TARRY BONE

MFA Thesis Project Description

Tarry Bone is a work of contemporary Southern Black fiction rooted in ethnographic observation, spiritual memory, and embodied experience. The project draws on the narrative traditions of Southern folktale and Black Pentecostal culture to examine faith, endurance, and the inheritance of belief across generations. Through a restrained, observational prose style, the story traces how religious language and ritual shape the interior lives of women, particularly within spaces marked by devotion, silence, and expectation.

Modeled in part on Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic approach to storytelling, Tarry Bone treats place, speech, and bodily experience as narrative authorities. The project explores how spiritual formation operates not only through doctrine but through gesture, repetition, and communal witnessing. Bone functions as both symbol and structure—suggesting what remains after belief is tested, what holds when certainty fractures, and how survival becomes an act of quiet resistance. Developed as a short story with expansion into a book-length work, Tarry Bone serves as the creative centerpiece of my MFA thesis.