Now that my teaching has finished for the academic year, I'm taking stock of all I read and learned this year from my amazing students. It's the perfect time to dig out my Columbia thesis collection, Land of the Sleeping Giant. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but did you know the "Sleeping Giant" is literally a small 'mountain' in my hometown?
I hesitate to say mountain, now that I live in Europe where the real mountains are - though, of course, not in the Carpathian Basin.
Master of Fine Arts Thesis Abstract, Cynthia-Marie Marmo O’Brien
Land of the Sleeping Giant: Imagining Home is a 43,600-word collection of sixteen nonfiction essays, ranging in length from three to twenty-five pages. The form of the essays varies from third-person research-driven prose to first-person lyric meditations, on subjects ranging from neurosurgery and doctor-patient relationships to the consequences of immigration, from emotionally rich childhood memories to encyclopedia-like explorations of modern day cities, from an investigation into the consequences of the discovery of a toxic landfill beneath a modern school building and urban neighborhood to an inquiry about the origins of a family heirloom. The essays were crafted over a two-year independent working period under the supervision of Cris Beam, during which time I was also teaching academic writing to first-year students in Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program. The seeds of some of the essays were sown during the preceding two years of writing workshops with Patricia O’Toole, Richard Locke, Michael Scammell, Darcy Frey, Honor Moore and Stephen O’Connor.
As a collection, the essays are unified by thematic concerns of how to define place and home; the formation of collective memory and its resulting impact on individual identity development; and the effects of serious illness on one’s relationship to both self and home. The thesis poses several questions— How do geographical, socioeconomic, political and historical characteristics of physical places shape the people who call them home? What factors go into the decision to leave one’s home of origin permanently? How does collective memory interact with first-hand experience of a place to influence individual decision-making? What are the consequences of serious illness on one’s relationship with the notion of home? Is home an exterior or interior location?
Under An Orange Moon: This is a first-person narrative about what is left behind by death, told through an account of an afternoon raking leaves with my father, during which my physical actions trigger reminders of my uncle, who died on my third birthday. It is also a meditation on the relationship between a father and daughter, and a younger generation’s role in an older generation’s grieving process.
A Figment of Your Imagination: Coming after the breezy lyrical essay that opens the collection, this serious mediation sets the tone for the collection’s exhumation of matters often left buried, physically or mentally. It is both an account of debilitating depression and an argument about the limits and possibilities presented to us by our ultimate resource, our imagination.
Land of the Sleeping Giant: Part reportage, part memoir, part history, part op-ed, the title essay is the author’s biography of a place, specifically the land on which her middle school was constructed in the mid-twentieth-century. Covering the earliest European settlement in southern Connecticut through the Industrial Revolution and on to modern-day debate over the need for what would be the largest environmental clean-up in the state’s history, the essay is not only the story of a place but it also traces the narrator’s desire to assess the health concerns of those who live around the school, which was built atop a chemical waste dump. Her struggle to do so objectively in the face of the limits of medical-scientific knowledge and with the biasing complication of being a brain tumor survivor adds tension to the lessons she ultimately draws, conclusions and challenges which are applicable far beyond the acres of land in her hometown that are the essay’s subject
Love’s Aftermath: What happens when the object of our affection is not a person, but a place? How does land leave its mark in our consciousness and how do we transfer an identity rooted in a specific setting to other places we venture in our lives?
Greenwood Avenue, Higgins Beach, Scarborough, Maine: An ode to a summer’s tradition of an intergenerational gathering at a beach house and a celebration of storytelling as a vehicle through which siblings, now grown, sort out the facts and myths of their shared childhood.
The World According to A. Schermer: History as told through a mysterious painting and a trip to the village where it was created.
Saturday Evening Stroll, Elizabeth Park, Hartford, Connecticut : A reflection on how serious illness colors one’s perspective, told through the eyes of the narrator, recently discharged from the hospital, taking a casual walk through the park in her parents’ neighborhood. Her experience gives unusual shades of meaning to the ordinary observations of a chilly evening and breathes new life into tired subjects such as fish in a pond, locked doors and what to eat for dinner.
Solid Things: A discovery of memory as embedded in objects, such as furniture and rocks.
That Summer: A eulogy for an eighteen-year-old boy killed suddenly in a car crash, written as an account of his last summer, told in stories of everyday occurrences, observations and conversations as technique to contrast with the jarring incident of his death.
Please Come Flying: An experiment in speculative nonfiction, as the narrator imagines herself reacting to tumultuous times through vivid and concrete imagery, punctuated by the refrain, a plea to God, “Please come flying.”
The Wave Within: Mixing memoir with science writing, this essay demythologizes the medical term “seizure” through an interview and observation at the Columbia Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, as well as a first-person account of an EEG. It also explores the boundaries of the known and unknown about how seizures operate in the brain, and the diagnostic challenges of a complicated and elusive malady.
A Place That I Could Not Go: This is a depiction of the process of constructing memories in order to revise the past according to the roles we wish we had played in it. Told from the perspective of the narrator in her hospital bed, contemplating a list of phone numbers culled from her cell phone and debating how to categorize the contacts into those who she should call with the news of her brain tumor, those who she won’t, those who she shouldn’t and so forth. Can one separate people and places into discrete time periods, one unique from the other, or is each phase of life inherently stained with the remnants of the previous phases and relationships?
Encyclopedia of Glasgow, 2002: This is an experimental essay about life as a young American in a Scottish city on the verge of the war with Iraq in 2002, in the style of a John D’Agata essay from his Halls of Fame collection. It seeks to define a place and locate it in a moment in time through a series of seemingly random alphabetical encyclopedia entries that form a narrative.
On The Metro North Platform, Bronx, NY: Commentary in favor of the passage of laws banning smoking in public places, told through a conversation between the narrator and a mathematics PhD student arguing over smoking a cigarette on the train platform. It incorporates recent laws and broadens its scope to situate this debate in the larger context of the dilemma over how to balance the preservation of civil liberties with the duty of a society to protect the collective good.
What My Father Told Me: A riff on the disintegration of the power of the patient in policy discussions surrounding the reform of healthcare, as sparked by a narrative beginning, “I did not find out that I had a brain tumor from a doctor; I found out from my father.” The essay also explores the essential, and underappreciated, role of storytelling as a diagnostic tool.
Somewhere To Sit: A quest narrative to recover my great-grandmother, Cresenz Fischer Schermer, who immigrated to New York through Ellis Island from Germany at end of the nineteenth century, this essay seeks to identity and distinguish the narrator’s life trajectory with that of the subject’s. Through interviews with her descendants, imagined scenes from her life, examination of her possessions and photographs, a portrait emerges of a young woman who left her homeland confident and strong, but ended her American sojourn worn and weak. Several factors are explored as to the possible sources and roots of this transformation.
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