world of persuasion and guilt.
ContributorsWilcock, Heath (Author) / Ison, Tara (Thesis advisor) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Rios, Alberto (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This project uses the tools of speculative climate fiction to explore and imagine the future of the United Nations climate negotiations in each of the five Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios. Climate fiction (cli-fi) proves a powerful but imperfect tool for envisioning future challenging and turning scientific models into meaningful narratives.
ContributorsHudson, Andrew Dana (Author) / Hirt, Paul (Thesis advisor) / Klinsky, Sonja (Committee member) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
The Desert Southwest has no shortage of representations in literature, art, and film. Its aesthetics—open horizons, strange landscapes, and vast wilderness—inform and saturate the early Western films of John Ford, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and continue in today’s popular imaginations. My work acknowledges such contributions and then it challenges them: why are those names more widely associated with the Southwest than Luis Alberto Urrea, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, or Pat Mora?
The project intersects the environmental humanities, critical theory, and cultural studies with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages, as well as nonhuman forces and intensities like heat, light, and distance. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void or wasteland, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality of desert place. My work is interdisciplinary because the desert demands it. It begins with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in order to reorient readers towards the rupture of the US War With Mexico which helped set the national and cultural borders in effect today. I then explore Denis Villeneuve’s film Sicario to emphasize the correlation between political hierarchy and verticality; those who can experience the desert from above are exempt from the conditions below, where Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood take place. The novels expose the immanence and violence of being on the ground in the desert and at the lower end of said hierarchies. Analyzing Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mora’s Encantado enables what I term a desert hauntology to produce a desert full of memory, myth, ancestors, and enchantment. Finally, the project puts visual artists James Turrell and Rafa Esparza in conversation to discover a desert phenomenology. The result is an instigation of how far is too far when decentering the human, and what role does place-based art play in creating and empowering community.
John Ford was from Maine. Georgia O’Keeffe, from Wisconsin. Edward Abbey, Pennsylvania. As someone born and raised in the Desert Southwest, I’ve written the project I have yet to encounter.
The project intersects the environmental humanities, critical theory, and cultural studies with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages, as well as nonhuman forces and intensities like heat, light, and distance. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void or wasteland, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality of desert place. My work is interdisciplinary because the desert demands it. It begins with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in order to reorient readers towards the rupture of the US War With Mexico which helped set the national and cultural borders in effect today. I then explore Denis Villeneuve’s film Sicario to emphasize the correlation between political hierarchy and verticality; those who can experience the desert from above are exempt from the conditions below, where Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood take place. The novels expose the immanence and violence of being on the ground in the desert and at the lower end of said hierarchies. Analyzing Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mora’s Encantado enables what I term a desert hauntology to produce a desert full of memory, myth, ancestors, and enchantment. Finally, the project puts visual artists James Turrell and Rafa Esparza in conversation to discover a desert phenomenology. The result is an instigation of how far is too far when decentering the human, and what role does place-based art play in creating and empowering community.
John Ford was from Maine. Georgia O’Keeffe, from Wisconsin. Edward Abbey, Pennsylvania. As someone born and raised in the Desert Southwest, I’ve written the project I have yet to encounter.
ContributorsOsuna, Celina (Author) / Broglio, Ronald (Thesis advisor) / McHugh, Kevin (Committee member) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020