Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2025, English: Creative Writing

This thesis, BORN OF FIGS, is a collection of poetry and hybrid works and an experiment in performing and modeling powerful transformations in language. Through wordplay that layers languages preceding modern English as well as languages other than English, the manuscript models and explores how histories intersect with the personal. Some poems about the speaker's encounters with plants, animals, and other products of the earth offer opportunities to witness and dwell in growth and change. These poems engage connections between ecological phenomena and infertility, miscarriage, and womanhood. Other poems are explicitly magick spells. These take inspiration from early Old English metrical charms, adapting their genre conventions, dramatic situations, and formulaic vocabulary, along with their performative nature as speech acts with the power to heal or harm. A third style of works appear in prose (lyric essay) and might be described as confessional. Through language-play that draws from abandoned vocabularies and modes, this manuscript is interested in developing a poetics of personally transformative ritual.

Committee: Cathy Wagner (Committee Chair); TaraShea Nesbit (Committee Member); Patrick Murphy (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; American Literature; Ancient Languages; British and Irish Literature; Fine Arts; Folklore; Germanic Literature; Language; Linguistics; Literature; Medieval Literature; Middle Ages; Modern Literature; Religion; Romance Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2018, English

This dissertation reveals how cognitive disability's formal and rhetorical potential developed in the U.S. from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, detailing the ways in which writers determined the reader's engagement with cognitive others. Scientific pathology inspired literary authors to experiment with narrative mechanics. Conversely, literature and popular nonfiction revealed to psychologists unrecognized features of cognitive identity as well as narrative's methodological and political potential. Cognitive disability, never fully assimilable, emerges as a force that can reorganize narrative events and aestheticize their telling. My work challenges theories of disability that prefigure difference as fixed or known in narrative. Great authors redefine disability as a force that is always coming to be known. I introduce a heuristic to help scholars understand this process, specifically how stories introduce tenuous ways of representing and narrating disability, put forth conflicting ontological claims about the mind, and withhold what can be known about disability at key moments. As readers struggle to pin down what exactly disability is, narrative places them in a space where they can reflect not only on the abilities of the disabled subject, but their own.

Committee: William Marling Dr. (Advisor); Athena Vrettos Dr. (Committee Member); Kimberly Emmons Dr. (Committee Member); Jonathan Sadowsky Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: History; Literature; Rhetoric

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2017, English

What I Know and How I Came to Know It explores the intersections of class and gender through meditations on memory and the body. The combination of essays and narrative nonfiction examines the way our growing up places shape us, how the stories we tell ourselves change over time, and the way pain and trauma intervene in life.

Committee: TaraShea Nesbit (Advisor); Madelyn Detloff (Committee Member); Daisy Hernandez (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Mental Health; Womens Studies

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2015, Creative Writing/Poetry

Acres of Flesh is a fragmented narrative of desire and compulsion that juxtaposes the moral decay of sexual obsession, with the physical and social decay of a dying Midwestern city. Within a series of persona poems, a clay creature called the Golem lumbers across the American landscape; simultaneously, the land itself—always constrained, hedged with brick or steel or concrete—awakens and uncovers itself, reflecting the shifting needs and biological deficiencies of a first-person speaker's body. This body is also juxtaposed against a sea of bodies—its Jewish antecedents, ancient and recent; a series of lovers, ghost-like and without voice, sharply outlining the narrow, privileged subjectivity of the speaker; and finally, prompting further interrogation of privilege, the other-race bodies of the speaker's fellow residents of the crumbling City Between the Rivers. Sound is a vital instrument here, not only functioning as a tool for crafting dissonance or reverie, but also operating as a synesthetic stand-in for the textures and tastes of the world—words become sharp edges or rough contours, or attempt to take on the pliancy and fevered heat of the eroticized, half-mapped flesh. Purposeful visual arrangements, at times concrete, help to augment the portrayal of a fractured identity.

Committee: Larissa Szporluk (Advisor); Sharona Muir PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Modern Literature

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2014, Music Performance/Instrumental Performance

Stuart Saunders Smith (b. 1948) is widely known as a significant compositional figure in contemporary music, and most notably for his music for solo percussion. His works are internationally performed and are characterized by a heavy use of complex polyrhythmic devices and atonality achieved through the intuitive selection of pitches, as opposed to structured tonal systems. Smith's expansive output as a composer has yielded three works for solo drum set: Blue Too (1983), Brush (2001) and Two Lights (2002). Despite a space of eighteen years between Smith's first composition for drum set, Blue Too, and the completion of the other two compositions, Brush and Two Lights, consideration should be given to the assertion that the three compositions are interrelated. Although they originated from differing stylistic periods of Smith's career, the three pieces can be found to share common aspects of rhythmic vocabulary and form. Aside from the compositional aspects, the pieces may also be related through autobiographical content and influence. Smith's description of his work as being that of a "confessional composer" connects his compositional style to that of the autobiographical writings of the "confessional" movement of poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, specifically the works of Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the interrelationship of Smith's Blue Too, Brush, and Two Lights with the post-Modern Confessional movement through compositional and autobiographical analysis.

Committee: Roger Schupp (Advisor); Eftychia Papanikolaou (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2013, English

This thesis presents a collection of poems and a study of recent post-confessional poets to be used as models and inspiration. It seems appropriate in this age of self-exposure, in theage of Twitter and Facebook, that our poetry mirrors that cultural trend. I chose this form of poetry for its essay-esque style, which allows the writer to reflect on their lives and reshape past events and memories. It is not a school of mere recollection, it is a school of reshaping and reforming memories and experiences to project answers onto the questions that plague our everyday lives. Post-confessional poets have their own unique challenges to overcome when writing personal lyrics, such the unstable nature of memory and the desired degree of sentimentality. However, this style is an important venue of self-discovery for a developing poet, and I had to learn through the course of this project to create an "I" that could reflect me as well as reach for the universal. To help me, I selected two contemporary poets to act as guides through the world of post-confessional poetry. Matthew Dickman and Marie Howe are both poets who write from the self and share similar familial losses that act as their subject matter. Studying both how they play with narrative and their individual poetic voice has provided a productive apprenticeship throughout this project.

Committee: Jody Rambo Ms. (Advisor); Brenda Bertrand Dr. (Committee Member); Mike Mattison Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2006, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

Nothing Fatal, a dissertation by Sarah Perrier, consists of two complementary pieces: a book length collection of poems and a scholarly essay. Both pieces are grounded in my interest in Romantic, feminist, and confessional poetic traditions at the start of the twenty-first century. The epigraph to this collection, “Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous,” is the bargain proposed by Frankenstein's monster when he asks for a mate. Like the monster, the speaker in these poems hopes to strike a deal that will stave off loneliness, or at least be incentive to virtue. And just as the monster's courting of his mate would surely be unconventional, the poems in Nothing Fatal also approach courtship unconventionally. These poems strive for the satisfaction that all creative work – including love – can provide. In these poems, conventional romantic roles (lover and beloved) bump up against and resist the roles provided for poets and readers by our literary Romantic legacy. The dissonance provided by these two partially compatible paradigms enables the poems in Nothing Fatal to grapple with questions of lyric sincerity. Introducing the manuscript is “What Do They Teach You in That School, Anyhow?: Redefining the Confessional Paradigm in Contemporary American Poetry,” an essay that reviews the reception of confessional poetry, and concludes that no balanced critical discussion of it has offered a clear delineation of its constituent parts, its value and role for contemporary writers and readers, or its relationship to other poetic traditions that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, connotative meanings of “confessional poetry,” which have been mostly pejorative, have dwarfed the denotative ones. This unbalanced treatment of confessional writing has had particular consequences for the work of women poets writing in the wake of second-wave feminism, and so I also suggest that our current discussions of a confessional school of poetry should acknowledge how women wr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Don Bogen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2003, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation contains three papers that address the definition of "confessional" poetry, most especially that which has been written by American women. The primary section of the dissertation is a manuscript of original poetry: thirty poems in all. These poems attempt to negotiate the boundaries between fact and fiction, truth and deception, often employing rhetorical strategies similar to those of the confessional poets of the 1960's.

Committee: Dr. Don Bogen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2010, English

This paper insists that John Berryman's "Dream Songs" be read as a survival epic. Henry, the poem's protagonist, escapes annihilation by assuming a great number of aliases unknown to his persecutors. This obsessive costuming continues until the seventh and final book, the moment of his emancipation and literary success, when he is no longer able to continue the charade of Mr. Bones and Henry Pussycat. The novelty and majesty of the seventh book is the subject of a careful, probing investigation of Henry's miraculous resurfacing in society. It is at this moment in the poem that John Berryman, like Henry, feels justified in removing the mask and disguise that for so long sheltered him from the obscenities of the world. I argue that the author inserts his own person, quite apart from Henry, into this picturesque conclusion to the poem, first by ridding himself of Henryspeech, and, secondly, by eliminating the figure of the interlocutor.

Committee: Mark Halliday (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; Comparative Literature; Language; Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2012, English (Arts and Sciences)

Major Kiss is a collection of twenty-six poems written, edited, and collected during Cameron Kelsall's time at Ohio University. While the poems cover a wide variety of topics--including creating back-stories for strangers, how to survive a blizzard sober, and the perils of having Wallace Stevens as your therapist--the common thread throughout the collection is an honest and often uncomfortable look at the many stages of human relationships. The collection is preceded by a critical introduction in which Kelsall analyzes the influence of confessional poetry, with particular emphasis on the use of voice, tone, diction, and form in the work of John Berryman (1914-1972).

Committee: Jill Rosser PhD (Committee Chair); Mark Halliday PhD (Committee Member); Robert Miklitsch PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2010, English (Arts and Sciences)

How do we deal with death, especially when that death is in the form of suicide? How do we live with the abuses and addictions of our parents? Can love survive in the event of a zombie apocalypse? These questions and others are tackled in this collection of poems. The introduction focuses on the question of writing about tragedy and suicide in particular, and the difficulties one faces when trying to convey something new and meaningful about such an old subject.

Committee: Mark Halliday Dr. (Advisor); Janis Holm Dr. (Committee Member); Jill Rosser Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2007, English (Arts and Sciences)

This thesis includes a critical introduction outlining the history of creative works from female Mennonite writers, as well as a concentration on how silence can be both prohibitive and utilized for the writer's voice. Original poetry follows.

Committee: Sharmila Voorakkara (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2008, English: Creative Writing

This manuscript aims to complicate notions of being, identity, and selfhood by examining the possibilities of the poetic "I." While much of this work is autobiographical in nature, this manuscript proposes construction of selfhood as being not just a single line of uninterrupted self-narration, but a trajectory scored with various adopted and discarded identities. The ephemeral tone and abstracted content of this work are an attempt to explore the fluidity of identity and the nature of experience in the context of language. The "I" functions as not only the poem's speaker, but the focal point to a moment in time, a feeling, a realization, and the culmination of cultural and historical affects.

Committee: Catherine Wagner PhD (Committee Chair); David Schloss MFA (Committee Member); Madelyn Detloff PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Literature; Folklore; Human Remains; International Relations; Language; Language Arts; Womens Studies