Thesis Defence: The Black Door

Nicholas Kucher, supervised by Professor Matt Rader, will defend their thesis titled “The Black Door” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.
An abstract for Nicholas Kucher’s thesis is included below.
Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Registration is not required for in-person defences.
Abstract
The Black Door is a lyrical ecopoetic collection that utilizes a braided narrative to follow three sets of speakers in their experiences of the annual wildfire season of the Okanagan Valley, those being: a gay human male, who endures a failing homosexual relationship; a chorus of nonhuman voices, located within the local environment; and a deific figuration of Death, who observes the other two speakers from a separate plane of existence. The poems investigate how the prefigurative past experience of the HIV and AIDS crisis can be used to redress the future experiences and collective impact of climate change and ecological collapse in the face of unchangeable circumstance. Through the lyrical inquiry of these two events, along with following the three speakers through their accounts of the Okanagan wildfire season, The Black Door provides a multifaceted investigation into how individuals and communities deal with collective loss, with the HIV and AIDS crises providing the psychic undercurrent through which this loss can be understood. Through ecopoetics, particular attention is paid to nonhuman subjects within the valley and their individual lives. Evocative of the treatment of LGBTQ+ and other marginalized peoples by the dominant power structures of the 1980s and today, The Black Door gives this attention to combat anthropocentric dehumanization of nonhuman subjects, by providing imagined accounts of the vivid individual lives of salmon, osprey, coyotes, and the like, in tandem with its humanoid subjects. By utilizing a variety of poetic forms, The Black Door is interested in how changeable and unchangeable circumstances affect both the human and nonhuman populations within their local communities. Through its lyrical poetic attention, The Black Door highlights the need for collective solidarity between humans and non-humans in the face of systemic injustice and rapidly changing environments. In their ideal intent, the poems within this collection look to question the separation between what is considered human and nonhuman, and how compassion and collective action can span across both of these worlds.