Bearing witness: essays, stories, and a novel in progress

Storytelling is like the air that we breathe. We need the stories to thrive, to be enriched, and to grow like the plants and animals around us. Stories are the places where we are rooted. And to tell a story is to bear witness. It is also to testify to the spirits here and past. Seeing the telling and hearing the rhythms played out in the living and the dead silenced marks a place to begin anew. The only black and white is on the page. They are words, but also notes to a song that can be rearranged for another tune. You can sing it in celebration. It can be a dirge, crying the blues and shames. Much of what is told is out in plain sight, on the ground, in the sky, on all the life scratching and clawing out a living. Some of story is the silence rumbling beneath the surface of the noise. It’s an ache for the liberation of humanity from the cruelty of humans. These essays, stories and the novel in progress are an arrangement of the struggles, joys, the surviving and living through and past the pain. It is the telling of how marginalized people always rise above the oppressions even in death. Story keeps them alive. All the living is included in the symphony, the loving, hating, religion, history, herstory, shouting the chorus of existence seeking harmony with all the living on the earth and beyond.

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

2023

Author dc:creator

• Zanders, Miriam A.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Pritchett, Michael, 1961-

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10355/97975

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:mospace.umsystem.edu:10355/97975