Field notes for returning home: Creative-critical conversations on the home place in Kroetsch’s completed field notes

This thesis utilizes a creative-critical approach to explore the concept of returning home as a place-based practice through the reading of three early poems from Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes. Each chapter begins with a personal, embodied experience related to the home place where I grew up and a Kroetsch poem grounds each chapter and acts as a field guide through which to view the experience of home. The selected Kroetsch poems, “Stone Hammer Poem”, “The Ledger”, and “Seed Catalogue”, each demonstrate a tension common in Kroetsch’s work: finality and simultaneity, product and process, and history and archaeology. The result of applying the tension of the Kroetsch works to my experiences with returning home is a thesis that works though, but does not eliminate, the hyphenated reality of creative-critical modalities for settler-descendants writing from a prairie home place. In the end, there is a returning to a home place that is as changed as me: Like putting on an old jacket that doesn’t quite fit but still warms me with the comfort of recognition.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Master's

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor dc:publisher

Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Regina

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• McFarlane, Rhea Terese

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Riegel, Christian

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Schnell, Melanie
• Melhoff, Craig

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

https://doi.org/10.82465/4752

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uregina.scholaris.ca:10294/16818