Wednesday, April 29, 2015

URSP Student Haley Chung Defines the Fluidity of Home and How We Experience It


Hello, my name is Haley Chung and I’m a senior pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry. I’m working with professor and poet, Susan Tichy on my senior thesis which is comprised of a twenty poem manuscript and a number of close readings on poems from published writers. My thesis attempts to unveil the concept of “home”. It poses the question: “As society becomes more interracial and intercultural, how does affect our interactions with physical space and place?” I became interested in this project through self-reflection. I began to wonder about my personal experience with the world around me through a bi-racial lens. Having grown up in an interracial family and in multiple places around the United Sates, I felt that my childhood was in constant motion, embarking on new landscapes, people, accents, etc. I wanted to explore this inconstant, and at times, transitory self. This project not only explores my identity right now but will help me understand my identity moving forward in life as a writer and human being. One of my obvious goals is to be a poet but I also aspire to become a professor for creative writing in the future.  By working closely with such an intricate topic and experiencing what it’s like to complete a “poetry research project”, I can assist future creative writing students with their endeavors .While asking and thinking about these big questions, I’m also writing and reading poems every week to help gain a better understanding of my research topic. Reading the works of other poets is extremely helpful when trying to develop my own language as a poet. Doing this also provides a great source of inspiration throughout the writing process.  For instance, I discovered this week to “play with form”. During this week’s writing process, I tried shaping my poems differently in order to add aesthetic and sonic diversity to my body of work. I got this idea from my mentor after she gave me valuable feedback on my first batch of poems I had written for this project. I was also reading through a book of poems by Patricia Lockwood who helped me think differently about poetic form through her ability to shape abstract story-telling and re-telling of her own childhood.