Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

4942

Date

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

Major

Creative Writing

Committee Chair

Tim Johnston

Committee Member

Cary Holladay

Committee Member

Theron Britt

Abstract

Sluts Like Us is a collection of ten stories that explore perspectives on loss and abandonment. Several of the stories are connected through thematic elements of plant-life, water, and subterranean exploration as well as through recurring characters. In these stories, children face the loss of their parents through death or abandonment; they navigate worlds in which they are not privy to the most crtical information and must form their own stories; newlyweds discover and -- bound by tragedy -- ultimately ignore the vast gulf that lies between them; mothers grapple with their frustration and lack of connection to their children, their subsequent disconnects from day-to-day life; grown men struggle to enact into reality their own latent maternal instincts. The title story, "Sluts Like Us," begins the collection: it deals most directly with the undercurrent of stigma, perpetuated and transformed through language, and the narrator of this story serves as a proxy author for the nine stories that follow.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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