Lrgur"I T) Htlt Urlt Or/Oilzorz THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER SIGNATURE Dafe

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY SAN MARCOS THESIS SIGNATURE PAGE THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FORTHE DEGREE MASTEROF ARTS IN LITERATURE AND WRITING STTIDIES rHEsrs rrrlE: desert/desert AUTHoR: Mea Hutson Hall DATE OF SUCCESSTUL OSpSNSB, May 8,2012 THE THESIS HAS BEEN ACCEPTED BY THE THESIS COMMITTEE IN PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTEROF ARTS Sandra Doller THESIS COMMITTEE CHAIR Catherine Cucinella lrgur"i t) htlt urLt or/oilzorz THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER SIGNATURE DAfE , Martha Stoddard Holmes THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER Dedication 2 Critical Introduction 3 Benediction 34 Creation 36 Confession 37 Transfiguration 40 Salvation 43 Reverence 47 Sacrament 51 Intercession 55 Trespass 57 Deliverance 61 Trial 63 Forsaken 65 Devotion 69 Inquisition 72 Rite 79 Forgive 84 Sanctified 87 Possession 89 Charism 92 Indulgence 96 Sacrifice 98 Revelation 101 2 abby aimee anaïs angela april brandon camille carol carrie catherine colette dad daren erin gary harryette henna hilda hutson hyla jacinto jan janette jason jeff jerry jessica jim jocelyn judy justin karen kate kathleen katy keith kelly keri kirby kristine laura leanne linda logan lori marcos mark martha mary marylou matt michael mina mom nathan oliver paul rose salah sandra sarah scott shawna stefanie susan thane tori virginia wendy yuan and all the grandmas . What am I but a pastiche? Thank you for letting me speak in your voices. Thank you for making believe that I can do things. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 3 “The Camoophant”—that was the poem that won me the poetry fair in second grade. I have written poetry for as long as I can remember, and yet I have resisted the label “creative writer.” I considered myself a “good” writer, even a “creative” writer, but I didn’t feel that I could accept the title and the honors that it would bestow. Creative writers, I believed, were free-spirited artists, in touch with their muses at all times, able to tap into that mystical sublime that drives creation, never at a loss for words, always eloquent, always original, always open. Then, in my first semester of grad school, I was given the assignment to write a paper reflecting on my own writing process. This assignment was seminal in shaping my identity as a writer, and, through it, I realized for the first time that the title “creative writer” scared the bejesus out of me. It was my own associations with the phrase that were getting in my way. I wasn’t big enough to fill my vision of such a prestigious role, and I felt that my creative writing had little or no worth compared to my “real” writing, critical writing and even narrative writing. In order to allow myself to be a creative writer, I had to learn how to enjoy being read creatively. “Every day I write the book” I had to learn that writing is always a process, a struggle, a journey that begins who knows where and ends who knows where. Writing is never pushed from a vacuum, although it may feel or look that way at times; as composition 4 theorist James Berlin says, describing the expressivist writing process, “The material world provides sensory images that can be used in order to explore the self, the sensations leading to the apprehending-source of all experience” (16). Writing, then, is the painstaking construction of bridges, image to image, self to self, experience to experience. Ursula K. Le Guin describes her personal writing process as “waiting for the well to refill” (Le Guin)—writing is the waiting and the refilling and the well itself. It is at once release and accretion. And so I came to understand that my writing is the fulcrum of my life experience. I view writing through my lens as a mother-producer. I perceive creation as a mother; I perceive language as a mother. While I think it would be a stretch to label my poetry “domestic” in the sense of seeking to express the minutiae of daily life, my poems would nonetheless be impossible without the experience of being a mother, of sparking life inside me, of physically feeling growth within me, of touching vitality, of nurturing an essence that is independent of me and yet wholly dependent upon me. As a mother, I have avidly watched the formation of meaning; I have watched language blossom in distinct, funky, quirky ways in each of my three children. I have witnessed the explosion of meaning as it emerges through experience, and I have gained appreciation for context, perhaps more than for any other aspect of language. I am awed by the way that an infant dives into the river of language, latching 5 onto the driftwood of certain words, like “mama,” and clinging to them for dear life to avoid drowning in the cacophony; I am humbled by the way that a kindergartener can look at a picture in a book and it helps her to make predictions, to comprehend and interpret not only what the words are going to say but also what they’re going to mean; I am amazed at the insatiable hunger for words that is generated by the necessity of expressing ideas that are ever more grand, ever more abstract. My colleague Janette Larson says in the introduction to her own creative thesis, “I believe that motherhood shifts and transforms a woman’s identity to the point that that writing, an expression of/ from that woman, has to irrevocably change along with her” (9)—I quote her because it would be difficult for me to express the sentiment any more accurately in my own words. Motherhood is transformative, and I cannot begin to think about my writing without acknowledging it. I also view writing through my lens as a daughter-product. I perceive influence as a daughter; I perceive growth as a daughter. Undeniably, one of the strongest impacts on my writing is my father. I absolutely can’t contest his presence in the way that I use language. Some of the ways to talk around my father’s persona include: a smalltown Boy Scout from rural Midwestern America; a convicted juvenile delinquent who ran with a street gang, carried a switchblade, and wore the representative black leather; a track star who was, at one time, the fastest white kid in Wisconsin; a double-major in English and 6 classical languages as a magna cum laude undergrad; an actor who studied Shakespeare with Sir John Gielgud; a brilliant student who was advised to pursue medicine but instead attended Yale divinity school during the Vietnam War; a male feminist who worked to put his wife through graduate school during women’s lib; a reservation minister during the days of the American Indian Movement; a self-described over-the-hill hippie; a charismatic and inspirational preacher who cites the apostle Paul, Martin Luther, T.S. Eliot, and Bob Dylan as equally influential on his own writing style. And I grew up as a daddy’s girl. I soaked up my dad’s presence like Maria Montessori’s allegorical sponge, which was explained this way by her son Mario: “The child does not learn language, he absorbs it as a dry sponge absorbs water. Language seems to grow in the child” (Montessori). And so, when I’m writing, I hear the words that my father has spoken to me so often: “What if you used metaphor here?” “I would probably use alliteration here,” “Well, from the Latin, this word means . .” and the always heartbreaking “But so what?” Because of being my father’s daughter, I recognize the disparate clash, the messiness, that can be present within one person’s identity and his use of language. I understand that language is performative, that it is a script that defines a role but that the role also defines the script; I understand Erik Ehn’s decree that “Writing is acting in another medium” (50). 7 My writing often comes from a place of crisis: the personal crisis of losing dear ones to death, to distance, to brokenness; the cultural crisis brought about by misunderstanding and greed; the epistemological crisis (Beachy- Quick 2) of knowing too much and not knowing enough; and the crisis of faith that applies to both sacred faith and secular faith, to all those doctrines and dogma to which I anchor myself in order to ride out the waves of my days and nights. Crises, to me, are those times when survival—physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and financial—is threatened. These moments hold the opportunity to jar me out of routine and force me into intention. And so I write, as Joan Didion has said, “to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear” (20). I write, as David Hare’s Victor Mehta says, in the play A Map of the World, to discover what I believe (Homden 124). I write in order to process experience; writing turns the abject into the project. Much has been said about writing out of crisis, about the relationship of crisis to writing. Robert Sheppard, in his essay “The Necessity of Poetics,” comments that, “Poetics is born of a crisis—the need to change” (Sheppard). Mina Loy, in her “Aphorisms on Futurism,” says, “TODAY is the crisis of consciousness. LET the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not re- create” (Loy). Ehn, also picking up on this theme of change and re-creation, propounds that, “Wakefulness to creation eschews competency in favor of 8 broken rocks, broken waves, broken langue .

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