Set in Colorado Springs, Cascade is a novel detailing the unraveling senses of belonging of its cast of characters. At the start of the novel Isa’s adoptive father, Ottis, leaves the city where they’ve built a life as a small, makeshift family. Isa and her mother Teresa, brother Zo, and best friend Cherry are left to confront their individual and collective modes of survival in Colorado Springs. As a novel, Cascade is concerned with a less critically engaged edge of the black diaspora in America: the realities and peculiarities of being black the Mountain West, in a city that did not experience a major historical black migration but has an established black population due only to the military and scattered migrations of black individuals and families.
While Cascade is the novel-in-progress examining these layers through detailing the lived experiences of its characters, the critical afterword is a craft essay exploring Cascade’s theoretical and spiritual underpinnings, as well as tracing its future potential. This afterword explores the influence of Black Geographies further, along with the novel’s engagement with reality TV, epiphenomenal time, craft questions of fiction and the true story, and the idea of ancestor as muse. As a whole, this project seeks to explore some of these seams between geography, blackness, the construction of family, and how we can use narrative to navigate the space between the living and the dead.
","abstract_html":"<p>Set in Colorado Springs, <em>Cascade</em> is a novel detailing the unraveling senses of belonging of its cast of characters. At the start of the novel Isa’s adoptive father, Ottis, leaves the city where they’ve built a life as a small, makeshift family. Isa and her mother Teresa, brother Zo, and best friend Cherry are left to confront their individual and collective modes of survival in Colorado Springs. As a novel, <em>Cascade</em> is concerned with a less critically engaged edge of the black diaspora in America: the realities and peculiarities of being black the Mountain West, in a city that did not experience a major historical black migration but has an established black population due only to the military and scattered migrations of black individuals and families.</p> <p>While <em>Cascade</em> is the novel-in-progress examining these layers through detailing the lived experiences of its characters, the critical afterword is a craft essay exploring <em>Cascade’s</em> theoretical and spiritual underpinnings, as well as tracing its future potential. This afterword explores the influence of Black Geographies further, along with the novel’s engagement with reality TV, epiphenomenal time, craft questions of fiction and the true story, and the idea of ancestor as muse. As a whole, this project seeks to explore some of these seams between geography, blackness, the construction of family, and how we can use narrative to navigate the space between the living and the dead.</p>","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Booze, Elisabeth L."],"institution":null,"degree_name":"Ph.D.","degree_level":"Dissertation","degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Patrick Cottrell","Saleh Saterstrom","Joanna Howard","Tayana Hardin","Jennifer Pap"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2024,"date_issued":"2024-06-15T07:00:00Z","date_published":"2024-06-15T07:00:00Z","updated_at":"2026-07-24T02:01:48Z","subjects":["Creative writing","Fiction","Arts and Humanities"],"languages":["English (eng)"],"rights":["Copyright is held by the author. Permanently suppressed.
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While Cascade is the novel-in-progress examining these layers through detailing the lived experiences of its characters, the critical afterword is a craft essay exploring Cascade’s theoretical and spiritual underpinnings, as well as tracing its future potential. This afterword explores the influence of Black Geographies further, along with the novel’s engagement with reality TV, epiphenomenal time, craft questions of fiction and the true story, and the idea of ancestor as muse. As a whole, this project seeks to explore some of these seams between geography, blackness, the construction of family, and how we can use narrative to navigate the space between the living and the dead.
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While Cascade is the novel-in-progress examining these layers through detailing the lived experiences of its characters, the critical afterword is a craft essay exploring Cascade’s theoretical and spiritual underpinnings, as well as tracing its future potential. This afterword explores the influence of Black Geographies further, along with the novel’s engagement with reality TV, epiphenomenal time, craft questions of fiction and the true story, and the idea of ancestor as muse. As a whole, this project seeks to explore some of these seams between geography, blackness, the construction of family, and how we can use narrative to navigate the space between the living and the dead.
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