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Browsing by Author "McConigley, Nina, advisor"

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    Crossroad of change
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Melendrez Valenzuela, Bianca, author; McConigley, Nina, advisor; Ginsberg, Ricki, committee member; Aragon, Antonette, committee member
    Crossroads of Change is a collection of eight short stories. The collection is comprised of characters who are of Latinx/e ancestry and who are, for the most part bilingual in English and Spanish. My goal for this collection was to create something that spoke to me as a reader who grew up in America wishing to see more stories that had characters that lived in similar spaces as I did as a child. Each story represents its own unique setting that represents different aspects of the character's lives, some characters are traveling through the United States and Mexico, others live in the US and others live in Mexico by the US border. This collection represents a culmination of my creative writing effort across the three years I've spent in this program—most of that effort spent in this last year was fine-tuning the language used by these characters, and the different ways I could present these Latinx/e characters while staying true to the medium in which I am writing in. I wanted to see what the limits of translanguaging was when it came to creative writing and the different ways, I could incorporate the language barrier that some of my characters exist in and portraying that to my audience without taking my character's identities as Spanish speakers away. My influence for this was from reading excerpts from author Gloria E. Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera. She was a huge inspiration in deciding to write about my culture while also adding in my native Spanish language. Amongst the language aspect of my writing, I also played around with the narrating POVs. This collection hosts stories that range from first person narrator to second and third person narrators, in my attempts of telling a variety of stories with different perspectives, as I wanted these Latinx/e characters to be viewed in varies angles and perspectives that counters the one-sided narratives often portrayed in contemporary writing.
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    Gutland
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Lear, Megan, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; McConigley, Nina, advisor; Chung, Hye Seung, committee member
    Gutland 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.