Brigham Young University BYU ScholarsArchive Theses and Dissertations 2019-07-01 The Hero's Mother Rosalyn Joy Ribeira Brigham Young University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Ribeira, Rosalyn Joy, "The Hero's Mother" (2019). Theses and Dissertations. 7579. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/7579 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. The Hero’s Mother Rosalyn Joy Ribeira A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts Christopher E. Crowe, Chair John Serge Bennion Dawan Lynn Coombs Department of English Brigham Young University Copyright © 2019 Rosalyn Joy Ribeira All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The Hero’s Mother Rosalyn Joy Ribeira Department of English, BYU Master of Fine Arts Sixteen-year-old Drea Grimm’s mother walked out of their family home at midnight seven years ago. All she left behind were notebooks full of made-up stories and a family that Drea, being the oldest, was now in charge of. One day, Drea finds a mysterious letter with her name on it written in her mother’s handwriting and everything she thought was true is destroyed. With the help of her partner on a school project, Ian, Drea uses her mom’s stories and clues from her last moments to heal her family and maybe bring her mother home. But there is someone who wants Drea, and they will do anything to draw her closer to the truth, and in turn, closer to supernatural danger. Keywords: young adult literature, fantasy, urban fantasy ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Huge thank you first and foremost to my committee of amazing professors who help me always to be better and to grow as a writer. Thank you to my friends and fellow students in the MFA program for all the feedback, advice, and pep talks that they have given me over the last two years. I truly understand now that no one writes a novel alone. I could not have done any of this without those who have helped me to move forward. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE .............................................................................................................................................. i ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................... iv Introduction: The Very True Evolution of The Hero’s Mother ...................................................... 1 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 11 Chapter 1 ....................................................................................................................................... 12 Chapter 2 ....................................................................................................................................... 17 Chapter 3 ....................................................................................................................................... 22 Chapter 4 ....................................................................................................................................... 25 Chapter 5 ....................................................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 6 ....................................................................................................................................... 34 Chapter 7 ....................................................................................................................................... 41 Chapter 8 ....................................................................................................................................... 50 Chapter 9 ....................................................................................................................................... 56 Chapter 10 ..................................................................................................................................... 62 Chapter 11 ..................................................................................................................................... 70 Chapter 12 ..................................................................................................................................... 78 Chapter 13 ..................................................................................................................................... 84 Chapter 14 ..................................................................................................................................... 90 Chapter 15 ................................................................................................................................... 101 Chapter 16 ................................................................................................................................... 113 Chapter 17 ................................................................................................................................... 122 Chapter 18 ................................................................................................................................... 130 v Chapter 19 ................................................................................................................................... 134 Chapter 20 ................................................................................................................................... 139 Chapter 21 ................................................................................................................................... 148 Chapter 22 ................................................................................................................................... 153 1 Introduction: The Very True Evolution of The Hero’s Mother This novel is more than a fictional story. It is a manifestation of my journey as a writer over the course of six years. It has been said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. I might add that a writer is someone for whom writing is like the ebb and flow of ocean waves. Or that a writer is someone continuously haunted. Or that a writer is someone for whom writing is sometimes torturous. Believe it or not, my journey for this thesis started when I was seventeen. I knew I wanted to be a writer even though I rarely wrote anything besides stray ideas and school essays. In fact, I was impatient for it. I read craft books, blog posts, author websites, searching for some secret key that would get me writing and make me into the kind of person who wrote the books I loved. I didn’t want to be an author when I was old, I wanted to it to happen right then. Meanwhile, I read almost every novel in the teen section of my local library, sometimes reading seven or eight books a week. The idea for this novel first came as a “what if?” question out of my love for fairy tales and fairy tale retellings. What if the stories the brothers Grimm told were real in some other fantasy land that they had discovered? And what if, since they found this land, their descendants were cursed with the responsibility of keeping the gate between the two worlds? And so Drea Grimm was born in a completely different skin and situation than she ended. In the five years after Drea first appeared in my imagination, I graduated high school, went to college, told everyone I knew that I wanted to be a writer, and drowned in my overactive imagination. I wrote the first twenty pages of Drea’s story. Then I wrote them again. Then again, changing them slightly each time. I took classes, workshopped the plot, and looked through even more books trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. 2 Why was it so hard to tell her story? Skip ahead to me post-mission, post-flip flopping, post-doubting my dreams. I was diagnosed with severe depression and put on medication. I stopped reading. I stopped writing. For two years I barely did anything. I was haunted. It was after this two-year episode and forced hiatus that Drea’s story came back to me. Drea and her family had always been central to the story. They were a constant. Even their names barely changed through the multiple evolutions of this novel, though there was once an additional little brother named Freddie. The Hero’s Mother is a character-based novel. Even more than that, it is a character-driven novel. When I was trying to make myself fall back in love with writing again, Drea drove the plot forward and took the reins when I couldn’t. It seems odd to speak of characters as if they made their own decisions and choices, but that is what it felt like. Their story was carrying me. In many ways, the lore central to this novel (the stories of the Ten Heroes) changed everything. Through building this lore, I was able to see how the legends of a foreign land effected Drea’s reality. Additionally, the stories acted as a solid reference