Navigating meandering threads : a critical and creative thesis delivered in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Creative Writing at Massey University, Distance, New Zealand

Abstract

This Master of Creative Writing thesis consists of two sections: a critical essay which analyses features of the braided form in ‘Time and Distance Overcome’ by Eula Biss and ‘The Fourth State of Matter’ by Jo Ann Beard, and a collection of personal essays recording my experience of living with motor neurone disease. Being diagnosed with motor neurone disease fractured my world and has raised many unanswerable questions. I knew that I needed to tell my story, but parts of it seemed too painful to tell. I was interested to see how other writers attempt to make meaning of a world that becomes fractured for them, and after reading a selection of lyric essays, I discovered the fragmented form of the braided essay. Made up of several seemingly unrelated topics or narrative threads, the braided essay provides space for the writer to approach painful or complex material indirectly, blending it with other material to draw the focus away from what Brenda Miller refers to as the “emotional center” (69) of the piece. Eula Biss and Jo Ann Beard are two essayists who use features of the braided form in their essays in an attempt to make sense of a complex world, Biss to explore racial violence in the United States and Beard to confront her own grief after a workplace shooting that killed six of her colleagues. With its use of fragmentation and white space, and the repetition of details that unite each strand, the form of the braided essay seems to reflect its content, making it well suited to writing about a broken self and a broken world. In approaching my own personal essays, I drew on the features of style and structure employed by Biss and Beard, and in doing so I was able to navigate around my grief and fear and frustration and see that woven through it all was the importance of family and friends, the importance of love. I have been able to confront my own mortality by taking refuge in the braided form, while hopefully leading my reader in leaps and sidesteps towards an understanding of motor neurone disease and living while dying.