Dunham has a master's degree in communication and a bachelor's degree in English. In the following essay, Dunham examines the debilitating effects of the narrator's spiritually imprisoned soul in “What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence” and the violent means God uses to free it.

T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land opens with an epigraph that John Edgar Wideman could just as easily have used to open “What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence”: “For on one occasion I myself saw, with my own eyes, the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a cage, and when some boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'” This passage, which Eliot took from Petronius's Satyricon, refers to the Sibyl of Cumae, a prophetess of the ancient world to whom Apollo granted a single wish...