Headshot after defending my thesis!
Author: Madelyn Dumas | Majors: Business Economics and Creative Writing
My name is Madelyn Dumas, I am pursuing a degree in Creative Writing with the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, as well as a minor in Italian, and a degree in Economics with Walton College of Business. My research mentor is Professor Geoffrey Brock, and we completed the research pertaining to this grant in the spring of 2022. Concerning future plans, I have very few. Alongside my thesis, I have just completed a seminary/leadership program, and I hope to one day combine my love of literature with my love of God in a way which is helpful for others. We shall have to see what God does with that.
Not to be too terribly cheesy, but: I did not choose my research topic, my research topic chose me. I did not intend to major in creative writing, and certainly did not care about poetry upon arriving in Arkansas in 2016. I am hard wired towards depth and beauty, so poetry naturally captured my attention in one of the basic English courses required for a business student. Thus, a creative writing thesis comprised of poetry. I come from a rough family background and have lived in several different countries. I tried very hard throughout my life experiences to not believe in a God, but, for mercy, could not shake away my faith despite the experiences of myriads of cultures and familial challenges. In 2020 I read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and found my own story embedded in the pages. Steinbeck explores mankind’s struggle with life on the other side of paradise, while still deeply longing for paradise. I believe many of us are on a hunt for things Edenic, and much of literature is an exploration of that hunt.
My research was a creative pursuit. Professor Brock and I worked to develop a collection of poetry which encapsulated my life experience while interacting in conversation with the millennia of poets before me about this Edenic hunt. Initially, I brought 24 very bad poems to Professor Brock. From that point forward, Professor Brock and I met semi-weekly, and I would bring four or so poems to him (some were new, some were edits of the original 24) which we would workshop together.He also recommend related poetry in hopes of helping to encourage my own writing. Before working with Professor Brock, I had virtually no form in my poems, save some pretty cheesy, poorly executed rhymes. This meant my poems were sort of unruly creatures with minds of their own that rarely communicated clear messages. We often implemented the sonnet form or the haiku form and found the poems falling into themselves. All of this meant well over 30 poems with many, many edited versions of each. For the final selection we narrowed it down to the best 27 and I attempted to organize the poems into a logical order surrounding the overall theme of Edenic longing. This placed familial poems, or poems about struggle in the first half, and poems about redemption and travel and relief in the latter half. I suppose my findings are that poetry takes vulnerability and work, and the best poetry has to be purged by fire like gold.
In regard to challenges, my challenges this semester were relatively the same as last semester, with the addition of being much, much busier. Last semester I wrote a slightly different version of what follows: My aim was to artfully express human longing. The object itself proves elusive (longing results from being unable to obtain). Therefore, the main challenges I faced were: 1) fear, and 2) a finite mind. Regarding 1): I am afraid of overstepping, or of claiming to know a truth unknowable, or of approaching a powerful, two-edged truth clumsily—with mere knowledge of an undergraduate girl who has lived little of the tragedies that history books unfurl. Regarding 2): I am approaching a topic I can never comprehensively address. Authors throughout history have scratched the surface of this human longing or else their works should not have outlived them; their works bare a trace of ageless beauty which preserves them. But the authors did not leave a formula to solve or a map to trace the root of truth. And if I had to guess, truth must be constantly unfolding from some fixed epicenter—always growing, always enveloping itself. So, if the authors had left a map, it would quickly prove inadequate. In short: the material itself, the pangs of longing which a human feels as they strive onward, is quite challenging to articulate and frightening to approach. Though, admittedly, this is also the appeal. I hope I boldly fell short.