Browsing by Author "Altschul, Andrew, committee member"

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A study of light in a small town
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Cotten-Potter, Cory, author; Doenges, Judy, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; Bernasek, Alexandra, committee member
This collection of work contains stories that explore the relationships that individuals have to their familial and cultural pasts. They ask what it means to embrace tradition or eschew heritage, and how to honor family connection or romantic love in a societal landscape that is often under threat. The stories are populated by the surreal and the supernatural, agents that act both with and against these characters as they attempt to articulate to themselves a system for coping with the chaos that surrounds them.
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American feral: a novel
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Freedman, Benjamin, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; MacKenzie, Matt, committee member
At its core, this novel centers around Pep Olsen, a fifteen-year-old boy living in the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State in 2004. He navigates his overactive mind and anxiety, absence of his dad who works on a nuclear submarine, seeking popularity in school, adolescent relationships, burgeoning bicurious desire, and fascination with a stranger who has recently been going around town, violently killing and displaying animals. Eek! The backdrop to this local violence is the Iraq war. A different sort of violence, but no less gruesome. The war has taken over the consciousness of the community and is usually present, humming in the background of the novel. Pep navigates his own still-forming thoughts on the U.S. and its invasion of Iraq, which is put in conversation with other main characters—Grandma Bee, Ken Olsen, and Vice Principal Sanders—who each see the horror of war but react in radically different ways. Often times, characters like the Vice Principal, Clint Shackton, and others act or say things with direct allusion to historical events or speech. There's also some philosophical references and literary allusions going on, though I hope it's not too heavy-handed. I think there's also this recurring theme of human and animal, how slippages between the two can occur, and how this period makes "animals" out of folks, and what that allows to be viewed as "legitimate." The way in which stories are constructed, how the media describes violence, and the mythmaking of war are all important. It's probably worth mentioning that I also recently read a ton of weird, early 20th century American political thinkers like Walter Lippman and Edward Bernays, who sort of professionalized and developed the idea of propaganda as a "necessary" means of controlling public opinion. Those ideas are present throughout, as I see a direct intellectual through line between that era and how the Bush administration riled up war support. Grandma Bee's leftist political tendencies are a nice foil to this. It also pretty explicitly deals with the somewhat uniquely American phenomenon of both being one of the most destructive, violent international forces, and yet almost uniformly not viewed as such within the country. Delusion and how such a picture of the world is formed seem to be important questions. Thematically, one of the things I attempted here was put the early aughts nostalgia of boyhood and dial-up internet and old video games and high school culture in direct proximity to the horrors of this period. I try and let the two bounce off one another, and hopefully this helps contribute to the slightly eerie, off-kilter atmosphere of the book. On a craft level, there's a few things I tried. First, the whole book takes place over roughly two and a half days, so naturally there is a lot of expansion of moments here, living inside the head of Pep and others. There's also an abundance of dialogue, at times spanning pages. I wasn't expecting this when I started, but it quickly grew to become an essential part of the pacing of the book as well as deepening the characters. And it was also, well, fun as hell to write. There are also some bigger ideas I played with—reality and distortion, the function of language, and what the line between mind and world is when you're writing from the perspective of within someone's head, etc.
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Hundreds of miles between then and now
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Toy, Tyler, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; Huibregtse, Gary, committee member
Hundreds of Miles Between Then and Now is a novel exploring questions of morality, immigration, and crime through the lens of a Chinese American family travelling through the deserts of eastern California. Jason, the novel's protagonist, reckons with his family's history of organized crime and with the life he wishes to live apart from it as he helps his mother and grandfather escape prosecution for a lifetime of organized crime.
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I don't want to be here
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Olson, Sarah, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; Anderson, Sharon, committee member
I Don't Want to Be Here is novel that explores questions of consent, ethics, mother-daughter relationships, and community through the lens of the Oak School when it becomes involved in a Me Too scandal. Helen Mathews, a teacher and administrator at Oak and one of the novel's protagonists, is accused of failing to act on knowledge of a student-teacher relationship that occurred in the early 2000s. She is forced to confront the judgment of the school community and her understanding of herself. Meanwhile, her daughter Turtle navigates the ups and downs of senior year and tries to figure out who she is both in relationship to and apart from her mother and the Oak School.
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Island time and other stories
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Furman, Lauren, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; Velasco, Marcela, committee member
In fulfillment of the requirements of the Colorado State University Department of English, this Master's thesis is a collection of ten works of short fiction linked through their setting in the Cayman Islands. The stories explore a diverse set of viewpoints and experiences present on the island, spanning across genders, races, socioeconomic statuses, time periods, nationalities, industries, and opinions about island life. Working through the genres of literary fiction and magical realism, the project seeks to interrogate themes of ecology and climate change, industrialization, feminism, and interpersonal relationships.
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The order of lost things
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Matheny, Lauren Lynn, author; Becker, Leslee, advisor; Jones, Laura, committee member; Altschul, Andrew, committee member
My thesis project is a novel, The Order of Lost Things. This novel explores themes of love, grief, and loss: the protagonist, Ana, is left to pick up the pieces after her ex-husband dies and leaves her as executor for his body and possessions. In undertaking this responsibility, she discovers more about Patrick, and about herself, than she'd ever thought possible.