Date of Award

Spring 2019

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Call Number

PS3606.R363 T56 2018

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Stonecoast

First Advisor

Suzanne Strempek Shea

Second Advisor

Justin Tussing

Abstract

Loren Francis planted himself squarely into his life in 2008, and looked around from there, trying to remember what the view was like from then: a time of building, music, creativity and expansiveness followed by an accident, panic attacks, and the deep rout of alcohol and drug addiction. He picks up the threads, tugging on them and letting them take him where they would back through his family tree to his Irish farmer grandparents on his mother’s side, and his British and Lebanese grandparents on his father’s. Music, addiction, family and entrepreneurism all play a salient part in his life in that year and before. He traces these themes from as close as is warranted to the present back through his childhood and that of his three brothers growing up as part of a back-to-the-landerturned- Amway-seller family on the rugged coast of Maine—and back farther still, to his “Uncle Rat” the taxidermist and Eli Whitney, his grandmother’s great-uncle.

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