The Postcard

Jablon, Sarah Marie (2023) The Postcard. Masters thesis, Northern Arizona University.

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Abstract

This project, titled The Postcard, is a culmination of fictional, autobiographical, and biographical work, which all began in the fall of 2014, when my family received a postcard from my deceased grandfather, Ken Jablon. Knowing I wanted to write about this true story and the events which followed, I became compelled to complete this particular project after attending Matt Bell’s 2021 Cinder Skies Reading of his ecofabulist book, Appleseed. From there, I realized I could use magical realism to tell the parts of the story which are fiction, but which capture the essence of the questions I wanted most to explore: What is reality? How does one's experience of reality transform after death? What is it like to relive memory? What if the afterlife could be a temporary place—what would this place look like? What resulted is The Postcard: a 46,000 word novel which follows numerous timelines: my grandfather in life and in death; myself in childhood and after my grandfather’s death. The story follows Kenny as he unknowingly traverses the afterlife, revisiting moments in time and memory as the material world unravels around him. In Kenny’s afterlife, time is nonlinear, with the post-death world bleeding into and overlapping with the material world of the living—especially in that place from where the postcard originated. As Kenny hurtles toward a total dissolution of the self, he must grapple with the life he once lead, discovering his own shortcomings (including his failures as a father and his friendships with other flawed men), accept his death, and commit one final act of will on the world of the living before he is able to move on: that is, to send a postcard to his family. Interwoven with Kenny’s surrealist tale is the memoir of the author, at two pivotal periods in time: 1) her journey to Cuenca, the origin place of the postcard, in search of the impossible---some trace of her grandfather; and 2) the formative moments of her childhood spent at her grandfather Kenny’s house in the Appalachian college town, Frostburg, which at times are also as horrific and surreal as the events experienced from Kenny’s after death perspective. The Postcard is a story of family, identity, and loss told through two unique generational and gendered perspectives. It is about freewill and the way reality is shaped through our perspective as conscious beings. It is about two tales that are intrinsically intertwined: one a story of unsuspecting transferal leading to discovery; and the other a story of intentional seeking leading to the acceptance that some things are just not meant to be known. For these preliminary drafts, I focused on capturing the essence of the story as I know it, my relationship with Kenny, and his character as a man, teacher, father, and grandfather. I focused, also, on piecing together these seemingly disparate timelines into something cohesive. In future revisions (as the novel draft is still a work in progress), I will be interested in doing additional research to focus on grounding the story in a larger conversation. Uncomfortable themes of white colonialism in brown spaces like Cuenca, Ecuador, pervade this piece. I’m not yet sure how best to address them: what to portray, and what to reveal of the characters’ own biases in relation to the narrator’s. If this story is ever to be published, I imagine that final result will be wildly different from what exists on the page today. I plan, for instance, to at some point hire a sensitivity reader to help me pinpoint uncomfortable truths. But this work is a start in that direction. Existing works which helped to shape this novel include: George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo; Gabriel García Márquez’s Strange Pilgrims; Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ The Man Who Could Move Clouds; and countless other books, stories, and other media about death, family, or which include magical realist or surrealist themes and motifs. I feel this work might situate well among the autofiction popularly being published by MFA graduates today.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Publisher’s Statement:	© Copyright is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
Keywords:	Fiction, American; Memior;
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PE English
NAU Depositing Author Academic Status:	Student
Department/Unit:	Graduate College > Theses and Dissertations College of Arts and Letters > English
Date Deposited:	12 May 2025 22:07
Last Modified:	12 May 2025 22:07
URI:	https://openknowledge.nau.edu/id/eprint/6135

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