Keywords

women, mental illness, loss, healing

Abstract

Taming Wildfires is a novella immersed in the mind of a young woman named Lilla with intense, undiagnosed mental illness attempting to reenter society after losing the crutch of her long-term partner. The novella engages with the intersection of queerness, mental illness, interracial relationships, and the society of recent past (2023-2024), and deals with themes of isolation, loss, self-image, and emotional healing. Readers are invited fully into Lilla’s mind as she navigates a long-term friendship strained by proximity and a new romance marred by omission. These relationships are overcast by her loss, her skewed reality, and her conflicting desires to be healthy, to be loved, and to be herself. A meditation on the realities of living life as a woman who feels, and is treated as, broken, Taming Wildfires asks not for forgiveness, but for understanding.

Completion Date

2026

Semester

Spring

Committee Chair

Hii, Siew

Degree

Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

English

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Identifier

DP0053179

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