Mountain Scholar :: Browsing by Author "Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member"

Browsing by Author "Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 22

Open Access
Abstraction, ideology and identity
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Hettinga, Maria, author; Simons, Stephen, advisor; Dormer, James, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Ryan, Ajean, committee member; Tornatzky, Cyane, committee member
My graduate work has been in printmaking, specifically monoprints. I print a variety of materials which reference landscape as well as domestic life, including common household materials such as wax paper, plastic wrap, sewing machine-stitched swatches of textiles and paper, tulle and lingerie. My personal biography is instrumental in my work; my cultural identity has played a major role in shaping my personal identity. I was raised in a Dutch immigrant farming community on the rural perimeter of Los Angeles. Domesticity, decorative arts, fashion and femininity were intertwined to create a fixed notion of beauty and to enforce a strict definition of gender roles. My insular, conservative community contrasted with the ever-changing natural environment of Southern California in the 1970s--1990s; the landscape was altered by urban expansion as well as pollution. I make abstract visual references to fashion, femininity and landscape in effort to create imagery which evades easy definition. I employ abstraction to destabilize traditional, taken-for-granted ideological narratives. While challenging authority, I promote a mindful approach to social and environmental progress which acknowledges the complexities of the twenty-first century.
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Acceleration
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Witthohn, Alec, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
Acceleration 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.
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barbarous
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Dempsey, Sunshine, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Dicesare, Catherine, committee member
What barbarous is primarily concerned with, as a book of poetry, is a formal representation of the disintegration and recreation of the speaker’s psyche. A more stable identity, that with which the speaker begins the manuscript, is represented by a more stable form, that of the prose block, which will gradually evolve into a more “fractured” structure, that of the “spatial” or “field” work. This hybridization of form is deliberate in that it should most aptly capture the disorientation of identity, the “breakage” that occurs to the speaker when he/she loses (and attempts to regain) a sense of “wholeness.” In this manuscript, the loss of identity is also represented metaphorically by an inability to speak, or to be understood. This loss of voice is a displacement to the speaker, and is therefore furthered by fracture and negative space. When there is no voice, there is no language, no written word, and therefore the silence of the empty page.
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Bird pretender
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Riley, Kaelyn Kelly, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; DiCesare, Catherine, committee member
This collection of poems is occupied with questions about the speaking subject, speech position, romantic love, the poem as an act of willful speech, the untenable spaces between poet and poem and lover and beloved, the hope that romantic love may be a disavowal of male authority, and the fear that it may not.
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Half-red
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) McCarroll, Gracie, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
My process in writing this manuscript was much different that any process I had prior: I typed all the poems on a typewriter, made edits with a pen, then retyped them again and again on the typewriter. I didn’t touch the computer until I felt each draft was as close as possible to its highest pitch. I think this process allowed for a kind of fruition of the line that I had never before experienced. I hope for this manuscript to be a demonstration of the ways I have learned how to listen to my body, my ancestral echoes, my feet, and my poems. In line with Federico Garcia Lorca's conception of duende, I tried my hardest dismantle any intellectual scaffolding that began to appear in my poems. I wanted the poems to sing themselves into being. This involved radical tracking of each sound, word, and image. More specifically, I tried to see the first draft of the poem as containing all of the answers for revision. Words repeat; however, meanings never repeat themselves. This is something the Greeks knew in their conception of metis, meaning "beautiful arrangements." Arrangement activates words, strengthens their charges. Another hope for this work is that it eliminates the binary that seems to prevalent in academia between visual and literary arts. Writing my poems drove me to action. I believe that all art should drive the creator and audience into action. So I found myself meditating on Nick Cave's notion of art being capable of "creating a form for the spirit," and in doing so, I realized that poetry wasn't a large enough vessel to contain me or my grief. I stopped reading and thinking like writer. I started reading and thinking like a spirit. I bought two wedding dresses from Goodwill and began altering them with Cave's Soundsuits in mind. I started by sewing over 200 fake rose petals on each sleeve of one dress all by hand. This idea was prompted by Sappho's fragment "with arms like roses." I had in mind to create a dress that was the embodiment of romantic stage of a relationship. So I adorned the dress with fake ornaments until fabric started to rip. This was over a process that took about 6 months, as I did not own a sewing machine and the matter of using my hands to attach these objects seemed important for my body to understand the way the dress would function. For the second dress, I meditated on the disillusionment of a relationship and its dismantling. I sewed around a hundred glass test tubes from campus surplus store onto the wedding dress with fishing wire. This process took about 3 months. But to state the symbolic life of each dress is to belittle them and their potential. I am simply showing the evolution of my thought as concisely as possible. In truth, I did not know each dress would function as they did until I activated them but putting them on and videotaping myself. This activation made their function apparent as I began to let the ground and the dress move my body. I took many hours of video that I deleted, as I figured out you can just put something weird on and move around. You must craft gesture as you craft a line in a poem. My intention in the introduction is not to explain what the video work means to the manuscript or what the manuscript means to the video. I simply want to put them side by side and allow the audience to experience them (see my website http://www.graciemccarroll.com to watch the video; it is also important that you read the essay on the site that accompanies the video—the video and essay can be found under the "performance" tab; I very much want to video to be included in our defense conversation). I can only thank you all, from the sincerest part of my heart, for the faith, understanding, teaching and work you have done to help me become a better person, and therefore, a better artist. I hope you enjoy what follows.
Open Access
History of peculiar traits and others
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) House, Joshua Bryant, author; Simons, Stephen, advisor; Dormer, James, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Moseman, Eleanor, committee member
My paranoid neurosis is the focus of my recent printmaking work. The absurd and frequently surreal imagery is derived from the continuous oddity of my everyday thought, from issues I know are clearly the result of overactive imagination or the serious dread of bizarre circumstances I often find myself in. The medium of printmaking allows for obsessive levels of detail and engrossment in the image making process, as well as a granting the ability to make unique marks that other mediums are incapable of. By placing these thoughts in figurative scenarios in a playground of psychological space, I synthesize the connection of symbolism in relationship to personal experience. The final product is a dialogue between the absurd idea and the logical means attempted to bring understanding.
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In small rooms
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Naughton, Kathleen, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
The form the language of these poems takes is linked and cannot be separate from how it means to mean. In some ways, the poems are "about" the language used to talk about the most mundane and universal human experiences—love, loss, aging, death, the passage of time, the interaction with place, the persistent idea, if not presence, of the sacred or ineffable, constructions of the self and how the relationships with those closest to us, with place, with age the passing of time, become a part of that sense of who we are. The sonnet-poems are the core work of the manuscript, and that they don't want to pause at all to explain themselves, to focus themselves. They refuse to consider where they're coming from and where they're going, they refuse narrative, they try (impossibly) to contain everything each time in each 14 lines, over and over, and always fail. This compression feels necessary to getting every everything up next to each other consistently; it also feels necessary to let myself as poet know that it will all be over soon, which is probably also important to the reader. Important because the poems are dizzying and stressful to read and it seems necessary for the sanity of all involved that we know that our engagement will be a limited one; important, too, because these poems are terrified by time, mortality, what happens at the end, and the series of small poems gives the work an opportunity to practice the end over and over and over. And practice beginning over and over and over. I don't think these poems are about reincarnation, but perhaps they are about the many deaths and rebirths within a single human life, and about the human on an ecological scale, in which one human lifetime is just one start and end in a series of continuous starts and ends.
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Let light eat the spine and Speaker for bones
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Weber, Kelly, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
My multi-part thesis, Let Light Eat the Spine and Speaker for Bones, reflect different methods of creating lyric corporality and different manifestations of my concern with vulnerability. The poetry portion considers the body as a site of connection between chronic illness and the Anthropocene, using poetry's sonic and imagistic qualities to produce a bodily response in the reader that's an alternative to the harmful language of the contract and the law. It is one book-length poem made of several smaller poems, a body of text tearing itself apart. By contrast, the creative nonfiction portion explores a constellation of concerns around gaze and bodily exposure in several stand-alone essays. Both manuscripts center a body-driven ecopoetics of thought and feeling.
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Letters to empress
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Klingbeil, Christopher, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document.
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Love is a series of vaultings
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Grabowski, River, author; Candelaria-Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Payne, Sarah, committee member
This creative writing MFA thesis, Love is a Series of Vaultings, is a book-length collection of poems and essays that seek transformation by resacralizing the speaker's queer body and metabolizing the violence of white, evangelical Christianity toward a more ethical, ecological ritual consciousness. The writing is hybrid in medium and genre, which speaks to its attempts to defamiliarize easy boundaries of time and space, prose and poetry, text and image, body and world, nature and culture, spiritual and material, and male and female, ultimately disrupting an organizing hegemony of dualism that categorizes, oppresses, and generally tells an uninteresting story of the world. The method of the book's inquiry is an essay, in the old French etymological sense—an assai—an attempt, an experiment, a verb: how might the queer body recover from ecstatic wounds, illness, and isolation? The book is this speaker's attempt to become embodied in the world, to seek an alternate sense of spirituality that will satisfy the highest frequency of their (be)longing.
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Picnic in the abattoir
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Hyche, Emma Catherine, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; McKee, Patrick, committee member
Picnic in the Abattoir is a collection investigating the negotiation of self amid a myriad of antagonistic forces. These forces include pop cultural products (particularly horror films), violence against women and its depiction in media, viewership and the gaze, etc. The collection is structured in three sections, or "Acts", supplemented with a "Postscript". This structure is intended to mimic, but ultimately subvert, the traditional three-act structure of narrative fiction and film. These poems not only serve as a continuation of my work in the past two years within horror tropes and ontologies of "victimhood," but also broach new topics for me, like the influence of film on ways of seeing and understanding the world and the paradoxical intertwining of fascination and aversion within the viewing experience.
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(Said • I • meant)
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Larson, Haley, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Sommer, Peter, committee member
This project began out of a struggle with spatial anxiety, as a project in boundaries of ecotones and memory. This gradually and rather elaborately evolved into an investigation of boundary definition, specifically those of a Self or an I, and the anxious instability inherent in recognizing those boundaries, consciously and unconsciously, breaking them or redefining their divided matter. In the realm of boundaries, the I lives in a physical body, necessarily preoccupied with its soundings, often its echoing or dissolving against its reaches. At some point, it seemed unreasonable to continue announcing "I anything" without pressuring the self that is suggested by an "I" to the edges of its boundaries, seeing if those boundaries hold or further contain or consume. Specifically, my practice up to this project grew increasingly uncomfortable in the assertion of "I," or at least in its assertion without a more sustained examination of what it is to utter an I that suggests wholeness. The written I became nervous for the body that tried to contain it. The written I became nervous for the voice that uttered in ownership its relation to the world. Its singularity and suggestion of lens, its singular apparatus of seeing, continued to unearth the impossibility of singularity, or at the very least, to urge a teasing of the multiplicity inherent in any being. I've previously likened this project to an investigation of awareness--awareness of one as a whole self and as a part, where the construction of parts completes a larger self (even an us) or where the destruction of self diminishes into smaller and smaller selves, even selves of particular music or earth. With that, this project aims to explore not just the boundaries but also what the spaces between these fractures and deconstructions allow--simplicity, music, truth, or identity. These poems ask questions of definition and wholeness, whether one is inherent in the other, whether either is possible.
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Slow motion iterations of all my whereabouts ever
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Konopka, Cole, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Jones, Laura, committee member
Slow motion iterations of all my whereabouts ever charts the development of an unnamed speaker as they explore different relationships with the self, often represented by the first-person pronoun, the I. The manuscript progresses from a confusion over the self through a resistance to it, followed by an abundance of self, a lapse of the self, and finally a plurality of self. These transitions take place in form, as well as in the context of the poems themselves, which contemplate the macabre in life.
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Terminator: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Roth, Laura, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Osborn, Erika, committee member
Fittingly, the first seed of Terminator is rooted in an ending. Before I knew "terminator" as the line of separation between the illuminated and unilluminated parts of the Earth, before I knew that I wanted to pursue an MFA in writing, I found myself split by the sudden loss of the hearing in my left ear and the resulting onset of my chronic tinnitus. This event, which took place years prior to any inkling of these poems, feels like an important place to begin. Unexpected and inexplicable, partial deafness was a "little-a apocalypse," one that revealed much to me about the subjectivity of perception, the body's volatility, and my own mortality. Perhaps this is why when, in the first semester of my master's degree, I stumbled upon the astronomical definition of a "terminator," a shock of recognition bolted through me. Like a planet, my body understood what it was to exist continuously in the space between two different qualities of light, what it was to live past the boundary of my reality. Though I didn't immediately latch onto the "terminator" as the structuring metaphor of my thesis, the poems I wrote for workshop naturally grew out of questions about the gray areas within my own being— between self and other, subject and object, subconscious mind and waking mind, human and more-than-human. These concerns are reflected not only in the content of my poems but also in their formal experimentation, which often approaches the page as an illustrative canvas where the black text can flow into organic shapes or trace stark boundaries. For the permission to be explorative in my composition, I am indebted to Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" and Lyn Hejinian's "The Rejection of Closure" as well as the countless poets who have laid their own foundations in "field poetics." Through the reading I've done in this program, my concept of the "terminator" has also taken on more sociopolitical dimensions. In particular, the pre-Socratic philosophers, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Prismatic Ecology, Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects, and the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty have helped me to see this project as a lens through which to think about human induced climate change and all the "endings" (and beginnings) it entails. At the same time, Terminator continues to be extremely personal to me. During my third semester of the program, my own world ended and renewed once more as I came into my queerness, a shift that continues to transform my close relationships, my embodiment, my value system, my orientation to the past and the future, my creative ethos. Affirming my gender and sexuality after a lifetime of suppressing them has opened fresh inquiry into my "shadow selves"— what parts of my identity do I allow myself and others to perceive? What parts are concealed? How are these unilluminated aspects of myself stored in the body? Once again, the terminator has come to represent an internal boundary for me, between who I believed myself to be and who I am becoming. As a result of these changes, I have had to reconsider how to situate myself in my world and, therefore, in my poems. In the past year, my poetic practice has expanded to encompass more intuitive and playful components, ones that honor pieces of myself that I'm not fully conscious of. When I find language by drawing words from a bowl, performing an erasure, or making a kind of "mad lib" out of a poem's syntactic structure, I am often surprised by my own instinctual knowing. "Origin of Blue," "Frequency," and "Worries" are all examples of poems that have emerged from these kinds of procedures. Despite the progress I've made, what you'll find in this manuscript is, as of yet, incomplete. As a recovering perfectionist, that's something I'm proud of. I'm excited to continue learning on the "terminator," to continue realizing some of the themes that interlace through this collection. In the immediate future, I plan to travel to Cleveland, Ohio in order to witness the last total solar eclipse that will pass through this part of the world during our lifetimes. I can't say exactly what will come out of this experience, though I admit I'm nursing a poem— a long one, perhaps bound by formal or temporal constraints (thinking about Alice Oswald's "Tithonus: 46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn"), that might divide this collection down its center. That would seem very right to me. My hope is that Terminator can offer a space where macrocosm and microcosm intersect. Like the Fibonacci spiral, which represents at once a seashell and the shape of our galaxy, I intend for this collection to touch deeply human concerns and deepen them still by contextualizing them within the reality that we live in a universe, a universe that moves in cycles that are both predictable and beyond comprehension. Humans have invented all sorts of explanations for our improbable existence— mythologies, religions, political regimes. No matter how advanced our technology or grandiose our scripture, all the intricacies of human and non-human life are conditional on something entirely out of our control: a cosmic agency that brings both light and dark, summer and winter to the face of this planet. We don't get to choose when or how the sun rises and sets. We don't get to choose our bodies, how they change, how they age, how they die. And maybe that's a good thing. It might be the one experience that we all have in common.
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The American dream starts here
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Iacovetto, Samantha Tucker, author; Thompson, Deborah, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Fiege, Mark, committee member
This collection of essays examines a family--created, sustained, and broken--through their lives in a small town, by war, and by each other. Essays include "Highlights From the Apocalypse," in which the narrator examines familial prophecy and tragedy and their place in the context of a culture over-saturated with end-of-days narratives. "This Is the Story of Someone You Should Know" weaves analysis of a Pink Floyd album through the narrator's attempt to define her father. A foreign war bride, and the family she creates as she leaves behind another, is the subject of "I'm Depending On You to Tell Me the Truth." "In Paradise" chronicles a narrator's time abroad, haunted by a childhood and hometown she can't quite leave behind. In "Blue Collar Love," a couple try to understand their roles in a not-quite-traditional marriage, and examine the class they came from and are ultimately trying to overcome.
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The damselfish year
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Osborne, Jordan, author; Dungy, Camille T., advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Bunn, David, committee member
This collection of poetry centers on exploring the relationship an individual has with their body and how it can be changed by the trauma of sexual violence. By refracting the self or creating a mask to obscure the self via the motif of the mermaid, the speaker of these poems endeavors to find a way to both distance herself from the trauma she has endured and bring herself closer to it in a less painful way. By doing so, the speaker is able to become a multiplicity in which the boundaries between Self and Other are blurred; pronouns that normally differentiate between actors and recipients, between individual bodies and beings, are confused and worn down by the breaking of boundaries that occurs during a violent encounter. The collection also considers questions of guilt, shame, and responsibility—incorporating figures such Mary I of England to create a space of haunting as a way to understand one's relationship to themselves and their decisions, particularly the ways in which they have been harmful to others. Other adjacent concerns here include victim blaming, violent family dynamics, ocean acidification and plastic refuse, and sex trafficking on porn websites. The collection also includes a series of loosely-structured sonnets centered on the Tarot, which is used to explore ideas of fate in relation to violence and violent histories both personal and societal. Throughout, questions of meaning and intention are brought to bear in a bodily way with the hope of asking readers to more carefully attend to how they are both liable for the perpetuation of sexual violence and—potentially—victims of it.
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The firing end of a miracle
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Eldredge, Luke James, author; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Emani, Sanam, committee member
I eat to stay alive. But it is impossibly more than simple sustenance. It is community. It is pleasure. It is shame. It is spirituality. It is life and death, nurture and harm. Food, its production, its consumption, and the ethics it both creates and dismantles is one we literally embody. Without examination and thoughtful investigation that requires the risk of making errors, the implications of eating are both deadly and consuming. I use lyrical, confessional, narrative, and experimental poetry to deconstruct what it means to participate in an economy that is inescapably reciprocal, while fully acknowledging the ways I am complicit in both giving and receiving harm. The implications and consequences of universal infrastructures can only be recognized through the acute particular. In the need to explore the ideologies of food, I must also explore the framework for that initial concern—growing up male in the American West as well as family-of-origin. My thinking around food and eating is inextricably linked to my family's and my local culture's thinking around food, both in the ways that I respect it and in the ways I push away from it. Food, family, and growing up male in the American West triangulate into the thesis's central concern.
Open Access
The universe works on a math equation that never even ever really even ends in the end: Charles Sanders Peirce's Evolutionary Metaphysics and the Law of Large Numbers
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Jarrott, Joshua, author; Kasser, Jeff, advisor; Gorin, Moti, committee member; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member
Recent work on Charles Sanders Peirce's evolutionary cosmology and scientific metaphysics has revealed a tension between two accounts Peirce gives of the laws of nature. Andrew Reynolds points out that Peirce seems to have thought that the laws evolved both in a statistical way—according to which the laws themselves are the statistical result of the Law of Large Numbers applied to instances of the laws—and also in a more directly evolutionary way, according to which instances of the laws reinforce one another making future instances conform to past ones. By forming "habits". These two analyses are straightforwardly incompatible, since the Law of Large Numbers requires events in the series to which the statistical analysis applies to be independent from one another, whereas the other account explicitly involves future law instantiations depending on past ones. Reynolds calls this problem the Incompatibility Problem. Despite the apparent contradiction, the work of this paper attempts a rational reconstruction of Peirce's evolutionary metaphysics, and on this reinterpretation of Peirce's cosmology, the incompatibility problem does not arise. On this view, the laws of nature remain statistical results of chance property instantiations, including dispositional property instantiations. It is argued, however, that Peirce need not be committed to the idea that instantiations of laws are dependent on one another. Rather, the view according to which habits in nature are formed is argued to apply to properties of the universe as a whole, thereby explaining why the universe contains any regularities at all. The so called "law of habit" is shown to be a special case of the Law of Large Numbers as applied to the world's properties, and the laws of nature are shown to be statistical results of various property instantiations.
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The war within
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Smith, Tara, author; Calderazzo, John, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Plaisance, Patrick, committee member
"The War Within" is comprised of the first eight chapters of my memoir of the same title. My memoir covers a span of approximately twelve years, and includes the circumstances of my life leading up to joining the military, my experiences while serving in the US Army, and the aftermath of those experiences on my mental and physical health. The first chapter begins during my deployment to Iraq in 2004, and then covers several tumultuous months after I returned to Germany post-deployment. The second chapter begins in 2002 when I first walked into the Army recruiting station. Chapters two through eight chronicle the struggles I overcame so that I could join the military, and end with my arrival at Basic Combat Training.
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Turnskin
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Bright, Hannah, author; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member; Bunn, David, committee member
Turnskin is a monstrous exploration in human ferality. A true fairytale about a woman or a wolf or a girl nosing toward the wilderness within the self, it wonders at how to be both human and animal, imagined and real, alive all the way and all at once. Through tender reconciliation of the child and adult self, the project essays toward truth through dream, childscape imagination, the faerie, and the speculative. The story roots in hybridity—of self, genre, form, truth, time and word; and seeks toward Metanonfiction—an inquiry of what a human body can do with a story, and what story does in turn with the mammalian body. Hybridity is enacted in the intersections between poetry and prose at the level of the letter, word, sentence, paragraph, piece, and cohesive sensibility; in pressing the boundaries between what is 'real' and 'fantastical' by blending the conventions and tropes of fairytale and memoir; and in pushing against narrative time and logic through mutual influence of the past, present, and future on one another. Informed by studies in animal science, anthropology, fairytales, poetry, art, and creative nonfiction, the project seeks to expose the sinister implications of what we understand to be real/fixed and imagined/fluid and aspires to converse with the work of Angela Carter, Jenny Boully, Maggie Nelson, Sarah Shun Lien Bynum, Helen Oyeyemi and Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, amongst others. In wondering what it means to be a human animal that can both construct our experience out of story and also live it in the nostrils, nerves, pupils of the felt sense, this true story investigates how to unstory—at the level of the tooth, the feather, the bone, what it means to actually makebelieve.