Apparitions: essay-stories

• Author / Creator

  Austen Lee

• This collection of essays explores my experience of girlhood in rural Alberta and beyond, especially the ways in which my relationships with other women and girls have impacted my sense of myself and the world. This project takes a particular interest in platonic love, and the kinds of heartbreak and longing that emerge out of female friendships. By consistently evoking ghosts and haunting, I attempt to make physical the underlying precarity of relationships, as well as the ways in which our past relationships continue to influence and interrupt the present. Two central questions here are: How do we manage and interact with our personal histories? And is it possible to truly leave behind the relationships we develop in our formative years? These essays often resist closure, asking readers to sit inside the uncertain aftermath of grief and embody a meaningful sense of not knowing. The beckoning call of our places of origin is also central, and parts of this collection aim to explore as well as trouble what it might mean for a settler person to be “at home” on stolen lands; in this case, on Treaty 8 and Treaty 6 territory. As the narrator grapples with the ghosts of her past, she must also engage with the complicated nature of longing for a home that might not “belong” to her in the way she once imagined. Importantly, this project took shape alongside an ongoing reading practice and was inspired by a number of exceptional writers and thinkers, including Sara Ahmed, Jo Ann Beard, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Sheri and Heather Benning, Sheila Heti, Maggie Nelson, Erin Wunker and others.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • rural alberta
  • haunting
  • creative non-fiction
  • memoir
  • girlhood

• Graduation date

  Fall 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-hmse-dw15

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.