Honors Link

Sarah Sheen, who graduated from the Honors College this spring with a degree in electrical and computer engineering, has always had a passion for writing. Still, it was hard to imagine that her hobby would become the basis for an award-winning thesis project. But after her display for her historical novel “Raising Cain” was named an outstanding poster at the Honors College Thesis Fair in May, that’s just how her story ended up.

The plot leading to that point had its twists. During her first two years as an undergraduate, balancing a highly technical course load, Sarah intermittently worked on a draft of a novel to take a break from her science and engineering classes. When it was time to start looking for a research project for her thesis in her sophomore year, though, she assumed it would be in her field. But after looking for research opportunities in electrical engineering without finding anything that inspired her, she learned she could write a piece of fiction as her thesis. “I had this intensely giddy ‘Yes!’” she recalls. “I was so excited to do something creative and something so out of the box like that.”

She started working on a historical novel in her third year. She decided early on that she wanted it to be a western.

“I’m a huge fan of Clint Eastwood and spaghetti westerns,” she says, but she was drawn to this old-fashioned genre by the potential to subvert its tropes and conventions. “There are a lot of traditions in westerns that are a part of our culture but that are also problematic,” she explains. “Westerns are very conservative. Even if they include elements of violence or crudity, they’re very non-conflicted (about consequences and motivations). The only people who wrote westerns were these white, old men a long time ago. And here I am, this liberal college student, and female, so let me re-envision it.”

She read several traditional western novels by authors like Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey, as well as modern ones like Heartbreak on the High Sierra, by Fiona Cooper, published in 1990, and she began to do research on actual life in the classic western settings in the nineteenth century. She wanted her work to “eliminate the puritanical niceness” of the standard western. “I wanted to explore how violent characters react to killing someone or to almost being killed. My main character is gay, and I wanted that to be an explicit part instead of just being implicitly hinted at and then never addressed.”

“Raising Cain” is about a gay confederate soldier who moves west after the war. He runs into trouble with a corrupt marshal and ends up taking refuge with a group of outlaws, where he must adapt to life outside of societal constraints and learn to accept who he is.

Sarah found a mentor in Gilad Elbom from the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, who supported her unorthodox project. She had never shared her creative work with anyone before this, but the relationship she developed with Dr. Elbom became the highlight of her experience. The opportunity to get feedback from an author she respects, both academically and literarily, was unique. “You can’t get that outside of academia,” she says, “because everyone who is going to be critical of your work will be people who are trying to publish it, and they’re not interested in making it the best novel it can be; they’re interested in making it the best product that it can be, and those two things are very different.”

Dr. Elbom’s support helped her to manage the most difficult part of the writing process, which was switching from her electrical engineering mindset to creative work. When writing was just an outlet, she could wait for inspiration to strike. For this project, though, she had a deadline to meet and couldn’t afford to wait for the ideal moments. “It’s a different part of your brain,” she says. “Anybody can dream up a novel, but not everyone can actually write a novel. When you’re thinking about engineering, it’s not creative in the same sense. It’s hard, but it’s not creative. It was definitely hard sometimes to make that switch over. But when it was good, when I would hit my stride on something and things were really coming together, it was awesome.”

Ultimately, Sarah feels that taking advantage of the opportunity presented by her Honors thesis to explore her creative side ended up teaching her about thinking and writing in ways that will extend to other parts of her life. “You have to learn how to force that part of your brain to work just like any other part of your brain,” she says. “I think you have to force yourself to sit down and say ‘I don’t need a muse to do this.’ I think that was really beneficial to my education as a whole, just learning how to take these very different parts of your brain and have a good work ethic and really get stuff done from those different angles. It’s hard, but it’s a really useful skill.”

And it’s a skill she plans to keep practicing even after her days here at Oregon State. “I’ve always really enjoyed writing, so I always want to keep that as part of what I do, to exercise that other half of my brain.” Next year, when she plans to begin a career as a nuclear officer in the U.S. Navy, she expects to continue working on Raising Cain, with a goal of eventually sending it to a publisher.

Sarah took several “selfies” while writing Raising Cain to document the writing process.