Seniors re ect on completing creative theses in the arts

BY Ryan Yim

The Dartmouth

Senior thesis season is in full swing, with graduating members of the Class of 2023 presenting projects from various academic departments. While a prototypical example of a thesis may look like a lengthy research paper, for many students studying a creative feld, their senior thesis functions as a creation of art rather than academic research. These can include theater productions, novels, flms, collections of short stories, and more. A few students from the graduating Class of 2023 refect on their experiences producing creative projects for their senior theses.

Maggie MacDonald ’23, a theater major, submitted a production titled “Orphan Play” for her senior thesis. Based on MacDonald’s own life, the play follows an aspiring playwright who draws on memories and past experiences to produce a play of her own. “Orphan Play” was derived from an initial draft for MacDonald’s thesis that she ended up scrapping. One of the characters from her original piece, based on MacDonald’s own mother, served as inspiration for this new play and its semi-autobiographical structure.

MacDonald said there were difficulties getting her new thesis proposal approved, primarily due to the semi-autobiographical nature of her play.

“Initially, it was really hard for me to get permission to portray myself,” MacDonald said. “They thought that because [my play] was so personal, that I wouldn’t be able to handle it, that it’d be too emotionally draining, but it was really important to me because it’s my story and it’s my work, and I wanted to tell it the way it was intended to be told.”

In the end, it was former theater professor Liliana Padilla — who has since left Dartmouth — who enabled MacDonald to take on the roles of both writer and actress, mentoring her throughout her writing process.

“She had my back in a really lovely way, and was able to convince the faculty that I should be the one to [perform in my play],” MacDonald said. “Performing [“Orphan Play”] was emotionally draining, but in a rewarding way. I’m happy that I did it.”

Tulio Huggins ’23, who is double majoring in history and English with a concentration in creative writing, wrote a short story collection for his thesis titled “Meet Me Outside the Sanctuary: Stories.” Also semi-autobiographical, the book follows a series of incidents which occur at an evangelical church youth group, a setting which Huggins is closely familiar with.

“I grew up going to church youth groups — that was a very important part of my life and has infuenced a lot of who I am … I think it’s a very unique cultural phenomena,” Huggins said. “I could tell endless stories of drama — of the good, the bad and the ugly — to show people what life is like within these unique scenarios.”

Unlike MacDonald, Huggins’s process of creating his thesis began much earlier in his Dartmouth career, all the way back in his sophomore fall.

“I took CRWT 10, ‘Introduction to Fiction’ with professor Alexander Chee … who told us to write a story that you would tell others if someone were to ask you,‘what’s a good story?’” Huggins said.

This prompt inspired Huggins to refect on stories based of of his youth group. In addition to including more light-hearted, humorous anecdotes, Huggins’s work also deals with more serious issues he witnessed while involved with the church.

“One of my favorite [short stories] is called ‘Cassia.’ It kind of hits close to home because it deals with abuse in the church and seeing some of my friends in my youth group have abuse in their homes,” Huggins said.

Due to the nature of Huggins’s fctional retellings, he developed a special relationship with his work.

“It’s a unique connection because you’re telling a story that’s very close to you,” Huggins said. “With a creative writing thesis, you have all the reins to that story, you can tell it exactly how you want to tell it. I think that’s what I was doing. I was telling about my own experiences exactly how I wanted to tell them.”

Mariah Hernandez-Fitch ’23, who majors in flm and media studies with a minor in Native American and Indigenous studies, directed a short flm titled “Ekbeh,” which translates into “to build” or “to cook” in Houma, Hernandez-Fitch’s Indigenous language. The flm explores themes of forced assimilation and loss of language through the lens of Houma’s enduring culinary culture, both deeply personal subjects to Hernandez-Fitch and her Houma background.

“My language has not been alive for a century. Due to eforts with linguistics and the Houma Language Project, they sort of revitalized the language through Choctaw and Chickasaw,” HernandezFitch said. “I wanted to honor my family and Dulac, Louisiana, which is where I’m from.”

Hernandez-Fitch said her film primarily focuses on her younger sister and the process of cooking gumbo, a staple dish in her culture.

“I start of with my little sister, who tells a tale about our culture and how language and land means a lot to us, how a lot of that has been taken away due to assimilation and practices against Native culture,” Hernandez-Fitch said. “Then I show you how to cook gumbo. The one thing that remains the same is our food. Through food, we sit down and we cook and we tell stories … food itself has made our culture able to sustain itself and come alive.”

Developing a film on such an intimate topic also posed its own set of challenges to Hernandez-Fitch as she was producing “Ekbeh,” mostly concerning the accessibility of her story to unfamiliar viewers.

“At a certain point, I realized maybe many people might not understand [my flm],” Hernandez-Fitch admitted. “But my family will, and I think that was the important message I learned through this process.”