Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/10217/100417

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Rupture
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Bucheli Peñafiel, Carolina, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Dungy, Camille, advisor; McConigley, Nina, committee member; Martin Quijada, Carmen, committee member
This 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.
Embargo
Digital network composing practices: digital removal in the Try Guys media ecology
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Banuelos, Mia, author; Amidon, Timothy R., advisor; Doe, Sue, committee member; Elkins, Evan, committee member
With an increased accessibility and democratization of digital editing tools, recomposition has the potential to occur to any text or artifact circulated in a digital space. One form of recomposition that must further be considered is digital removal practices, including erasure, deletion, deflection, and exclusion of human or non-human objects in a digital composition. These practices have the potential to impact digitally networked composing practices and how we think about rhetoric and writing in media ecologies. This thesis focused on the intersection of digital removal practices and Ridolfo and DeVoss' theorization of rhetorical velocity, which considers composing for recomposition, and its co-influence on digitally network composing practices. Through a case study of The Try Guys, a group of popular YouTube personalities, this thesis explored the influence of a participatory culture in a media ecology and the role recomposition plays in a public scandal. Data was collected from The Try Guys media ecology surrounding the removal and/or revision of a former member, Ned Fulmer, and the larger medial ecology comprising The Try Guys' social media presence. These data illustrated the significant influence of participatory culture, as an influx of users associated with The Try Guys fandom contributed to the rhetorical velocity and recomposition of information and context produced by the Try Guys. Specifically, data illustrated that participatory cultures can and do shape how digital removal unfolds within and beyond digital networks. This thesis (1) emphasized the increased influence of a participatory culture on the curation and circulation of content in a media ecology and (2) explored how digital removal practices have the potential to influence how we theorize rhetorical velocity and how we must be strategic for composing as authors, writers, users, creators, inventors, teachers, and students.
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Sung ritual
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Culbertson, C., author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member
Sung Ritual is an ecstatic record of the queer, neurodivergent poet's coming-to, as if waking to the present from an oracular dream made up of repeated memories of the past. Part confessional and part self-reckoning, this collection tries to account for the facts of one's life and how those facts come to shape present-day relationships with the world and others. The tradition of the ode after Whitman becomes a ritual in which the poems form a chorus resolved by taking-up of the proper pronoun "I" only in the collection's final pages. The song there formed anticipates future(s) wisdom informs cannot be imagined without the poet's attending to living's antecedents.
Open Access
Impacts of trauma in school environments on ELA teachers: an interpretative phenomenological analysis
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Robinson, Kit M., author; Ginsberg, Ricki, advisor; Nam, Rosa, committee member; Kennedy, Alexis, committee member
This study was conducted as an interpretative phenomenological analysis of five secondary English Language Arts Development teachers in Colorado. The study aimed to understand the impacts on ELA teachers, specifically their perceptions of their instruction and ability to remain in the classroom, following traumatic experiences or exposure at work. By using an interpretative phenomenological analysis we can see the spectrum of perceptions and insights ELA teachers have into navigating through trauma as professionals charged with supporting the academic and social development of our students. Data was collected in the form of one-on-one interviews with the participants. The interviews were guided by questions designed to investigate the forms of trauma exposure or experience in school environments they had as teachers, the impacts these events had on their instruction and desire to remain in the field as a classroom teacher, and overall observations and perceptions into what supports were provided or desired. Interviews were recorded and transcribed and the data was coded inductively. This study was then organized as a narrative to examine the intersections and revelations found in teachers' various perceptions of shared traumatic events. While not generalizable, this study aims to elevate these insights to further conversations on trauma in school environments and how we comprehensively support those in charge of supporting the students.
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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.
Open Access
Transgressions
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Zero, author; Limlamai, Naitnaphit, advisor; Doe, Sue, committee member; Coffino, Kara, committee member
Transgressions aims to use poetry to explore the intersections of transgender and transitional identities in education spaces through the lenses of queer theory, literature studies, and autoethnography. I address the lack of representation of transgender voices and experiences in historical literature and poetry (the classroom content) in addition to my experiences in the classroom itself. The objective of this study is to use evocative methods that intentionally resist hegemonic expectations to highlight the importance of trans*poetry as an essential tool for self-reflection and identity formation and to point toward new methods for teaching writing that reflect the lived experiences of learners in the margins. The methods used in this study are autoethnographic and involve self-reflexive analysis of my own post-secondary academic experiences and literature-based analysis of my own poetry (written throughout my academic career). My study reveals insights into the nuanced experiences of the learner and educator in post-academic spaces, and the results of my research indicate that trans*poetry has the power to challenge dominant narratives; the power to ground, historicize, and contextualize self-narratives; and the power to create space for marginalized voices to be heard in and out of the classroom. In conclusion, Transgressions offers a new perspective and framework to study identity and history in post-secondary education spaces. It highlights the importance of experience and creative expression as sources of knowledge and understanding and proposes a new historiography that centers the voices and experiences of transgender people. While this study has its limitations, it is hoped that it will inspire further research into the intersections of poetic expression and self-identity in post-secondary classrooms.
Open Access
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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Pardon blooming
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1983) Hayden, M. D., author; Ude, Wayne, advisor; Tremblay, Bill, committee member; Mitchell, Carol, committee member; McMurray, George R., committee member
A toad, a butterfly, a human being, a philodendron, all need sustenance, need air; all grow and change. Clamp a bottle over a living creature and it suffocates, its movement restricted, its possibilities limited. For an individual, rigidity becomes a glass bottle, and those who struggle to escape the bottle must experience something painful in the process. Glass bottle. Rigidity of society and tradition. For some, rigidity comes from their own acceptance of society's rules or tradition's importance. A creature raised in the confines of a glass bottle is uncomfortable with sudden freedom, as uncomfortable, perhaps as a free creature confined. For others, rigidity is imposed from the outside. These rigid boundaries of society and tradition may not be apparent until they conflict with the individual's inner needs for growth, but when they do conflict, the individual must find air to breathe. Some escape the glass bottle; most don't. Glass bottle. Rigidity of linear time. Although the concept of time as linear is arbitrary in Western thought (some American Indian tribes do not have such a concept), most of us assume our past happened to us in the time line before now. If we remain always the same person, the past, the memories happen continually. But if we have grown and changed, we are not the same person as the child of ten, the adolescent of fifteen, the young adult of twenty. The memories we hold happened to a different person because we are always becoming someone else. Linear time does not allow this idea, but circular time, or even spherical time, does. Glass bottle. Rigidity of gender. Separation of the sexes by innate differences or by imposed societal roles creates a rigid boundary that obscures the commonality of human experience, that denies the similarity of emotion and need in men and women. The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are 'the opposite sex'--(Though why 'opposite' I do not know; what is the 'neighboring sex'?) But the fundamental thing is that women are more like men than anything else in the world. 1 Glass bottle. Rigidity of language. The boundaries of our language define the boundaries of our world. Those things we cannot perceive, we cannot say, and vice versa. The stories in this collection seek to express what our language has no way of saying, to escape a rigid structure, voice or time, to break glass bottles.
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Immeasurable mouth of night
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Seebeck, Tashiana, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; DiCesare, Catherine, committee member
This thesis is a collection of poetry concerned with the unconscious interior: dreams, nightmares, memories, and the liminal space between. The poems are committed to a necessary logic of surreality and formal experimentation.
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Coraline Connors, a catechism
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Clark, Megan, author; Altschul, Andrew, advisor; Vara, Vauhini, committee member; Diffrient, Scott, committee member
Below is the story of Coraline Connors, a sixteen-year-old Catholic, lesbian runaway. Coraline is mouthy, irreverent, and acerbic, but, above all else, Coraline is a lost kid looking for a place to belong. Told in first-person point of view, this novel follows Coraline's journey from her childhood home in rural Pennsylvania to the Cambridge, Massachusetts radio station in which she was conceived. This thesis is interested in girlhood, coming of age, queer identity, and religion—in particular how the latter two intersect. It is dedicated to all the real-world Coralines.
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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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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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Eldest daughter
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Emerson, Anna, author; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Shutters, Lynn, committee member; Gerst, Katie, committee member
Eldest Daughter is a memoir in essays that explores the boundaries of home and self, braiding together threads of the Midwest, horses, grief, illness, water, and family. By structuring itself into three "waves," Eldest Daughter underscores the currents of mourning, loss, and becoming. When we meet the narrator, she is stuck in the middle of a Midwestern flood, trying to wrangle horses from the mud as her mother seeks to save their home from destruction. This starts the work off with the explicit statement that this is a narrator at a crossroads—or perhaps a series of them—as we watch her navigate the intersections of grief and family, femininity and masculinity, horse and human, and landscapes of both the Midwest and Colorado. By the end of Eldest Daughter, the narrator has a better understanding of the contours of her grief, anger, and role as the eldest daughter. As such, the pieces in Eldest Daughter attempt to answer, in sixteen pieces and just over two hundred pages, questions of: How do I grieve loss? How can I attempt to name the unsaid, to give it life and depth? How and where do I feel at home? Or, more specifically, how, and where, do I feel like myself?
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Relations
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Marquez-Uppman, Julia, author; Vara, Vauhini, advisor; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, committee member; DeMirjyn, Maricela, committee member
This memoir-in-essays explores questions of family, grief, and identity through various formal innovations. The first few essays examine identity formation through the concepts of place, lineage, inheritance, and home. In the latter half of the collection, the essays then shift to deeper questions of relationality, interdependence, and art (storytelling, music-making) as modes of constructing the self.
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Community education
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Piasecki, Nicole Susan, author; Candeleria Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Vara, Vauhini, committee member; Hausermann, Heidi, committee member
Community Education is a collection of creative nonfiction essays that wonders about the positive and negative space created by silence. When normative social structures silence honest conversation and speech, what damage is done? Can it be remediated? How might one learn to live freely, speak openly, and translate fear into a generative force. Many of the essays in Community Education chronicle the coming-of-age story of a queer female in rural and suburban Michigan in the late 1990s. The narrator struggles to connect with family and friends after losing her dad in a tragic mass shooting. The disconnect caused by her grief compounds when she leaves for college and begins questioning her sexuality. Without positive stories or queer role models, she believes she must keep secrets to avoid disappointing the people she loves or becoming a social outcast. She finds a sense of belonging—sometimes intentionally and other times by accident—in communities of strangers who help her untangle her lifetime of internalized narratives about womanhood and queerness. She meets strangers in early-America-Online chatrooms and joins a friend group of older feminist lesbians who call her "baby dyke" but treat her like an adult. She meets queer people and allies at gay bars and music festivals and as a member of a gay ice hockey team. She leaves her home state of Michigan shortly after graduating from college and starts fresh in the Colorado Rockies. Everywhere the narrator goes, strangers and acquaintances step in to draw the narrator out of isolation and offer lessons about living she never received in school or at home. This community education helps her feel more at home in her body and country. It gives her the courage to assert herself. Through finding her voice, she learns the truth has its own consequences and rewards. At the core, this book is about seeking home outside the geography of self, in order to eventually find home inside.
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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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This is how it was
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Pagliari, Nicole, author; Altschul, Andrew, advisor; Ausubel, Ramona, committee member; Chatterjee, Sushmita, committee member
This Master's thesis is a collection of short stories that interrogate instances of racial aggression against Filipino and Filipino-American women alongside the existential dread of being a young woman and regret and robots in varying quantities and combinations. These stories all share a common goal of analyzing poignant moments of reckoning for their female protagonists of varying physical presentations, socio-economic statuses, and stages of life while also experimenting with speculative elements and voice.
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Scholia on vireos: a field guide to the family Vireonidae
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Helzer, Aiden Grant, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Thomas, Adam, committee member
Using birds as image bearers, Scholia on Vireos: A Field Guide to the Family Vireonidae is a bird book of poems. The poems are foremost an experiment in the form and music of contemporary poetry. Each genus of the family has a particular form which was developed to represent it, and the syllable count of the lines was often inspired by the individual species's song. There is at least one poem for each species of bird. The poems also experiment with multiple languages (Ancient Greek, Latin, the Romance Languages, especially French and Italian) and with grammar and linguistics. Aside from the family of birds, the poems take inspiration from religion, philosophy, and mythology.
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Musician (lost at sea)
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Kneisley, John, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
In Musician (Lost at Sea), I am trying to understand poetry as a mode of caregiving and companionship for those crossing over from life to death. Inspired by the Ancient Greek role of the psychopomp – a mythic guide accompanying souls to the afterlife – my poems attempt both to show and to traverse the mysterious boundary between life and whatever might follow. In doing so, rather than considering death only as an occasion for grief or loss (yet no less removed from them), my poems allow death the potential to be warm, accompanied, and a space that could give way to new life. Almost all of my poems cannot help but establish themselves in the natural world: a place where death and life are so clear in their conjunction, the way a forest fire's ashes feed new plants, or the way a rabbit's body sustains an owl. Ultimately, these poems might make a seemingly impossible claim, as the Greek philosopher Thales first did, that life and death are strangely the same thing, and that to die might also be an opportunity for the soul, or other forms of life, to continue to live or grow. The speaker of many of these poems bears witness to the transitional space between life and death, observing those close to dying or already dead. From the collection's onset, the poems remain sensitive to this space's mystery, careful not to prescribe death with any one outcome, offering instead companionship and thought to the rich change occurring. In the opening poem/prelude, "Lost Graveyard in the Appalachians," the speaker walks among gravestones made illegible with age, lichen and moss growing over their names, before saying "this place / seems no longer / for my knowing." These lines, rather than simply dismissing a human way of knowing, open up both spiritual and natural possibilities for knowing the dead, which the collection will carry forward. "This place" might not be for "my knowing," but perhaps for the lichen's instead, or perhaps also for the psychopomp guiding those buried underground elsewhere ("each grave that vanishes / vanishes / as if opening / somewhere"). The collection creates space for the speaker, the reader, and even more deeply, each poem, to be just such a psychopomp: a figure that accompanies the dead on this journey elsewhere, and in doing so, gives care. Many of the poems adopt the second person "you," a pronoun that is both self-referential of the speaker and also inviting of the reader to take part in witnessing or walking with the dead. This "you" carries a strange intimacy, allowing empathy for an occasion that is universal and familiar (death) while also one that is completely unknowable to the living. The poems give the reader close access to this occasion and to the imaginative spaces beyond it, guiding them through various beings' deaths while maintaining the same careful and warm presence befitting a caregiver. Grief and loss are no less aspects of death here, as they always are, and yet they are understood more as parts of a larger journeying process, one that affects the dead just as much as the living who feel their absence. In the poem "Planting a Future Elegy in a Holloway," for example, the "you" allows both the speaker and reader to step into an imagined landscape and manner of grieving. The speaker finds themselves in a holloway, a woodland road caved in from its surrounding land, circular in shape, formed from erosion and centuries of travel. In planting a "future elegy," "you" have come to try to "orient a grief / you have not found / a language for / yet hold / and press / in older earth," the holloway providing an ancient space with which to shelter a poem that does not know its specific purpose yet, but does know that it will grieve. To plant a future elegy here, among "an exposure of roots, / moss, and quiet / mushrooms," a "rabbit's / bones," and "a worm / looping in and out / of loam" signals, like "Lost Graveyard in the Appalachians," a passing of understanding to the natural world, the land itself perhaps a more fitting agent for knowing and holding the dead. Further, by appearing at the collection's beginning, this poem suggests that the future elegy, perhaps a metaphor for understanding grief and death in general, bears out as the book progresses: an undeveloped seed that will take root in landscape, silence, and antiquity, as subsequent poems will reflect. In terms of subject matter, these poems, most of which adopt a narrative quality in describing a death or those already dead, range from the ancient to the contemporary. This variance accentuates the collection's larger motion – that of moving across narratives as a psychopomp moves alongside the dead – eventually transcending time and space despite frequently relying on Greek mythology. As the book moves, we move alongside figures like Baucis and Philemon, an elderly couple from Ovid's Metamorphoses who turn into trees; a singing fisherman who drowns at sea, two ants carrying the dead body of another ant, Orpheus's head floating down a river, patients at an Alzheimer's unit mourning their daughter, an astronomer buried on another planet, and still others. These deaths, despite being distinct, each demonstrate a continuation of a life in one way or another, the poems acting as psychopomps in carrying the souls they house elsewhere. What happens after death may still be unknowable, but the poems at least hold that death is more a transition than a fixed end point, even if that transition is a human decomposing underground while providing nutrients to grow a flower. A much smaller group of poems, placed throughout the collection, use the first person "I" to speak from the point of view of the dead. These persona poems, most of which are titled "Gravewhisper," allow the reader intimate, albeit imagined, access to voices beyond the grave. The language and syntax of these short poems (the word "whisper" capturing both their quietness and brevity), are purposefully unconventional, suggesting that speech and language, even though decipherable, function differently in the afterlife. These "Gravewhisper" poems each appear directly after more traditional narrative poems featuring a death (from which stems the "I's" identity), the proximity allowing for the living and the dead to be in conversation with one another, even though neither may know they are doing so from their vantage point. Two related poems, each titled "Whispergrave," further accentuate language that might befit the afterlife, each of them adjusted to the right margin rather than the left, formally reflecting a "Gravewhisper" on the opposite page. Together, these poems invite the reader into acts of deep listening, bringing them closer to wherever the dead may now reside, and attuning them to how a being might speak after they have died. Although different from the "Gravewhisper" poems, there is a similar strand of communication to be found in the realm of dreaming and in the unconscious mind throughout the manuscript. In the poems "Experiment in Dreaming" and "The Obsolescent Clocks," for example, the speaker (or a "you") enters dreams in which strangers, both realistic and fantastical, speak about death. In the first case, "you" dream of a fishing village, and meet a peddler selling clay vessels by the sea who mentions a drowned bird. In the second, "you" dream of an abandoned clock shop where clocks can speak, each broken and spinning according to its own, chaotic time, and labeled with the identity of someone who has died ("A grandfather clock is named / 'musician lost at sea' / while a watch, spinning violently / is 'a burned ash tree'"). Both poems suggest, by way of their playfulness in attempting dream-like thought patterns, that there is something about the unconscious mind that bring us closer to death (or to the dead), even while temporarily asleep. The space of a dream might then also be a realm in which the psychopomp can thrive, each dream perhaps a kind of spirit guide in itself, journeying us elsewhere, where language, image, and narrative operate on a level buried below our normal span of thinking. Finally, my collection's title, Musician (Lost at Sea), taken from the line referenced above in "The Obsolescent Clocks," acknowledges these layers of movement between life and death the psychopomp traverses. The title can read like an epitaph thanks to the parentheses, naming a musician and their cause of death, allowing us to conceive of the collection itself as a kind of grave marker for one who has passed into an afterlife. The word "musician," beyond denoting a musical occupation, perhaps more simply alerts us to a role being played, the poetic spirit behind the collection able to function as a musician telling a story (or many stories), adrift in uncharted waters of a kind (the idea of imagining an afterlife). Perhaps the psychopomp, at once book, speaker, and reader, is a kind of musician too (or muse), guiding us toward a poetic, and therefore musical, understanding of the dead, and what it might mean to accompany them elsewhere, a place that cannot help but be "lost" because of its intrinsic unknowability.
Open Access
Iraqi Kurdistan teachers' views and attitudes towards written corrective feedback in EFL writing
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Al-Jaf, Chnur, author; Ehlers-Zavala, Fabiola, advisor; Delahunty, Gerald, committee member; Grim, Frédérique, committee member
Written corrective feedback (WCF) in English as a foreign/second language (EFL/ESL) teaching and learning is one of the most controversial topics among researchers and teachers. Several researchers have debated and investigated its influences and effects on student learning (e.g., Ferris, 1999, 2003, 2004; Truscott, 1996), and different types of feedback have proven to be effective in improving writing skills (Bitchener & Knoch, 2010; Lee, 2004; Lee et al., 2021). Teachers provide WCF to their students in hopes that their students will benefit from it (Bitchener, 2012). Although there is much research on this topic (Brown, 2012; Chandler, 2003; Ferris, 1999, 2003, 2004; Hyland & Hyland, 2006; Lee, 2004; Lee, 2020; Lee et al., 2021) and in different ESL/EFL contexts, there are no studies on Iraqi Kurdistan teachers' views on WCF and its types. This study, therefore, aims to examine the perception and attitudes of 30 EFL teachers in Iraqi Kurdistan to understand their beliefs regarding WCF and the types of feedback they say they use and find important to give to English language learners (ELLs). A survey questionnaire was used to collect data for this investigation. Results showed that the majority of teachers who participated in this survey use WCF and believe it is useful for their students. However, there is some inconsistency in their answers regarding the types of feedback they use. Results show that they use several types of WCF depending on the context and their students' level of proficiency. Teachers' responses align to a large extent with the literature available. The results of this study can be useful for EFL teachers and researchers in Iraqi Kurdistan and other similar contexts to improve their practices related to WCF.