Balcony dreams
Date
2024-05
Authors
Burr, Johanna Adrian
Major Professor
Advisor
Marquart, Debra
Cook, Kenny L
Shenk, Linda
Suárez, Lucía M
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Abstract
Balcony Dreams is the first half of a coming-of-age memoir that follows Johanna (Hanna) Burr during her teenage years when her Anglo-American family lived in Cuenca, Ecuador. While her parents promised a light-hearted adventure of family bonding, in the end, the Burr family is trapped in a foreign country without the funds to return to the US and must make a life for themselves in their new circumstances. Throughout her seventeen months in Cuenca, Hanna marvels at the city’s beauty and the sublime landscape of the Cajas mountains while grappling with issues of loneliness and isolation, gender and sexuality, complicated family dynamics, and self-expression. Interspersed with her reflections are prose poems that recount the central myths of the Cañari and Inca people who dwelt in Cuenca before the Spanish arrived. This interweaving of Indigenous myths with her reflections on her past is meant to underscore the importance of engaging with origin stories and when attempting to understand the identity of a place. The final chapters begin to discuss the second half of her Ecuador journey when Hanna returns to Cuenca in 2023 at age twenty-seven, precisely ten years after leaving the city.
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