This red earth

This Red Earth is a young adult historical verse-novel which explores themes of desire, guilt, and obligation. Antje learns to find her voice, despite coming of age in both an era and a family where girls were expected to follow their parents’ wishes. Many issues facing Antje and her family in 1927 still exist today. Questions explored by my protagonist were, “What am I allowed to ask of my family?” “How much freedom?” and “How far can I go to achieve what I want?” The story is set in Kingfisher, Oklahoma in 1917-18 during The Great War and the mid-1920s to 1927. Research included visits there to interview relatives born in the 1920s and 30s. They told stories remembered from their grandparents’ time including how their church was segregated by gender. Research was conducted at the Chisholm Trail Museum in Kingfisher, the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City and the University of Central Oklahoma. Documents included historic Kingfisher newspapers, High School yearbooks, photos, books on the Oklahoma 36th Division and an archived interview of a Kingfisher woman born the same year as my protagonist. Research at the University of Washington included magazines of the era, the Montgomery Ward and Sears Catalogs. Youtube showed animal husbandry and functioning historical farm equipment. To research The Great War I corresponded with a researcher at the National World War One Museum and Memorial in Missouri and a researcher at the US Army Medical Department Office of Medical History at Ft. Sam Houston in Texas. It is hard to confront questions from our own times, but through the lens of history, sometimes it is less threatening. My goal is for this work to help high school students explore questions, such as, what is an immigrant’s place in society? Can a girl chart her own life? And can we meet expectations family members when they conflict with the core of who we are? I chose the tight and spare language found in poetry to reflect the harsh sparseness of a life offering few choices to girls in the early 20th century.Arts, Faculty ofGraduat