Congratulations! You’ve made it to what I consider the “book jacket blurb” of this website! I’m assuming if you’re here then you’ve already checked out the rest of the edition, which if you haven’t, what are you doing here?! I jest, I know I like to look at the author before I read the work they’re doing too sometimes. My name is Evelyn, I’m a Medical Biology (Pre-Med) and English double major on the HuMed track here at UNE. (Here’s a casual plug for our awesome HuMed program, info can be found here: https://www.une.edu/humed.) I’m the president of the UNE Alliance (our college’s equivalent of the GSA), treasurer of Zephyr: The University of New England’s Journal of Artistic Expression, and treasurer of the Creative Writing Club. As you can probably guess, I really love writing! In my spare time, I’ve actually written a 1,056 page novel that’s in the editing process named The Upside of Down. I’m also currently working on two novels, one of which does not have a title (though a conceptual summary of it is lesbian romance, organized crime, and cosmic horror on the High Seas), and the other whose name is Cry Wolf. 

You’re probably wondering at this point why I’ve chosen to annotate One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Well, I’ve read it three times! I love the character Chief (though I know there are a lot of problematic elements to the way he’s written and in the novel as a whole) and the use of mechanical imagery throughout the novel to describe the oppressiveness of society. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is also one of the many sources of inspiration for The Upside of Down, both for the voice of one of my characters and the larger themes of the novel itself. This has forced me to think with a very critical and conscious lens about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, because I certainly did not want any of the many problematic elements of Kesey’s work to seep into my own, especially since all of the characters within the novel come from very diverse backgrounds. To put it in Kesey’s style, I had to strip the whole thing down to its very bare bones, throw out all the ones that were twisted, cracked, and sharp-then imagine the machine running without those elements. I’ve been editing the novel for a long time. It only seemed natural that I’d pick the novel for this class, dig a little deeper, and try to see some of the aspects which I’ve always seen yet somehow overlooked. And I hope, if you’ve read this edition, that you now see Kesey’s conspiracy as clearly as I do.