mfa thesis

Black Lake started as poems about grief and became something bigger: a video installation art piece, a creative nonfiction essay, and a chapbook exploring loss and the tenth anniversary of my father's suicide.

the video

the essay

the chapbook

Black Lake is both a metaphor and a real place. It's been in my family for generations: where Grandma Tootie and Auntie Greta made pancake and sausage breakfasts I can still smell, where we've spent summers together, where we've spread ashes. To be consumed by grief is to jump into a black lake. The work is intimate but leaves room for you to breathe, to map your own experience onto the words and images. Here I'm connected to generations of family memory, and to loss itself.

"
it’s a marvelous night for a moondance.

/  van morrison  /