MY MOTHER WHO TEACHES DANCE: Selections from a Novel
| dc.contributor.author | Holmes, Connor | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2017-06-19T14:19:08Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2017-06-19T14:19:08Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2014-06-19 | |
| dc.description.abstract | My Mother Who Teaches Dance is a novel of self-discovery, told alternately from the perspectives of Alby Melvin, a South Florida crime reporter, and Mariposa Fernández-Pérez, a Cuban ex-pat living in Miami with her parents Mateo and Lucia. Some sections are told from the perspectives of supporting characters, though Alby and Mariposa drive the story. Their lives intertwine when Alby goes to the funeral of his estranged father, held by Mateo, whom Alby’s father had saved in a trucking accident. Alby must reconcile his father’s abandonment and his mother’s late-stage Huntington’s Disease, and Mariposa must traverse her tumultuous past growing up in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Both struggle to understand Alby’s father, Franklin Melvin, who passed through their lives so fleetingly. The novel explores various themes centered on homelessness, foreignness, fatherhood, abuse, abandonment, and reconciliation. The novel is written in a traditional style but with sections utilizing syntax or formatting in order to accentuate the narrative material, including alternating POVs, stream-of-consciousness, and the use of subtitles or numerical lists. Ultimately these techniques should serve Alby and Mariposa’s story by palpably exorcising the traumas of their pasts and helping forge a new conversation between them. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11868/65 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
| dc.publisher | MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa | |
| dc.subject | Novel | en_US |
| dc.subject | Journalism | en_US |
| dc.subject | Cuba | en_US |
| dc.subject | Florida | en_US |
| dc.subject | Homelessness | en_US |
| dc.subject | Huntington’s Disease | en_US |
| dc.subject | Trauma | en_US |
| dc.subject | Foreignness | en_US |
| dc.subject | Abandonment | en_US |
| dc.subject | Abuse | en_US |
| dc.subject | Reconciliation | en_US |
| dc.title | MY MOTHER WHO TEACHES DANCE: Selections from a Novel | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |