--lessness: Absence in Four Aspects

Graduation date: 2015Access permanently restricted to the OSU Community at author's request.A Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing thesis in the Creative Nonfiction genre, composed of six essays in a prologue and four sections. The essays address or orbit or interrogate or are threaded together with themes of absence, grief, transgender experience, isolation, depression, what it might mean to have a body, the definition of home, family, inheritance, identity, suicide, sleep, dissociation, drug use, travel, and video games. The essays speak with both associative and discursive logics and weave nontraditional and traditional uses of narrative with a sonic sensibility deeply embedded in the language. They tend to resist a coherent forward chronology while still using trackable themes to move between individual essays and individual paragraphs, frequently interrogating memories of past experiences and past held ideas by contrasting them with experiences had and ideas encountered later in the author's life. The essays explore ideas often by telling narratives. The collection might be considered a lyric memoir--lyric due to its sonically-aware voice, associative logic, and frequent use of the non-indented block of text; memoir due to its broad use of memory and notable presence of narrative despite resistance to storytelling, and its equally frequent use of the traditional indented-paragraph of text. The collection as a whole tells an implied narrative of self-discovery, and ends with an unstable compromise between resolution sought and resolution achievable