Grief

Overview "Blackbird Rising captures the experiances of a family through the lens of their youngest member, Alice. As Alice works to navigate the complications that had become her home life since her brother's return from Vietnam, she is also forced to face the reality of the social and political changes happening during the Civil Rights movement. This story has a focus on mental health, greif, and includes some violence. The aim of this thesis is to provide insight on not simply another area of the...

Overview "Daddy's Little Girl is a collection of poems that moves through the speaker's grief—for their father, for the time before the speaker's own conception, and for the premature end of childhood. Grappling with identity as a pre-determined condition, these poems center cultural scripts and ideologies, assigned gender, socioeconomic status, and familial legacy, reaching beyond the fixed nature of the speaker's geographic locality and toward the immobility of girlhood in a fatherless, patriarchal...

Overview "Theatre can be used for more than just entertainment. By providing a collaborative, supportive, and communal space for students, theatre can promote exploration of challenging topics like resiliency, mental health, or even grief. This space allows students to discover their voice, build lasting connections, and make meaning about the world around them. In order to explore this further, a devised piece was created to understand how students think and feel about resiliency and the role it...

Overview "Mind-Body connection has been a long-studied practice, emphasizing the need for integrating the body in exploring traumatic issues and grief. For the purpose of this project, six participants were engaged in a series of interviews and workshops designed to explore our connection to body, loss, and mom through physical theatre techniques, such as clowning and Viewpoints under the framework of applied theatre, leading to the creation of a solo clown show. These workshops aimed to understand...

Overview "In a thematic retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," a man is forced to bring his elderly mother home from her nursing home after she is evicted on grounds of non-payment. She has severe dementia that gets worse the longer he attempts to care for her, and eventually he begins to wonder if she would simply be better off dead. "Dolores" explores themes of grief and guilt before a loved one's passing, the role of men as caregivers, and a broken healthcare system that abandons...

Overview "Heirlooms summons fragmented ancestral memory to illustrate the speaker's gendered relationships to land and place. In the first half of the collection, the speaker traverses a lineage of matriarchs and the delicate relationships between Puerto Rican women who survive displacement and diaspora. Through ritual and a multilingual incantation, the speaker honors the complexities of generational difference and struggle within an American setting. In the second half, the collection reflects upon...

Overview "Homecomings and Other Ghost Stories is a story collection that investigates the push and pull between grief and memory. Within these stories, the very act of remembering presents itself as a form of grief, where nostalgia becomes an act of mourning and the fallibility of memory is its own kind of loss. In grappling with these themes, characters are either running from their pasts or deeply indulgent in them. For the main character in the flash story, "The Outside Room," precious memories...

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"Love You, Darling is a novel about a young woman named Grace Donahue and her struggle with alcoholism. The main narrative takes place from 2017 to 2019, beginning in her final year of college, when a personal tragedy upends her relationships with family and friends. Over the next two years, she grapples with loss, love, addiction, the stress of adulthood, and what it means to find oneself amid the chaotic currents of modern life." -- Abstract

Overview "'Miss February' consists of several chapters from a potential memoir with the same title. The memoir follows a young girl's journey through the tribulations of grief and early-onset mental health issues. The project is divided into three central parts, "Past," "Present," and "Future," and this thesis contains a majority of the content for both the "Past" and "Future" sections. In "Past," we see the protagonist grow up around their similarly affected mother and in the wake of many...

Overview "Plague Days & River Roads follows the protagonist, college junior Liv Ford, as she returns to her hometown in order to understand how and why her friend Juniper died—and whether the mystery of who Juniper's mother was related to her death. As she dives deeper into her memories with Juniper, Liv begins to piece together the shards of her eccentric family through her relationships with her own mother and with Juniper's father and brother during August 2020. The novel is a musing on grief,...

Overview "My thesis is focused on themes of grief, loneliness, and the natural world. One of my goals for these poems was to take myself out of them, and to be an observer of my surroundings. There is also an emphasis on the connection of self to nature, and how that can sometimes be neglected. Considering these themes, another intention for this project was to employ as many forms possible. I utilize fragmentation as well as more traditional forms such as the sonnet. My title provides readers with a...

Overview "Self-Induced Exorcism Inside an Empty House is a cerebral road trip of poems exploring what it means to leave and be left, both physically – death, the leaving of a lover — and esoterically — what happens to the body and the mind when the things that have kept us stable leave? What happens when we exorcise the things that are holding us back or holding us together? Self-Induced Exorcism explores how grief manifests — how, even before loss, the anticipation of it can shape the way we move...

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""The Angie Archive" is a personal experimental documentary short film. Told through a combination of narration, home videos, 16mm footage, hand-drawn animation, and family photos, it tells the story of Claire Maske's search to find every single photograph in existence of her mother, who died ten years ago. It explores the relationship between photography and grief, the construction of fantasy and identity through family photo albums, and the failures of archives." -- Abstract

Overview "This thesis explores threads of identity, weaving together influences that shape the sense of self, including ancestry, childhood, culture, and religion. These themes spread across three sections; "on a loom" is a meditation on interfaith upbringing and the reconciliation of two belief systems, "heirloom" relates to paternal ties, and "bloom" speaks to maternal heritage. The collection highlights two matriarchs and how they lived out their individual cultures (Jewish and Colombian) and...

Overview "On an asteroid in a belt near the center of the Milky Way sits the last library in the galaxy. It's a place where one is just as likely to find a first edition copy of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice as an ancient alien timeship. Rowena isn't entirely sure how she found the position, but, reeling from her twin sister's death, she told herself, she was looking for an adventure. Just when she thinks she's setting in, it turns out the library's aging AI CardCAT starts acting strange. What...

Overview "Log line: A temperamental college student assaults her grandmother's caretaker by mistake as she attempts to understand her family history. It is scarce to witness feminine characters in film or television externalize their emotions. To enforce physical action upon the tangible world as a result of internal realities is not a luxury that most women are afforded. When Asian women are depicted as submissive, exotic or lacking all emotion, any chances of being seen as emotionally complex...

Overview "Applied Theatre practices are used to build community amongst populations of people in diverse settings with and without prior experience participating in the performing arts. This thesis reflection explores the impact Applied Theatre practices can have on building community with people who have experienced grief through the lens of loss. The creative process of building an Applied Theatre workshop is examined in a collegiate setting from building and designing curriculum, reflective...

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"Urubú is a feature length script that details the story of Fina, the queer prodigal daughter of the Da Silva crime family, as she returns home in order to avenge the murder of her brother, Nio. In a journey that explores themes of resilience, family, and grief, Fina must uncover Nio's past, relive her own, and confront the moment the two diverged in order to make peace with the person she could have been had she never left." -- Abstract