Interdisciplinary arts and sciences - Bothell

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/19657

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Everywhere the Light Touches / Alice Through the Looking Glass: Exposing the History of a Well-Behaved Woman
(2025-08-01) Hudson, Bethany; Borsuk, Amaranth; Heuving, Jeanne
When history spotlights the man at the center, who is left in the shadows? Everywhere the Light Touches, a novel, reilluminates the life of pioneering businesswoman Alice Kay Whitney Hutchison, longtime secretary to George Eastman, founder of Kodak. Written in an experimental, epistolary form that blends omniscient and first-person narration, it imagines Alice’s response to Eastman’s suicide as she questions their life’s work in light of the compromises they made to protect their private selves. A lens of grief and memory invites readers to reconsider Alice’s role in the intersecting histories of photography, capitalism, and feminism at the turn of the twentieth century. The accompanying essay, “Alice Through the Looking Glass: Exposing the History of a Well-Behaved Woman,” draws on the work of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to examine the politics of archival silence and the ethics of recovering “well-behaved” women from historical obscurity. Taken together, the two pieces offer a feminist reimagining of erased labor and overlooked lives, while probing the unstable boundaries between fact and fiction, past and present.
[COMMITMENT]
(2025-08-01) Tonelli, Harley; Maestas, Nadine
[COMMITMENT] is a hybrid collection of prose poems and lyric fragments that confronts experiences of trauma, institutionalization, relationship collapse, and the pursuit of beauty in the aftermath. Resisting linear narrative, the poems move through hospital corridors, courtrooms, prisons, and open fields. Themes of hunger, madness, violence, and the fragile body intersect with motifs of birds and the sacredness of the natural world, echoing the frameworks of disability poetics and the lineage of confessional literature. Informed by the aesthetics of Maggie Nelson, Bhanu Kapil, and Lyn Hejinian, this collection is both a record of survival and an unflinching confrontation with the self—a desperate, sometimes tender attempt to speak into the silence left by institutional and interpersonal erasure.
Homebound
(2025-08-01) Islam, Noor Alnaaz Alnaaz; Chen, Ching-In
Homebound ~ was envisioned as a novel in verse. It’s a story about a girl remembering the home she left and reimagining the reasons of her move. The propulsion of the narrative leans on its landscape. Environmental disruptions like floods, landslides and seasonal storms mirror her turbulent life inside her home. My protagonist’s name symbolizes blue. Her name Akakhi translates to the color sky blue. She wants to chase the sky. She leans into this idea of being sky like. As a creator I lean onto colors in my writing. I do so at the risk of being called out as the cat who loves the box of mangoes! I write because the clamoring thoughts inside corrode my calm. I compose poems because language feels inadequate. This push and pull between the possibilities and limitations of what words can and fail to convey—opens space for discoveries—creates a tension. This tension evokes a thrill I like to latch onto. I call this the creative high, the joy felt during the process of creation.
it's always something different in the end
(2025-08-01) Coleman, Mikayla; Hiebert, Ted; Borsuk, Amaranth
its always different in the end is a collection of four projects that combine physical and poetic realms, exploring the ways that materiality and interactivity can heighten the poetic experience by leaning into fiber arts, ceramics, collage, video, and more. As a neurodivergent artist and poet, Coleman’s projects include tactile, repetitive motions that she has leaned on to make her own education accessible, addressing judgements she has felt in academic spaces. In presenting and discussing the projects included in it’s always different in the end, Coleman questions finality and emphasizes the importance of pursuing long-term, non-linear, deeply personal projects in the face of an ultra-fast paced society that demands astronomically high volumes of product with no regard for lost quality or meaning. Coleman, like many of the artists and writers she includes in her discussion, addresses the historic devaluation of women’s work. Coleman hopes to widen the possibilities of what poetry is considered to be, encouraging writers, makers, and appreciators to embrace a slow poetics and create art that transcends capital. In presenting and discussing the projects included in it’s always different in the end, Coleman asks readers to question finality and encourages artists to pursue long term, non linear, deeply personal projects.
re-/ Can Poetry Hold Us All?: A Journey Out of Trauma-Based Writing
(2025-08-01) Mannino, Natalie; Borsuk, Amaranth
re- and the accompanying essay "Can Poetry Hold Us All?: A Journey Out of Trauma- Based Writing" explore the complex relationship between trauma, creativity, and recovery through a poetic and reflective lens. It chronicles the author’s journey from writing that was deeply entrenched in personal trauma to a re-imagined creative practice grounded in healing, presence, and self-renewal. Initially trapped in cycles of repetition and emotional exhaustion, the author confronts the limitations and mental toll of trauma-based writing. Through intentional disengagement from past themes and the development of new coping mechanisms, the author begins a process of creative re-discovery. The resulting poetry collection, re-, deliberately omits contextual details and instead emphasizes the emotional and thematic aftershocks of experience—loss, uncertainty, and hope—allowing readers to engage freely and empathetically. Influenced by experimental poetics, the gothic tradition, and writers such as Aase Berg, Orlando White, and Ross Gay, the work prioritizes fluidity, ambiguity, and the power of the present. The thesis is ultimately a testament to the ability to re-build a sustainable and life-affirming writing practice, one that moves with—and not against—the self.
our shoulders branch across time
(2025-08-01) Hicks, Catheryne Genevieve; Chen, Ching-In
This hybrid MFA thesis, our shoulders branch across time, is a nonlinear homage to intersecting lineages—familial, spiritual, and somatic. It centers the matriarchs of my family, descendants of Donita Buffalo and Irvin Hicks Sr.—living and deceased Black women whose lineage I continue.Alongside these familial roots is an evolving spiritual practice, drawn from Buddhist traditions and grounded in mindfulness of the body. I also write from my lineage as a hands-on healer, shaped by my work as a physical therapist and bodyworker. Through prose, poetry, and photographs, I experiment with space and structure to surface what the body, memory, and lineage hold—what’s hidden, misremembered, or in need of healing. I write through the lens of multiplicity embodied in the ouro~ensō, a merging of circular symbols from African and Buddhist traditions. I write from inside the circle, adjacent to it, or gather fragments that have bled into its periphery. In this act of witnessing, I may be breaking chains or conjuring what resists a single narrative. From roots to body to rupture—and back to the unseen—the words stretch across time and space, branching into a form strong enough to hold the discomfort of more than one truth.
Carry-on
(2025-08-01) Peterson, Mason; Borsuk, Amaranth
Carry-on is a chapbook, an archive of objects, a series of vignettes. It is autobiographical. It is awork of complete and utter fiction. It, like any honest poet, is full of contradictions and half-truths. More accurately, it is a mixed-media collection of poetry and prose housed within a fictional traveler’s suitcase and the various items it contains. Exploring the interplay between object and interpretation, Carry-on asks readers to examine the assumptions they make about strangers— fictional or otherwise—as they rifle through this traveler’s very literal baggage. By placing prose and poetry in direct conversation with physical objects, this project encourages readers to draw their own conclusions about this character based on what’s said, what’s shown, and what’s missing. Picture a pair of sunglasses with a poem about a fond beach-day memory engraved across their surface. A sweatshirt whose tag instructs you how to handle both the garment and its wearer with care. A poem about tension so thick you could cut it with the enclosed pair of scissors. Each object in conversation with the poem, each poem a part of the object itself—both components inextricably entwined.
The Eschatology Scholarship Database
(2025-08-01) Nelson, Elfie Lyn; Hiebert, Ted; Borsuk, Amaranth
The Eschatology Scholarship Database is a collaborative digital archive that explores the ethics of misinformation, memory, and apocalypse. Styled as a future-facing wiki, the project invites contributors to imagine themselves as posthuman entities reconstructing the end of the world from fractured, inconsistent evidence. Each entry is part of a (still) growing corpus of invented scholarship, designed to mimic the tone and structure of academic research while remaining entirely fictional. Contributors generate narrative ruptures through hyperlinks that expand the archive outward in fractal patterns, displacing linear history and authorship. It transforms archival space into a site of play and emergence, where contributors re/member community by writing new futures. Together, Janus and other future historians will build a corpus that reflects neither the shape nor authority of the human body. In so doing, the Database will become a speculative body of misinformation that plays with the aesthetics of knowledge to reveal its biases and imagine alternatives.
Propagation
(2024-09-09) KEEFER, LINDSEY; Heuving, Jeanne; Hiebert, Ted
Where do we place the desire to use our grief as a souvenir of what we’ve lost? Propagation envisions a world that turns this kind of grief into an asset by processing it into a source of literal power. In this alternate world, human bodies produce a grief-triggered hormone – memorin – that can power their electrical grids. When a person misses someone deeply, their memorin levels skyrocket. Authorities then extract the hormone and funnel it into their cities’ electrical systems. A groundbreaking series of experiments identifies an even more potent source of memorin: the grief people feel toward their childhood selves. Through the narrative of a woman giving birth to her younger self, this novel explores the intricate redundancies of the grief we feel about our childhoods. How can we let go of the past in a way that honors it while providing an honest kind of closure?
Bird Boy: Evolution at Lightspeed
(2024-09-09) Smith, Parker Dean; Milutis, Joe
What is the difference between human and animal? How might we define the murky place between us? How might we explore it, identify it, and make peace with the spaces where we brush up against one another? Is there some of the animal inside all of us? How do we connect with it? Should we? And if we do, what will we find? Using extended metaphor, personification, and transformational images of the body, Bird Boy adds to this collective questioning. The speaker of these essays and poems pushes against the animal inside of himself, aligning human emotion, introspection, and morality with the physicality, rituals, and behaviors of birds.
T R I N K E T
(2024-09-09) Payomo, Felicia Madrid; Chen, Ching-In; Heuving, Jeanne
T R I N K E T at its center, is a story of a woman searching for her childhood. Through the eyes of the treasures that occupy and color her world, we are introduced to the moments in her young life that shaped her. The passing of time is uncovered through object memory, as her associations combine storytelling and the tangible to explore the beginnings of her fears, joy, isolation, and confusion. Tangled and fractured, we witness the gentle grief with the conclusion of a childhood, and the realization that, despite great changes, some things stay the same.
Variable Proximities: calculations of closeness | diagrams of distance
(2024-09-09) Morris, Candace R; Borsuk, Amaranth
Does grief have data? Centralizing friendship, this work investigates love and loss through the search for, analysis of , and visualizations from the data embedded in grief. Situated in proximity, what would data science and the grieving process, seemingly incommensurate entities, reveal? Would grief come into relief or recess in such a paradigm? Mining archives collected over a 10-year friendship, the author conducts an intimate and vulnerable forensic investigation into a complex friendship, death, and grief. This work seeks to quantify the impact of friendship and loss and encourages the reader to consider their own relationships and grief through the lens of data and ephemerality.
We Might Have Been A River
(2024-09-09) McVeigh, Emma; Chen, Ching-In
We Might Have Been A River is an experience of embodiment as told through the exploration of sound, touch, language, and water. Seeking to question and understand the impacts of cultural and economic systems such as capitalism, consumerism, and individualism on the body, the author investigates her relationship to these systems as they influence her relationship to the natural world, her own body, and others. Through an interrogation of the senses, namely sound and touch, the author explores loneliness, physical intimacy, and connection. Simultaneously, she examines language as a means of inquiry––a place of questioning that allows her to investigate the ideals of individualism, collectivism, and consumerism through a breakdown of the words we use to make up our sense of selfhood. Finally, water remains the soothing balm and wise teacher throughout the process, informing what it might mean to exist more embodied and collectively in the world.
Trans Universe Theory
(2024-09-09) vaughan-ende, phoenix kai; Hiebert, Ted; Heuving, Jeanne
Trans Universe Theory is a multimedia, hybrid-form book that writes in the overlaps between language, identity, humanity, quantum physics, evolution, technology, grief, queerness, and speculative futures. TUT seeks to prove the impossible through the expansiveness of language—a non-integer (nonbinary) medium. It seeks to poke at the underlying nature of everything—of things—as inherently nonbinary. Thus, valuing and necessitating a queer and trans lens. By writing in the intersections of language, art, humanities, mathematics, and quantum physics, TUT challenges humanity’s internalized binaries—looking at ways that even numbers and the smallest points of our universe are fundamentally nonbinary. This book challenges our world’s scripted codes and from the margins, from a liminal space, aims to critically examine the socially constructed dichotomies that are made to be invisible.
The Lighter Way
(2024-09-09) Balabram, Elisa; Borsuk, Amaranth
The Lighter Way is a transmedia interactive novel that follows characters in New York City and across the web. In it, a group of unseen healers is testing a virtual space called the Lighter Web, designed to create a community that moves people away from dehumanization and division toward empathy and love.
Greetings from the Meat Aisle
(2024-09-09) Dalrymple, Pria; Hiebert, Ted
Greetings from the Meat Aisle is a celebration of what it means to be young and filledwith emotion. Specifically, to be a woman learning how to be alive for the first time. This project is expressed through poetics and visual imagery– which will be discussed in two parts– the poetics, then the images, and finally, how they work together. Greetings from the Meat Aisle is an ode to experiencing different emotions for the first time, and deeply, as a growing woman. A huge unspoken theme throughout GMA is how girlhood can be experienced andmore often than not produces these angsty feelings, memories, and existential experiences. The aforementioned “celebration” of what it means to be young and filled with emotions describes just that. Girlhood can often be characterized as different metaphors throughout the project. However, girlhood can best be represented by the feelings of disconnect and the ability or lack of understanding of how the world works as you grow up in it. This is shown by no overt figure at the forefront of the project, as there are many “selves” found throughout GMA. Selves include: the myself, the Meat Aisle, and the meat creatures. All of which represent different ideas and intangibles of girlhood. All three selves work together to curate these tensions between themes and ideas discussed within GMA.
Fragmentary Mother
(2024-09-09) Tran, Kathryn Marie; Borsuk, Amaranth
Fragmentary Mother is a collection of essays and experimental creative nonfiction that explores my transition from Marine to mother. Composed during my pregnancy and following the birth of my child, these experimental essays confront past traumas that have influenced me, while also reckoning with the way I am reshaped in this new phase of my life. Ultimately, this is both a documentation of a healing process rooted in love and an acknowledgement of empathy for oneself in response to trauma. The work focuses on three distinct ideas that shape my understanding of motherhood: (1) childhood and my direct experiences with mother figures, (2) my experiences as a leader in the Military, specifically the Marine Corps and (3) the present state of pregnancy and motherhood as I transition through it. Reoccurring themes of medicine’s impact on shaping my life as well as webs of interconnection are reflected in each piece. This work encapsulates the unique and beautiful experience of capturing a delicate state of change for a mom.
Borrowed Mysteries: Lines Composed on Tantalus
(2024-09-09) Wong, Gradon; Heuving, Jeanne
A collection of poetry arranged in six series on varying subjects. These poems are meant to be purely expressive, without any kind of didactic purpose. Each series is introduced by an epigraph from a different work, and the most important theme throughout the entire work is, as the title suggests, the concept of borrowing. Nearly every poem relies on some kind of allusion. The second most important theme is the inconstancy of the poet, both his feeling and his expression, and the guilt and dread that this results in; the guilt of indulgence, and the dread of the abyss. As a result, any other theme may or may not be the fantasy of the reader.
Little Sufferings
(2024-09-09) Knopp, Melissa Mae; Borsuk, Amaranth
Relationships with mothers and daughters are fraught. I know this. “Little Sufferings” is a collection of short, somewhat repetitive personal essays written under seven themes—Faith, Femininity, Family, Vigilance, Body, Self, and Competence. It includes photographs of my mother throughout her life, though primarily in adolescence, as well as one of myself and my sisters. This project was discovered primarily in discussion with my sisters, discussions we’ve been having all our lives about our mother and the little— sometimes big— things about her, her personality and self-presentation, that just drive us bananas.
The Internet Sad Boi Journals
(2024-09-09) Knechtel, Farron; Borsuk, Amaranth
The Internet Sad Boi Journals is cumulation of a long-term project where I archived curated and then responded to my own online journal entries previously posted on LiveJournal.com from 2001 – 2003, written at ages fifteen through eighteen. The first half is comprised of these journal entries interspersed with personal essays offering further details and a contemporary perspective on the subjects raised by these entries, such as immigrant identity, toxic relationships, sexual abuse, masculinity, queer identity and isolation, and queer mourning. The second half collects poetry from my LiveJournal in conversation with my current poetry, searching out throughlines of subjects and themes to bridge my poetic voice from past to present. The Internet Sad Boi Journals finds a place between Y2K nostalgia and memoir to radically embrace my past and present self as a writer.

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