Award Date

5-1-2021

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English

First Committee Member

José Roach-Orduña

Second Committee Member

Anne Stevens

Third Committee Member

Jarret Keene

Fourth Committee Member

Lynn Comella

Number of Pages

66

Abstract

This collection of essays is a reflection of three years of work in the MFA Creative Writing Program at UNLV. As a culminating project, I decided to create a thesis that explored various areas of interest and research that influences my writing. Enclosed are various essays that explore topics such as love, loss, mortality, family, identity, and home.

While there is interplay between these essays in the collection, they also stand on their own as individual creative works, and as seeds for larger projects. It is my intention with this work to further expand and several of the essays enclosed in the collection to create various larger works that explore themes of family, identity, and home.

Though much of my formal training is in traditional essay writing, I have worked throughout my time to think of new ways to approach nonfiction writing and narrative story telling. For example, in the essay Mother Sauce, the narration is in second person as though it is a conversation happening between two or more people.

As these essays moved from idea to first draft to fully conceived work, how the interact with other works in my field has been on my mind. During a conversation I had with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, she told me that every story is unique because everyone’s experience is unique. Although people have experienced similar loss and identity issues to me, each of our experiences are unique to our moment. With that, I believe that as a queer writer adding voice and visibility to certain experiences and facts of life is important to the literary field as can be.

Keywords

Essays; Love; Loss; Mortality; Family; Identity; Home

Disciplines

Creative Writing

File Format

pdf

File Size

724 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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Available for download on Monday, May 15, 2028


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