Theses and Dissertations Collection

This project’s primary concern is what’s True; it’s driven by what I learned in the spiritual world of my childhood to call seeking. The work is a direct response to the perennial claim from Mom that You have to find God, no matter what she looks like. Though often in this text seeking is marked by loneliness, it’s the constraint of each piece that it be an act of seeking.

The manuscript explores truth through a range of contradictory claims to it (fact and affect; Eastern and Western medicine; science and magic/spirit; pain and dissociation; narrative/language and interruption/embodiment; madness and sanity; mutuality and individualism; learned truth and “objective” truth; law and belief). Somewhere in this collection, everything listed in the previous parenthetical claims to be “true,” where true sometimes means accurate and other times Godly. Often, the only conclusion this text lands on looks like this: The Venn diagram is a circle. Which is the entire problem.

In this collection, I frequently ground the writing in nontraditional sources of truth in order to honor those ontologies and better represent my own internal landscape of knowing. Color and sound, mirrors and mountains, physical sensation and questions of scale become things I turn to again and again to play out—often literally play out, as in a performance—scenarios and stories, an effort to poke the truths and see what spooks and what holds steady. In a body and a landscape (the Rocky Mountain West) haunted by stories, I’m often narrating the stories as I’ve heard them told while simultaneously close reading them and revising, then re-revising them on the page. The telling then is an act of improvisation and arts & crafts and alchemy, all things I learned as responses to doubt and to bounds. Stories here can’t be undone, but their scope (in time and in space) can always change. This book takes finding the right scope, or a new scope, as key to its seeking.