The garden house

The Garden House is a collection of poems on love, loss, and toads. Three main sections explore the primary speaker’s journey through “The Real World,” “Frog Fortunes + Toad Tellings,” and “Garden House.” “The Real World” acts as an introduction to the speaker’s family and experiences. It reinforces the need for the creation of the Garden and the Garden House. The middle section acts as a transition and explores the primary speaker’s inventions for the Garden and their relationships with toads and frogs. Fortunes appear throughout the middle section to enable fantasy and reality to merge, working towards the creation of the Garden in the last section that connects the toads, speaker, and transformation. The poems explore themes of home, family, isolation, belonging, grief, love/self-love, and transformation. The loss of Dad is reinforced by a series of narrative poems that function as letters to Dad, making this loss a thread throughout each section that further supports the speaker’s need and intentions for the Garden House. Explorations of misfit characters represent the speaker’s experience with feeling othered and excluded, and the speaker’s experiences of being treated as an outsider enable them to find connection and solidarity with misfit characters, like Frankentoad, Pateesa the Rancor, Toadzilla, and other frogs and toads. Since there are no real scientific distinctions between toads and frogs, they often resist strict categorization, which is instead based on their physical characteristics like skin texture. The focus on toads and frogs in this collection reflects this fluid nature and embodies the speaker’s desire for companionship and connection. The first section explores the speaker’s connection to toads, where frogs and toads are grounded in science and research. The middle section uses fantasy to allow the speaker to explore transformation of identity, experience, and place. The last section fully enables the speaker to create a new Garden and make it a space of refuge, safety, and connection.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts)

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Creative Writing and Media Arts (UMKC)

Grantor

University of Missouri--Kansas City

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Warren, Margaret

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bar-Nadav, Hadara

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10355/101633

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:mospace.umsystem.edu:10355/101633