The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Susan Sechrist, MFA. Susan’s graduate thesis is a memoir entitled For Lack of Better: Thought Experiments in Grief, Memory, and Identity.
After a career as a technical writer, Susan came to UBC to study mathematical and scientific metaphor in fiction. She used geometry, botany, and astronomy to build the world in her fantasy novel instead of inventing a magical system and wrote a coming-of-age novel about bathymetry by way of a girl and a bottomless pond. Her thesis project is part memoir, part phenology – a reflection on her father’s death during the COVID pandemic. Susan wrote a feature column, Go Figure, for the literary blog Bloom, celebrating mathematics in literature, and published her short story, A Desirable Middle, in the eclectic Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
Susan’s memoir, For Lack of Better, is built from seven iterative personal essays that reflect on her father’s death from COVID in 2021. It examines grief during the pandemic, a traumatic time when comforting rites and rituals, sources of social support, and expectations of mourning were shaken. From riven traditions emerge a new reconciliation of the sudden death of her beloved and last remaining parent. The project explores how memory incited by loss can be conflated by wish fulfillment and coping mechanism, and how the line between fantasy and reality is especially blurred by the act of recollection in service of meaning and identity.
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