Title
Degree Type
Thesis
Date of Award
2011
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Debra Marquart
Abstract
Sanctuaries navigates the environment of "home" via interrelated essays and vignettes personal to my upbringing in rural Southwest Indiana. By exploring my own childhood, youth, and family traumas and successes, I have crafted a collection that speaks volumes about seeing the world from a perspective both privileged and underprivileged simultaneously. I uncover my lineage's numerous bouts with physical and mental illness and unrealized dreams, but I also bring to light our traditions of spreading kindness, treading lightly in the world, and preparing inordinate amounts of food and festive cheer to balance out times of hardship. Few writers have attempted to paint the Southern-Midwest's landscape and to characterize its people as more than caricatures caught between the factories of the north and the tobacco fields of the south, so I rose to that challenge. What results is an essay collection rife with excess and squalor, abandon and abandonment, humor and deep sorrow, atheism and fervent belief in the supernatural, and snippets of what it really means, by my home region's estimation, to be part of a family.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31274/etd-180810-2618
Copyright Owner
Samantha Lynne Robinson-adams
Copyright Date
2011
Language
en
Date Available
2012-04-30
File Format
application/pdf
File Size
274 pages
Recommended Citation
Robinson-adams, Samantha Lynne, "Sanctuaries" (2011). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 11934.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/11934
