Browsing by Author "Ausubel, Ramona, advisor"
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Item Restricted Acceleration(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Witthohn, Alec, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee memberAcceleration is a novel following a week of events in the life of Cameron Noh, a model from New York City who travels to Milan for fashion week as labor tensions among transit workers boil in the background. He meets with his agent, Simone, and a wealth of other characters as he debates whether or not to move to Paris. This work is written in the style of the weak novel, as described by Lucy Ives in her article "The Weak Novel," publish in the Baffler 2022. Its content is, more or less, plotless, filled with symbols such as snails, eyes, clothes, darkness and light as Cameron meanders from fashion shows to after-parties, in a kind of hedonic depression, searching for something that might fulfill him. Acceleration is also a comment on capitalist consumption and the culture that surrounds it, the way it generates this searching in all of us under capitalist rule. Eventually, the situation with the transit workers becomes untenable, resulting in what might be an act of terrorism focused on Milan's La Scala Theater.Item Restricted American feral: a novel(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Freedman, Benjamin, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; MacKenzie, Matt, committee memberAt 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.Item Restricted Bundy girls(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Ash, Summer, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Khrebtan-Horhager, Julia, committee memberBundy Girls is a novel about dark obsessions, female friendship, and the dangers of adolescence. The story's narrator is a high school girl with a crush on one of the most notorious serial killers of the 20th century, Ted Bundy. Her intense bond with her best friend, who is also a Bundy fanatic, led the pair to found the 'Bundy Girls Club' with a group of peers who also enjoy dressing up as serial killers and publishing zines about Bundy. When a classmate goes missing, the girls see an opportunity to use their true-crime knowledge to start their own investigation. But when the mystery gets too close there is more than just friendship at stake for the Bundy Girls.Item Restricted Gutland(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Lear, Megan, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; McConigley, Nina, advisor; Chung, Hye Seung, committee memberGutland is a novel that explores the narrator's self-reliance and search for identity as she cares for her partner's child and father in an isolated village. This novel is a work made of fifteen chapters, divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the narrator's straining relationship, struggles to integrate herself, and emotionally troubling duties of caring for someone else's child. This part also details the inner workings of closed-practice groups such as the Primitive Baptists, the hivemind mentality that comes from growing up in a secluded area, and the trials of gardening. The second part looks closely at the women around the narrator, who integrate her into their group of friends, the growing tensions between the narrator and her absent partner, and the bond growing between the narrator and the preacher, a dying man she takes care of.Item Restricted How to clean a heart(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Brousard Norcross, Elena, author; Levy, EJ, advisor; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Ipsen, Annabel, committee memberIn this short story collection, How to Clean a Heart I have included eight stories that represent the work I've achieved during my MFA, but also evidence for how I've expanded as a writer. My stories have gone from either collisions of the fantastical and the real, to stories that consider the world and wider contexts. But, my writing will forever be personal and a way to exorcise trauma and grief where I cannot other places. In Mikayla's Ghost, a girl who lives in her dead parent's house takes in a not-so stranger and waits for love's return. In The Foal, Jess must confront how grief has separated her and her dad after a drifter murders her pet foal. How to Clean a Heart concerns Ira and Sage, two young people who love and care for each other but because of their traumas are unable to fully connect. Laurie considers metaphysical, religious and feminist questions of being, the story loosely based on a missing persons case in the Fox Valley. In Ampere, a man made of wood feels love for the first time and it makes him question his purpose in life and his "othering" in society. Little Ghost follows Nenana who returns to her hometown where she first learned her place in the world, something she has been trying to forget ever since. Archaeology for Beginners takes place in the near future, where the last survivors of an economic and environmental apocalypse track what they believe to be the boot prints of Cowboy, 25 as they name him. What follows raises questions of why they are truly making up stories about tracks in the dirt, and how we make meaning at the end of the world. Phases continues looking towards the future where the earth is spinning faster, causing a multitude of changes and chaos in the world. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, Magnolia finds a way to accept that the world and all she knows, is ending.Item Restricted 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 memberHundreds 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.Item Restricted Hurricanes make the best bouquets(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Meyer, Eliana, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; McConigley, Nina, committee member; Emami, Sanam, committee memberHurricanes Make the Best Bouquets is a collection of short stories which explores love, loss, isolation, inner strength, and the process and shape of forgiveness. These nine stories reimagine the domestic drama as a place where displaced men and women—mothers, daughters, sisters, divorcees and one widower—search for answers in decomposition, orange blossom perfume, and strange apparitions. From the top of a lighthouse to a Visalia Super 8 to a Salvation Army window display, the heartache these characters experience in the wake of abandonment, death, and self-discovery asks them to adapt to new realities and confront the meaning of home and belonging.Item Restricted 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 memberI 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.Item Restricted Island time and other stories(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Furman, Lauren, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; Velasco, Marcela, committee memberIn 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.Item Restricted Keepers: a novel(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Carey, Patrick, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Emami, Sanam, committee memberKeepers is a novel told through the rotating first-person perspectives of three lighthouse keepers on an island in northern Lake Michigan around twenty-five years from now, in the midst of the Second Great Depression. It takes place during a weeklong visit by one keeper's son, who forces them to reassess their pasts and return to the present. By foregrounding backstory and digging for the differences within repetitions, the novel traces a gradual accrual of emotional and spiritual mass even as individual events seem to blend like raindrops in a puddle.Item Restricted Recurrence: a novel. Book one(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Shrayfer, Lilia, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Levy, E. J., advisor; Yalen, Deborah, committee member; Foskin, Kevin, committee memberInspired by the disappearances of over a dozen Soviet Jews during the refugee crisis between 1979-1989 in Italy, this novel aims to offer a speculative portal into the crises of identity that may have led to such tragedy. Spanning three generations of one Bukharan-Jewish family, from Stalin's purges of the 1930's, to Khruschev's Sovietization campaign, to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, to the above period of statelessness in Europe, the book explores this family's exile through the lens of Eva Kalandarova's gender and sexual identity. What is transmasculinity for transient lives? What does it mean for someone haunted by the sins of their father? In 1941, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was evacuated to Central Asia, where she and other Russian writers in exile sought to recreate literary life. It is in Central Asia that she wrote—and later burned—her only play of a writer condemned not only by the state, but by her peers. Her contemporaries at the time, such as Nadezhda Mandelstam, write that she saw the future of the Soviet Union. Inspired by her diary entries detailing typhus-induced hallucinations, the novel speculates on the possibility that Akhmatova's relationship with the landscape and its locals may be found in her work. Accordingly, the novel imagines parallel dreams and associations between the Bukharan Jewish families centered in this book and her writing. Similarly, the novel explores Ladispoli as a mirror to the historical anxieties and traumas of the Jews of Rome. I have aimed for a poets' novel; I have aimed for a historical fiction novel, a speculative novel, a trans-national Jewish novel that imagines new Jewish questions. I have aimed to situate my people amidst the Jewish literature that has too long overlooked them, for even in our silence, we have much to say.Item Restricted Rupture(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Bucheli Peñafiel, Carolina, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Dungy, Camille, advisor; McConigley, Nina, committee member; Martin Quijada, Carmen, committee memberThis collection of short stories is tied together by the genre known as Andean gothic which fuses the indigenous and mestizo cosmovision, myths, symbols, believes, worldviews, legends, and imaginaries of the Ecuadorian geographic area, with the realities of Ecuadorians' everyday lives. Rupture is a collection of eight short stories that center around these realities in terms of gender, power dynamics, self-discovery, the paranormal, religion, culture, race, politics, gender, loss of innocence, migration, and dislocation. In addition, they circle around mysteries detonated by these intersections, realities, and sometimes even around violence and horror. The title comes from the concept of capturing decisive moments in all the characters in this story collection life, where something about their worldview got disrupted, and they had to move out of their zone of familiarity (not necessarily comfort). All of them are traversing the known into the unknown and are learning lessons from the world that surrounds them. All of the stories border a tangible world, an internal space, and oftentimes a paranormal space as well. I didn't make the distinction of whether or not an otherworld or a paranormal world exists or if it's a product of the character's minds and beliefs, since that is not precisely the point of the stories. The point is on how they shape and intersect with the lives of the characters. I wanted to pay homage to the stories I grew up hearing where all these elements mixed in a natural unquestionable way, where they are not mutually exclusive.Item Restricted The twelfth step(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Reagan, Ross, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Levy, EJ, committee member; Martinez, Doreen, committee memberThis collection of twelve short stories challenges the issues of addiction and recovery in real and fantastical ways. The collection acts as a meta-arc; each story is meant to guide the reader as they progress through the collection either as someone experiencing addiction and working the 12 Steps or as a general audience of short story readership. Within its fictive guise, characters are stationed in worlds familiar and unfamiliar, local and commonplace, and otherworldly and strained. Settings range from the North Maine Woods to the heart of Los Angeles; from an '90s-inspired conversion camp in the Midwest to a fearful, ethically-wrought U.S. in the not-so-distant-future; from a Chick-fil-A to 1969 to the local 12-Step meeting community bulletin board. The past, present, and future of these stories speak loudly and blend thematically. Genre is bent into different modes of contemporary storytelling as an unexpected way to put recovery on the map, while other traditional narrative forms seek to capture a consciousness both uniquely felt and universally understood by readers and addicts alike.