Digital Commons Network^™

Catching Smoke, Megan Duffey

Creative Nonfiction MFA Theses

"Catching Smoke" is a creative nonfiction essay collection that focuses on living in the south and the hardships associated with matters of poverty, addiction, incarceration, and family cycles. This collection ponders all the ways that the concept of smoke affected my family's life and gives multiple meanings to the phrase and title "Catching Smoke." Artifacts (pictures, letters, etc.) are used throughout to express a family narrative concerned with keeping a record, destroying family secrets, and examining the "shadows" of truth.

Skyward, Christian R. Griffin

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Her Sweetest Comeback, Kelly Gangeness Le

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Kelly Gangeness Le’s poetry manuscript focuses on paradoxical values concerning horror and humor paired with family and isolation. With the aesthetic approach that poetry ought to resemble the emotional intensity of music, Le strives for animated language. Her influences come from coarse, post-hardcore music and Lucie Brock-Broido’s scholarly yet brutal poetry. Thus she negotiates between lowbrow and literary dynamics. Family; Horror; Humor; Dissonance

The Resurrection Of Nora O'Brien, Abigail Elizabeth Benson

MSU Graduate Theses

There is a cave, hidden in the hills, that brings the dead back to life. Its power is the driving force behind the blood feud between the Walshes and the O’Briens that lasts for generations. Jeremiah Walsh, a young boy growing up just after the civil war, is entrusted with the location of the cave and its secrets. But when he kills to protect his family legacy, he is stricken with guilt and questions his loyalties. His story parallels Nora O’Brien’s, a teenage girl who moves to the Ozarks with her family after the death of her grandfather. As she …

The Quality Of Mercy, Kerry Mcnamara

English Theses & Dissertations

The Quality of Mercy is a hybrid of memoir and reportage, the story of a daughter’s love and her father’s journey through his vocation to the Catholic Church, his entry in the priesthood and his years of missionary work. Not many people discover in their teenage years that their father had been a celibate Catholic priest. Not many have the opportunity to trace their father’s story through diaries, interviews, and recollections. The Quality of Mercy is both a window into the world and a mirror into the soul, a daughter’s attempt to tell her father’s unique tale.

What We Hide, Ashley Bowcott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What We Hide is a collection of memoir essays that explores the themes of mystery and deception in personal relationships, specifically within familial and romantic ones. Though the essays in the collection explore the decades from early in the narrator's childhood through her move to Florida for graduate school, the narrator's keen discernment of the world around her and her curiosity for what experiences shape a person's character remain constant. Many essays explore the extent of her father's alcoholism and the consequences of it, as well as the narrator's obsession over the possible sources of his addictions. Other essays examine …

Around The Table, Rachel E. Mills

All NMU Master's Theses

ABSTRACT

Around the Table

By

Rachel Elizabeth Mills

This collection of nonfiction essays revolves around concepts of food and home. The essays focus on the universalizing nature of food, both from a personal perspective, and from a diasporic Middle Eastern perspective. In these essays I explore how food unifies and creates communities. The essays range from exploring my own upbringing in rural Upper Michigan, and how food creates bonds within my own family and community, to examining how food creates ties and communities within the Arab diaspora. This collective narrative, in focusing on the communal characteristics surrounding the human need …

Our Bodies Moving North, Jamie Lynn Bruce

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Elysium, Darren Bulhak

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.