A Record of Fracture: Finding my Long-Lost Poet-Mother
Graduation Year
2025
Document Type
Senior Thesis
Degree
Bachelor of Arts
Primary Major
Literary and Intercultural Studies
Primary Minor
Creative Writing
Thesis Advisor
Joan Baranow, PhD
Abstract
My memoir and creative nonfiction writing series follows my journey of self-discovery as I initiate myself upon a quest to seek out my "long-lost" mother, Lynne Wildey. She had long been estranged during my childhood and earned herself the title of “black sheep” in our family due to her choices of defining herself as a poet, living a bohemian, free-spirited beatnik’s life in an underworld faraway in San Francisco. However, I always sensed there was more to the story, more that existed elsewhere, waiting to be claimed by me. Finding my long-lost poet-mother becomes like a gateway, the beginning of my own story as my life unravels and reckons with taking greater risks, exploring freedom, creativity, and an inheritance of the untamed. The process of writing restores her to me, not just as my mother, but also freeing her own long-silenced suppressed history, and allowing it to breathe through my words. Though she lived fiercely amongst the literary greats of North Beach, her own voice often remained eclipsed by her more famous peers, which left her remarkable poetic identity frequently neglected, overlooked, or undervalued. Unfortunately, this is not surprising for a woman navigating through a male-dominated arena, such as marked the Beat generation of literary history. Shaping legacy from the fractured pieces, we write ourselves home.