Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Trickling, Marissa Medley

Honors Projects

A collection of poetry and other writings that explore family relationships with a focus on mental illness.

Ghost, Moving, Andrea Wuorenmaa

All NMU Master's Theses

This collection of creative nonfiction essays weaves a journey through local history, genealogy, physical landscape, and personal memoir. The essays therein investigate the past through the lens of the present, and the present as informed by the past. Written from a first person perspective, many of the essays directly address individuals or time periods long gone, while all of them are constructed with the memory, research, and imagination of the author.

Though this collection is rooted in history, it also relies on the metaphysical to create a vision of the past. Intangible themes—life, death, a farewell to things and people …

Love Poems For Photographs And Other Writings, Erin Francis O'Leary

Senior Projects Fall 2016

This project is a collection of writings about photography that vary stylistically from traditional academic essays to more formally imaginative pieces. It is structured around the understanding of art criticism as not solely a passive response to the artworks on which it is focused, but as a productive and valuable artistic gesture that exists independently of its source materials. Art criticism, though concerned primarily with the external, can be understood (also) as an autobiographical effort.

Wingspan: Living With Birds, Lauren A. Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Wingspan: Living with Birds is a collection of creative nonfiction essays that intertwine the author’s personal experiences and reflections with her knowledge of the natural world and ornithology. The six essays explore themes of family, self-reflection, understanding a sense of place, rock climbing, and dealing with grief. These themes are combined with natural histories of different bird species and the author’s experiences working with birds, especially as a bird bander.

Traversing The East Coast In A Pair Of Converse, Laura A. Stall

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. My journey began with a step in a pair of low-top pink Converse sneakers. In this creative nonfiction piece, I wrote about my journey through life through my shoes. In humorous and sometimes touching stories, I recount the people and events that I feel have shaped me to be who I am today, whether that is a good or bad thing. Every anecdote comes fresh with a pair of Converse sneakers. However, in the end, the story is not just about the shoes; it’s about the life …

Close Call With Nonexistence: A Memoir, Jeff Gailus

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Fred Eduard Gailus was born on April 26, 1944, in Memelland, a place that no longer exists. It was a tiny sliver of Germandom on the far eastern edge of Hitler’s outsized German Reich. When the Soviet Red Army swept through on their way to Berlin, to end World War Two and the reign of terror perpetrated by the German people, the homeland of my father’s ancestors was wiped off the map forever. Thanks to the courage and tenacity of his mother, Fred survived the largest forced migration in human history to marry young and raise a family of four …