Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2017, English

This manuscript is a memoir, but it is not solely mine. The poems collected in this manuscript are a testament to my mother, Amy Jo Brumback-Atha. They attempt to quarrel with my families' histories, pain, trauma, and abuse. The narratives are based in truth but riddled with the complexity of memory and its shortcomings. Songs of Amy & Other Poems is a history full of holes. The manuscript also contains artifacts, photographs, and memorabilia—talking back to them to rupture what is displayed in their frames. Part document, part confession, part memoir—Songs of Amy & Other Poems is a fragment of life as I have lived it with and through my mother, Amy.

Committee: Catherine Wagner Dr. (Committee Chair); cheek cris Dr. (Committee Member); Nesbit TaraShea Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2014, Creative Writing/Poetry

Stellar Autopsy is a collection of original poetry that considers the relationship between loss and memory. The poems in this manuscript use landscape to compose elegies for childhood and family, lost time, and the self. In blending narrative voices and lyric moments, the speaker in section one embodies the chaos of grief, the wandering and dislocated sense of being lost after a loss. Bodies and relationships break. Landscapes are varied, strange, and quietly threatening. Often, poems are resigned to the knowledge that time is fleeting, and relationships, whether damaged or brilliantly meaningful, all have an inevitable end. Gradually, the speaker uses violence and fractured syntax to soothe suffering and to ground the body in a place. In section two, the speaker begins to see omens of fertility, to look to the sky for direction, and exercise reason and judgment. Though a resolution is only initiated, landscape remains the instrument by which the speaker approaches examining her relationships. It is this examination that resembles the stellar autopsy—the raw data scientists use to compose the music, or the elegy, of a star's final moments. In their dying, stars fertilize the universe. Planets could not sustain without carbon from dying stars. It is the hope in this kind of departure, the life beyond valediction, that readers consider throughout this collection.

Committee: Larissa Szporluk (Committee Chair); Sharona Muir (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Language; Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2011, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature

Field Guide to the Heart is a collection of poems that explores the intersection of nature, ecology, and grief. It draws on the poetic tradition of Robinson Jeffers, Margo Berdeshevsky, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, and other contemporary poets to encourage the reader to look again at the marvels of everyday occurrences. Using the heart as a symbol of the connection among and between species, the collection draws out the interconnectedness and interdependency of all things. As John Felstiner explains, in Can Poetry Save the Earth: "First consciousness then conscience." In addition to a collection of original poems, Field Guide to the Heart also includes a critical paper, Muddying the Waters: June Jordan and the Prose Poem, which interrogates the psychological geography of the prose poems in Jordan's Things That I Do in the Dark. Cassel argues that by exploring the psychological integrity of a physical place in her poetry, Jordan has been able to make peace with the relationship she had with her parents.

Committee: Donald Bogen PhD (Committee Chair); John Drury MFA (Committee Member); Joanie MacKowski PhDMFA (Committee Member); Adrian Parr PhDMA (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2009, English (Arts and Sciences)

This thesis includes a collection of original poems introduced by a critical introduction. Some poems utilize discursive narrators to get at an idea. These narrators are often, though not always, neurotic, and are trying to find meaning despite a crippling anxiety. In addition, there are several allegorical prose poems that ask to be taken seriously. The introduction attempts to situate my work in the context of contemporary poetry.

Committee: Mark Halliday (Committee Chair); Jill Allyn Rosser (Committee Member); Robert Kinsley (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Literature

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2023, English: Creative Writing

My thesis, “Step into the Tin River” is a multilayered collection of verse and prose centered on the physical, as well as spiritual, movements of people of color in America across time. My own African American ancestry has called out to me and awakened a familial consciousness. Now, I wish to navigate the dreamlike landscapes, and surrealist terrain of my family's past in Louisiana. Both poetic and prose works will focus on a deep admiration for the ingenuity and brilliance of native groups who transformed the landscape with their own hands, allowing for a reimagining of individual experiences in nature. This journey will manifest through dreamlike, partially fictional renderings of family members, as well as through poetry and prose in conversation with the visible remnants (earth mound, effigies, engraved objects, crinoid stem beads, and more) of native groups who once inhabited the land. Reflections on the wit and sorrow of the black consciousness are prevalent to help establish the weight of family connections and adversities.

Committee: Cathy Wagner (Committee Chair); Stefanie Dunning (Committee Member); Tammy Brown (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Spirituality

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2019, English (Arts and Sciences)

This thesis is a collection of essays, prose, and experimental works of creative nonfiction aimed at exploring how the psychological theory of ambiguous loss lends itself to creative nonfiction as an anchor, and as a tool for analogous investigation. The thesis includes a critical introduction that defines this theory at length, observing its occurrence in the sphere of nonfiction writing. The critical introduction places this author in conversation with writers also working with themes conversant with ambiguous loss like Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson, and Emily Rapp. As this thesis is a collection of various forms of factual narratives including personal essays, memoir, and digital compositions, the critical introduction also depicts the author's craft techniques and intentional design choices when working with nonfiction storytelling.

Committee: Dinty W Moore (Committee Chair); Eric LeMay (Committee Co-Chair); Edmond Chang (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Composition; Design; Environmental Studies; Fine Arts; Personal Relationships; Personality; Psychology

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2018, English

This work of prose and poetry is an exploration of history, hobby, and memoir focused on the state of Indiana. While many, even those born and raised there, consider Indiana a cultural waste land, this thesis reflects on the rich, if tragic, past of Indiana, and shows something of today's life for rural Hoosiers. Braiding events, people, and muzzleloading, it presents a vision of Indiana that highlights its animals, land, food, and family. Most concerned with the central and southern regions of the state, the thesis hopes to remind those who may be ashamed of their Hoosier heritage that they have much to take pride in. With a slight emphasis on an older generation's vernacular, and ranging from straight prose to fixed form poetry, the thesis offers a window onto life lived in the Indiana countryside, acknowledging highs and lows learned about not only from books but from old Hoosiers.

Committee: Keith Tuma (Committee Chair); cris cheek (Committee Member); Cathy Wagner (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

CANNED ROSES, the title of this collection of poetry and short fiction, metaphorically captures the plastic, transient, comic absurdist quality of modern relationships. In Japan, and perhaps soon in the United States, canned roses are being sold, apparently for those romantic emergencies when there's no time for fresh flowers. These plastic (literally, not just figuratively) roses are packaged in containers much like those designed for canned potato chips. Since roses are the classic gift of lover to beloved, canned roses serve as an apt symbol capturing the ideas this dissertation expresses about love in the modern world. This is a book about relationships, particularly male-female, but also familial. Seeming polar opposites are being expressed: the futility of relationships in this fast-paced, superficial, increasingly mobile, alienated, technological world; and, at the other extreme, the all-encompassing beauty, transcendence, and magic of love, fleeting though it may be. Tied to the theme of relationships is the motif of the self, that is, an essentially egocentric search for the self, especially as the self copes with and comments on, in witty satirical fashion, life in an absurdist universe. The fiction especially (the poetry to a lesser degree) has its roots in an existentialist view of an absurdist universe, especially apparent in the relationships of the characters and the comic satiric voices of the narrators.

Committee: Terry Stokes (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2009, English

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how the idea of religious toleration was represented in early modern English polemical prose, poetry, and other literary genres. I argue that religious toleration extends from what is permissible in spiritual practice and belief, to what is permissible in print, and texts on religious toleration encouraged writers to contemplate the status of the discourse to which they contributed. Although the study begins and ends with analysis of two authors whose writings on toleration have received extensive critical attention, this dissertation also applies the latest theoretical framework for understanding religious toleration to writers whose contribution to the literature of toleration has previously been less well documented. Thomas More's Utopia (1516) outlines an ideal state with apparently progressive institutions and social practices, including property shared in common, abolition of the monetary system, and religious toleration. Contrary to the view of previous criticism, however, the image of a tolerant society in More's Utopia is unlike the modern ideal of toleration as a foundational principal of modern pluralism. Although More also argued against toleration of heresy in his later polemical works, he engaged with the concept of toleration to contemplate the efficacy of the dialogue as a persuasive tool. Most importantly, More developed the ideal of polemical toleration, which held that participants in a debate should create a textual space characterized by moderately-toned language and the suspension of judgment for the time it takes to persuade and ultimately convert one's opponent. As this study shows, More's works reveal greater ambivalence towards polemical toleration than they do towards religious toleration of the heretical sects he so despised. This study also analyzes the role of religious toleration in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563-1583). Foxe's work has traditionally been received as a polarizing sta (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John King PhD (Advisor); Christopher Highley PhD (Committee Member); Luke Wilson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2010, English (Arts and Sciences)

The Last Chance Texaco is a coming-of-age novella about a fifteen-year-old girl. The novella is told in prose and verse poems, and is in two parts. It is introduced by a critical piece that discusses narrative strategies in coming-of-age novels.

Committee: Mark Halliday Dr. (Committee Chair); Darrell Spencer Dr. (Committee Member); Sherrie Gradin Dr. (Committee Member); Lynette Peck Professor (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2012, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This thesis reports on the themes of madness, unreason, and wonderment in Jacques Cazotte's Le diable amoureux, a late-eighteenth-century recit fantastique, and the third book of Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit, an early-nineteenth-century prose poetry collection also considered a fantastic piece of literature. By analyzing 1750s-1850s literary sources belonging to the fantastic genre in which the experience of dreaming is central and whose authors or main characters suffer from a certain type of madness that could be defined as delusion through the informed regard of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, literary theories, and Continental Philosophy, this thesis explores the problem of ego construction and self-fashioning, asking what it might mean to become a thinking subjectivity and trying to describe that very process. The two literary sources analyzed in this paper are excellent examples of what one could call Bildungstraumes, that is, dreams that implement the main mechanisms of the mind and show in allegories the symbolic mental representations presiding over our psychic agencies.

Committee: Jonathan Strauss PhD (Advisor); Elisabeth Hodges PhD (Committee Member); Randolph Runyon PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; European Studies; Language Arts; Literature; Philosophy