Browsing by Author "Layden, Sarah"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    13 Things Your Mail Carrier Won't Tell You
    (Booth: A Journal, 2016-01-22) Layden, Sarah
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    Collision Physics for the Math-Averse
    (Booth, Butler University, 2010) Layden, Sarah
    (Timing Scenario 1): The hit absorbed by the small car with excellent safety features prevented the big car from hitting a third, uninvolved car, an aged hatchback that would've crumpled like a wadded sheet of paper. In that car would be small children, a young mother cavalier with seatbelts. Her cigarette inches from the child in the passenger seat. The collision would push the glowing cherry directly into the child's eye. The collision that could've happened a mile up the road, but was prevented by the driver of the small car leaving five minutes late (Timing Scenario 2). There was coffee to be drunk, email to be checked, breakfast nearly forgotten but a piece of bread quickly toasted, quickly eaten. An email reconsidered, edited carefully, then reworded. The momentary regret of hitting "send." The clock checked, the panic of where-are-some-socks.
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    "I Knew Grad School Was Gonna Be Hard But...": Community and Feedback in Graduate Writing Support
    (2021-06) Worrell, Brandilyn Nicole; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Buchenot, Andre; Layden, Sarah
    Often, one of the first areas to cave under the pressures of graduate school is a graduate student’s writing. Sometimes this is because a writer feels unprepared for the amount or types of writing or it is simply due to the fact that writing is a layered process that has not been fully explained to graduate students before. In any of these situations, there remains a need for graduate writing support that accounts for these varied experiences and the larger graduate school environment. In order to better understand these needs on the IUPUI campus and begin to address them, this study collected data from current IUPUI graduate students and a pilot Graduate Writing Group program through the University Writing Center. Through this research, two key themes arose as vital to addressing graduate writer needs and student success in graduate school: community and feedback. By encouraging consideration of these topics within graduate writing programming, support offered can encourage these areas for graduate writers. Community provides space for students not only to learn from each other but also share common experiences and struggles. Through these spaces, graduate students can gain insight into their writing, program, field, and themselves by recognizing what is a natural part of the graduate school process, what needs to change, and how they develop as a result. Quality and diverse feedback leads to deeper understanding of a student’s field, their voice, and their writing process. Without an understanding of these two elements of graduate writing, students remain more likely to struggle with the graduate school process and with the liminal space of being students and professionals.
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    Psychological Mirroring in Tana French's In the Woods and The Likeness
    (2021-12) Gott-Helton, Sarah Meghan; Marvin, Thomas; Layden, Sarah; Kirts, Terry
    Tana French’s work has been the subject of a number of recent scholars. Scholarship on French ranges from theories of liminality, to meditations on how French’s work explores the “Celtic Tiger” phenomenon in Ireland, to looking at her stories as new takes on old fairy tales. French’s work straddles the line between popular detective fiction and literary fiction, upending popular tropes and creating something wholly new. One issue that has not been explored is how French’s work fits into a Lacanian framework. The six novels in her Dublin Murder Squad detective stories are rife with issues of psychological mirroring, or doubling. As such, they take the typical mystery trope of pairing a detective with a case that alters and reflects back their own psychological traumas, and takes them to a new level. This work will address issues of French’s characters and how they fit into the theories of Lacan’s Mirror Stage, as well as the “Real,” “Symbolic,” and “Imaginary” realms that we human beings unconsciously construct for ourselves. This writing examines the first two novels of the series, In the Woods, and The Likeness, and analyzes them in light of these theories, showing how mirroring exists in nearly every aspect of each text.
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    Reading in the Bardo: Seeking Comfort in the Absence of Ritual
    (Poets & Writers, 2020-10) Layden, Sarah; English, School of Liberal Arts
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    Wayward Stories: A Rhetoric of Community in Writing Center Administration
    (2019-07) Hull, Kelin; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Buchenot, Andre; Layden, Sarah
    Six weeks in to my position as assistant director of the writing center and suddenly I was confronted by a cluster bombing of issues and concerns – microaggressions, depression, confusion, suspicion – each one separate but related, and threatening to tear a new hole in the already fragile foundation of community in my writing center. How do we feel, what do we do, how does a community survive when the story we’re experiencing isn’t the story we want or expected - when it is, in a word, terrible? After McKinney’s Peripheral Visions, we know our labor and our centers do not look, act, and feel cozy, iconoclastic, or focused on one-on-one tutoring all of the time. And yet, if we are going to continue to move beyond the grand narrative, a deep and meaningful understanding of community is essential. When we put our story in relation to our communities, then our story becomes just one thread in a much more complex tapestry. We cannot separate one person’s story from the story of the writing center. Each person, each story, is a stitch in the rhetorical fabric of community. Using critically reflexive stories to change and shape practice, this thesis highlights the grand narrative of community and shows how that narrative serves to stymie community growth. These stories resist boundaries. They are wayward. They are counter to the narratives around which we construct our lives. When we share stories and write together, we begin to understand the threads we’re all weaving into the tapestry – our community, stitched together through shared practice; a process that will never end, as each person comes and goes. The community will never be resolved, and in the ambiguity of boundlessness, comes a new way of seeing the world - through constellations and the dwelling in inbetween.