BACKBEAT THE WAVES: Selections from a Novel
| dc.contributor.author | Wilhelm, Gregg | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2017-06-14T17:55:31Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2017-06-14T17:55:31Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2014-01-03 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Set in a time between glam rock and filthy punk, “Backbeat the Waves” washes over the summer that changed Mercury Widdershins’s life. His divorced mother struggles to keep the family bar from sinking. His gay uncle gets promoted to tollmaster of the city’s new bridge that completes the beltway circuit. His strung-out sister bursts about like a seagull popping Alka-Seltzer. His extended family of barflies includes a wooden-legged charlatan, a former stripper with dementia, a reporter with literary aspirations, an AWOL sailor of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, arabbers, beat cops, and ballplayers. Merck’s life completely spazzes when his cousin arrives from Appalachia—as alien as a Wookie—bringing with her a weird look, strange words, a radical attitude, and ultimate questions. Together, they discover their own liberating music, their unique sexual identities, and their separate solutions to what the future holds. Told from the perspective of popular late-night disc jockey Mercy Withers, over the course of her last shift before a station format change, “Backbeat the Waves” explores moments when people exist between things: city and country, adolescence and adulthood, male and female, perseverance and mortality. For a summer that witnessed the death of a universal “king” and the launch of human culture toward interstellar space, the most dramatic events happened at home. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11868/54 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
| dc.publisher | MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa | |
| dc.subject | Familial relationships | en_US |
| dc.subject | Mortality | en_US |
| dc.subject | Perseverance | en_US |
| dc.subject | Adolescence | en_US |
| dc.subject | Nineteen seventies | en_US |
| dc.subject | Sexual identity | en_US |
| dc.subject | 1970s | en_US |
| dc.subject | Music | en_US |
| dc.title | BACKBEAT THE WAVES: Selections from a Novel | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |