First Advisor

Leni Zumas

Term of Graduation

Winter 2022

Date of Publication

3-16-2022

Document Type

Closed Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in Creative Writing

Department

English

Language

English

Subjects

Sexual minorities -- Peace River Valley (BC and Alta) -- Fiction, Fundamentalism -- Peace River Valley (BC and Alta) -- Fiction

DOI

10.15760/etd.7793

Physical Description

1 online resource (ii, 153 pages)

Abstract

Set in the Peace River Valley of northern Alberta, this novel follows the first-person voices of three women: a hungry and bombastic deaconess, a homesteading mother doubting her own mind, and a queer farm girl writing letters about calculus and kittens to her best friend and illicit lover. Each of these women reaches for supernatural forces to survive her constrained role in their rigid and isolated subarctic religious community. Their voices guide the story towards a failed Rapture and its aftermath, exploring eschatology, queerness, and translation, as well as the science and magic of environmental forces like swamp gases, ice roads, muskeg bogs, and aspen colonies. The story unspools in both epistolary and direct narrative, weaving Christian fundamentalism into magic realism and the mundane daily labors of women on the northern prairie in 1950. Only the first half of the novel appears in this thesis.

Rights

© 2022 Rosanna Beth Nafziger Henderson

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

This thesis is only available to students, faculty and staff at PSU.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/37365

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