Year of Award
2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Degree Name
Creative Writing (Poetry)
Department or School/College
Department of English
Committee Chair
Sean Hill
Committee Co-chair
Brian Blanchfield
Commitee Members
Sean Hill, Brian Blanchfield, Beth Hubble
Keywords
poetry, queerness, neurodiversity, connection
Subject Categories
Disability Studies | Poetry | Queer Studies
Abstract
The Filament weaves together the results of a neurodivergent person exploring their universe, in all its harrowing beauty and familiar tragedy. The speaker traverses oceans and thunderstorms, wades through the swampy shallows of their high school, participates in a pharmaceutical supply chain and its subsequent ransacking, floats through altered mental states, and retells legends, spanning many styles while still using the lyric “I”. Scrying into a nebulous future, the speaker returns with stories of the planet and its people, and the kind of world they want to build.
The speaker exposes their ghosts throughout the collection, hoping that the adage, ‘grief shared is grief lessened’ rings true now and forever. But the work is also the speaker’s dreams put to form, with the hope of a new era of empathy and compassion extended to anyone who will listen. A filament will eventually burn out from overuse with no other entity to share its circuit. So, this collection seeks companionship as the speaker enters the rest of their life, a constant source of support regardless of how the path forward twists.
Recommended Citation
Skibicki, Elena, "The Filament" (2025). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 12473.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/12473
© Copyright 2025 Elena Skibicki