Wild Violets

Wild Violets is an extended work of nonfiction that explores various themes related to loss, illness, and the nature of family. It’s very much a story of matriarchal connections. The narrative primarily traces the complicated but gratifying relationships between myself and the other women in my family—my maternal grandmother, my mother, and my two younger sisters.

Writing the Unspeakable: an Ethical Approach to a Traumatized Narrative

This project uses the works of contemporary author Tim O’Brien, whose fiction often performs the trauma of the Vietnam War, to explore new ways of encountering the traumatized text. Informed by Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face, and Sigmund Freud’s and Dominick LaCapra’s work on the narratology of the melancholic and the mourner, I consider the different ways we respond to the suffering Other and explore the paradox that through reading a traumatized narrative empathically we may come face-toface, as it were, with the suffering Other. If this is indeed the case, I reason, then the obligations that are due to the Other are also due to the text itself.