My Father’s Daughter: A Thesis in the Field of Creative Writing & Literature for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies

Abstract

My Father’s Daughter follows Laura, a young woman who flees a patriarchal village where storytelling is punished as sin, to a city where she intends to write a novel that will prove her stories are true. The world she enters operates on dream-logic: mermaids, crows, and boarding houses where oblivion is served teacups and publishing contracts are linked to the Devil’s Grandmother. The obstacles she encounters are simultaneously external and psychological—the city, a projection of the self that was shaped by suppression. At its center, the novel is a study in creative paralysis. Laura carries everything like a live thing in a drawer in her chest. What she’s learning to do is act. My Father’s Daughter traces the unbridgeable distance between the hunger for recognition and the terror of the blank page. Drawing on the tradition of feminist surrealism and the fairy tale rewritten from within, the novel asks whether a woman can stop living inside the stories for which she was punished for believing long enough to write her own.