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Tourist Trap: on Being Raised in Award-Winning Sand

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Tourist Trap: on Being Raised in Award-Winning Sand University of Central Florida STARS Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 2007 Tourist Trap: On Being Raised In Award-winning Sand Catherine Jane Carson University of Central Florida Part of the Creative Writing Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Masters Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STARS Citation Carson, Catherine Jane, "Tourist Trap: On Being Raised In Award-winning Sand" (2007). Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019. 3109. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/3109 TOURIST TRAP: ON BEING RAISED IN AWARD-WINNING SAND by CATHERINE J. CARSON B.A. University of Central Florida, 2005 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Fall Term 2007 ABSTRACT The literary essays in this collection explore the relationships between mind, body, and environment as the narrator explores Orlando, her beachfront hometown of Sarasota, and other “tourist traps.” The vignettes and traditional and experimental essays here question how residents make popular vacation destinations their own, how newcomers establish themselves as part of local culture, and how much trust one can put in strangers and neighbors, from theme- park designers to lovers. Dance floors, hybrid bikes, flying elephants, swing sets, and swimming pools fill these pages. Worries spiral like disco lights on dance floors, and cultural forces press down with the regularity of pedal strokes. With the embodiment of place comes connection between environment and activity; music, buildings, landscape, and physical activity heighten the relationship between personal identity and place. Everything moves, but the appeal of tourist traps remains constant. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For the support and encouragement I’ve received throughout this process, I thank my committee, my family, and my friends. First, thanks goes to Lisa Roney, who encouraged me to make my own discoveries by asking question after question after question, slipping her interpretation into comments and turning my head to look into the shadows my words cast. She urged me to always explore deeper and find connections where I didn’t think any existed. I am incredibly grateful for Lisa’s calm in the face of my panic, for her listening, and for her interest, not only in my subject matter, but also in my well-being and in the potential growth of my work. I owe many thanks to Jocelyn Bartkevicius, who saw me through several nonfiction workshops and read one essay through more incarnations than I can count, always pushing me to condense language and strike the most painful chords I could manage. She led me to explore the grotesque, uncomfortable, and embarrassing, from the dolls I used to play with to my childhood fantasies. She challenged me to reveal the truth behind memory through excavating the artifacts of conversation and objects, even if I wasn’t sure what that truth was or if I really wanted to see it. Thanks goes to Terry Thaxton, who watched my hand shake across the page while I wrote my first imitation of a poem I didn’t understand. To Terry, for acknowledging that between line breaks and end-stopped punctuation and alliteration a poem also contains emotion. For telling me that I don’t need all those extra words. That, possibly, I might be a poet. iii To all of them for reserving their judgment and for respecting me as a student, a writer, and a person. Forever, thanks goes to my parents for keeping up with my progress, supporting my decision to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing, and allowing me to write about them. Thanks goes to Wes for listening even when he didn’t know what I was talking about, to Mark and Susan for being part of this process with me, and to Amy and Emily for taking me out to dance away the haunting rhythm of the cursor, perpetually blinking against the white page on the computer screen. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION............................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER TWO: HOME AND AWAY ....................................................................................... 3 Park Puzzle.................................................................................................................................. 3 Plastic Skin................................................................................................................................ 13 Stars Over a Mountain West of Asheville ................................................................................ 27 Carving Through Hills .............................................................................................................. 34 Displacement Under a Tamarind Sky....................................................................................... 42 CHAPTER THREE: TOURIST TRAP ........................................................................................ 51 Dance Maps .............................................................................................................................. 51 Rilo Kiley.................................................................................................................................. 54 Tourist Trap: Mental Maps ....................................................................................................... 59 Mental Map I: Off Campus................................................................................................... 59 Mental Map II: Downtown ................................................................................................... 69 Concert T .................................................................................................................................. 85 Indie Pin-up Santa Claus........................................................................................................... 92 The Thing About Vinyl is That it Can Melt ............................................................................. 98 CHAPTER FOUR: FORWARD MOTION................................................................................ 105 On the Swing Set: An Essay in Vignettes............................................................................... 105 Wofford College, South Carolina, 2007 ............................................................................. 105 Orlando ............................................................................................................................... 106 Winter Park, 2006 ............................................................................................................... 114 v Beech Mountain, 1999........................................................................................................ 116 Summer Trip, 1993 ............................................................................................................. 118 Sarasota: Summer, 1993 ..................................................................................................... 123 Florida Weather I ................................................................................................................ 125 Running, 1995..................................................................................................................... 127 Florida Weather II............................................................................................................... 130 Sweating, 2007.................................................................................................................... 133 Near Drowning........................................................................................................................ 136 CHAPTER FIVE: WRITING LIFE ESSAY.............................................................................. 162 APPENDIX: BOOK LIST.......................................................................................................... 166 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 170 vi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Throughout the writing process, I’ve toyed with several metaphors to describe the schematic of this essay. For one, I took the central image of the opening essay: a puzzle I played with as a child, made of large, cardboard triangles that fit together to depict a park scene. The seams between puzzle pieces connected diagonally-cut bodies and finished the trajectories of airborne footballs. I used this as a model a few months ago when I had trouble processing exactly what the three major things I was writing about—independent-label music, exercise, physical environments—had to do with each other. Sure, each essay could depict a particular scene, connected to the scenes on either side of it through a similar image or theme, but how could I also pull in what was happening with these three, very different entities? I had three themes. A triangle has three points. I combed back through my essays, and then I saw it. Each involved the body, an environment, and background noise. I made lists of how each of these themes was represented in each essay. This list led me
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