Date of Award

Spring 2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

English

Committee Director

Michael Pearson

Committee Member

Janet Peery

Committee Member

Blake Bailey

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E64 D46 2014

Abstract

In 1959, my mother left Texas at the age of twenty-eight, leaving behind a complicated past in the cowboy town of Grapevine, to build a new life for herself on the Tidewater Peninsula of Virginia. I was the first born into my mother's Virginia life. Throughout my childhood, I experienced glimpses into my mother's Texas life, providing enough insight to let me know that something not-quite-right lurked there. The details of her life remained mostly hidden to me, until forty years after my mother Ieft Texas, when I was thirty, I sought to reconstruct her past out of fragments from family stories, photographs, newspaper articles, historical records, memory, and imagination. In these fragments I discovered siblings I had not known existed, a grandmother murdered, a grandfather imprisoned for the crime, and an aunt who, at the age of twenty, disappeared from the face of the earth because of involvement with a Fort Worth drug mafia. The tragedies I discovered in my mother's past shed much light on her erratic behavior in my own sometimes troubled childhood. In this manuscript I explore my family's tragic history and discover that the past can never be expunged from the consciousness of a family, that the past carries forward with consequences no matter our denial of it, in the psyches of the living as well as the ghosts of the dead, and most importantly, that those ghosts of the past will haunt our present until they are called into the light.

Rights

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DOI

10.25777/1p21-qh14

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