Taste of Grief & Other Stories is a thematically connected collection which examines how the complexities that unconventional ideas of love coupled with the weight of grief impacts the characters created and the specific spaces they inhabit. This collection aimed to produce stories that felt compelling, narratives that challenged the binary, and characters that were motivated by their grief. The title story, “Taste of Grief” is a flash fiction piece that zooms in on a woman who has recently become a widow in the face of her wife’s sudden death. She is so consumed by grief that she finds herself deranged with hunger, ending with her trying to eat her wife’s ashes.
“The Box Turtle Swims Upstream in Frick Park” is a story told through the viewpoint and perspective of young Maggie as she learns about the fragility of family. “Spirit Airlines” begins on a plane as Sadie, a recently departed ghost, is accompanying her husband on his flight back to their hometown; he is reeling from the loss of both his wife and child. Described as literary fiction that flirts with the cusp of weird, this collection engages with genre-elements of horror and fabulism to subvert reader expectation and converse with this nuanced idea of experimentation in fiction.
Outline of Studies:
Major: Creative Writing
Educational Career:
M.A. English, 2021, Mississippi State University
B.A. English, 2019, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Committee in Charge:
Prof. Manuel Blake Sanz
Prof. Chrissy Kolaya
Prof. Peter Kispert
The public is welcome to attend.
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