A Book of Uncommon Haunting
Date of Award
5-2024
Document Type
Thesis - Closed Access
Degree Name
MFA in Writing
First Advisor
Kate Zambreno
Abstract
A Book of Uncommon Haunting is a cycle of linked lyric essays on the poetics of grief that assumes different forms: the travelogue, the commonplace book, the academic talk, and the instruction manual. It is a portrait of a place, a queer intellectual history, a family genealogy, and an inventory of obsessions. Through personal, literary, and historical observation, I meditate on affectively charged “tokens” that contour my imaginary: the ruins that inspired Wuthering Heights, ghost stories, a cabin in Maine, Woolf’s “On Being Ill,” my parents’ possessions, and the Old Quaker Cemetery in Nantucket. Each essay distills insight into the destabilized subjectivity and ambivalent chronologies of a life spent mourning. The manuscript embraces a collaged chorus of diverse voices that have shaped how I perceive my fractured past, including Melanie Klein, Anne Carson, and Marcel Proust. Writing against a narrative arc that culminates in closure, I explore the reparative potential of loss as the very thing that kindles creativity and survival.
Recommended Citation
Hussey, Miciah, "A Book of Uncommon Haunting" (2024). Writing Theses. 425.
https://digitalcommons.slc.edu/writing_etd/425