Creative Writing Commons^™

The Trash Birder's Guide, Ashely Adams

All NMU Master's Theses

This collection of essays details the author’s experience with birds and the bird watching sub-culture. The author grapples with obsession, exploration, and human-animal relationships. Essays include the search for peregrine falcons and ‘u’aus, navigating “The Biggest Week in American Birding,” and tending to owls and geese at a bird sanctuary. In addition, the essays seek to use the langue and images of birding to create an interconnected narrative that not only illuminates the birding sub-culture, but also the world of a transient young birder.

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.

All Feathers And Attitude, Virginia Macdonald

All NMU Master's Theses

This collection of essays and prose poems seeks to examine the elements of an identity: how memories, culture, work, place, family, and brain chemistry simultaneously create and undermine a sense of self. How the sense of self is not contiguous, or smooth. How hope and regret wrestle.

While deeply personal, All Feathers and Attitude is not a memoir, but rather an assemblage of interpretations based on actual events. The individual pieces are gathered into sections that correlate somewhat to the themes mentioned above, but the sections are not labeled as such. The readers may draw whatever conclusions they wish regarding …