The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Dayna Mahannah, MFA. Dayna’s graduate thesis is a memoir entitled Escape Velocity.
Dayna Mahannah came to UBC without an undergraduate degree, though she did attend The Writers Studio at SFU. She worked at Adbusters and interviewed musicians for BeatRoute. A few projects she wrote during her MFA: a speculative comic about her dog; a poetry chapbook about sisters, in the form of a time capsule; a profile of a taxidermist; a story of a destructive teen shipped to summer camp to reform an obsession with a heron; an essay about life modelling and body image. Dayna’s work appears in Electric Literature, TRUE Africa, and HELD. She is the interim editor-in-chief of Geist, and lives in Vancouver.
Escape Velocity explores the cost of ambition and the misfortune rooted in the adage, “Wherever you go, there you are.” The author moves abroad to pursue a journalism internship—a last-ditch attempt to shed her aimless youth and fulfill her dream to become a writer. But as her goalposts become loftier and her bank account dwindles, the author makes riskier and riskier decisions in order to return home to Canada a success story. This memoir illustrates the dangers of isolation and fractured support networks as it unearths hope in strong familial connections. To find yourself wherever you go is unfortunate only for as long as you keep running.
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