Flesh & Blood is a 118-page horror-drama screenplay about a single mother struggling to control her cannibalistic urges while caring for her young daughter and evading an increasingly suspicious detective. Two primary themes of this screenplay are control and motherhood. The protagonist of the film, Christine, grapples with controlling her...
Under the Skin is a collection of short stories that explores how different characters behave when placed in situations that are outside of their control. Stories include “Mirror Image,” which sees a young teen grapple with the fear of being an incorrigibly bad person; “Very Slowly, Then All At Once,”...
Through the creation of a children’s book, this project aims to educate children and adults about the act of banning books in the United States. This non-fiction picture book targets readers between four and ten years old. Research on the history of book banning and questions about why it happens...
Shrapnel is an exploration through memory. It’s a work that bends and twists upon itself and, as memory often does, lands within worlds and experiences only for a moment before jumping to the next story or thought. This text is a hybrid work that doesn’t fit neatly within any specific...
Her Hair is an Open Hand is a collection of free verse poems exploring unity and division through the lens of myth and place. The collection is organized into three sections. The first reflects on division: alienation between the speaker and physical landscapes, isolation within romantic relationships, and the violation...
Scenes from the Tarot is a novella that explores the desire to control time. The narrator, Truth Aiken, spurred by fear of her own death, recounts the story of her sister Beauty's death and its effects on Truth's highly unusual family. Proceeding backwards through time, Truth describes her tumultuous relationships...
The purpose of this thesis was to create a sustained piece of fiction that both represented my growth as a writer throughout my time at Oregon State University, and wove together a mixture of imagination, language, and creativity. My hope was to write a novella that incorporated and drew from...
Down the road is a collection of short stories written in the post-Stonewall tradition of gay men's literature, which has focused on works that reflect gay experience and specifically autobiographical fiction; a desire to write for gay readers without having to explain circumstances or points of view to readers unfamiliar...
Set in the dryland farming country of Eastern Oregon in the late 1950's, this novel follows a year and a half in the life of a young girl as she comes of age. A water rights dispute, the plight of nearby ranchers, disappointments in her own family and a harrowing...
Fallow is a creative non-fiction book of memory and place. It chronicles the lives of William and Vera Lutz and their lives of struggle on the Northern Plains of North Dakota. It follows a narrator and his attempts to make sense of, and connect to their, lives following both of...