Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Twoothree: Uta Journal Of The Arts, Da-Shiva Francois, Sydney Gillentine

twoOthree

twoOthree UTA Journal of the Arts: Volume 1 Spring 2024

Mom, Svea I. Silverberg

Emerging Writers

This nonfiction essay gives a look into beginning the grieving process of an abusive parent.

House Of Grief, Megan Eralie

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This collection of essays examines how I house the grief for the losses of my religion and my grandfather. My first essay, “Body of Feathers,” looks at my body as a house of shame and how I transformed my body into something that could be mine instead. It explores a series of moments from my life where I felt disconnected from my body, usually because of rules or expectations set by someone other than me. In the essay, I move from feeling like I had no control of my body, to taking back control and experiencing my body as mine …

Zero, Amber Brandau

WRIT: Journal of First-Year Writing

A piece of literary nonficiton abut the struggles of learning how to read.

A Taste, Acquired, Anna Koester

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis was born as a memoir of sorts. Food is something for which I have an inherent curiosity, from a specific ingredient’s origins to how a dish makes me feel. In remembering and retelling stories from my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, I’ve discovered that my modes of eating have taken on different approaches and purposes throughout my life. I’ve done my best in the following pages to describe how I learned to eat and where my idea of feeling nourished came from, how food has played a part in forming my ideas about family and sharing, and how it …

Writing Workshop In Prose, Brenna E. Crowe

Open Educational Resources

A prose workshop where students write a lyrical essay, a satirical essay, a personal essay, an informational interview, and a portfolio.

Engl 211w: Intro To Nonfiction (Points Of Entry And/Or Exit Wounds), Heather Simon

Open Educational Resources

We will explore the notion of creativity as it pertains to new ways of engaging familiar topics and carving out frameworks for exploring uncharted territory. We will actively read and respond to works of creative nonfiction to enrich our understanding of structure, style, and language. Assigned readings will demonstrate how creative nonfiction can encompass a variety of forms (think: reportage, braided essay, erasure, visual essay) and draw from both research and experience to offer a unique perspective and elicit an emotional response. We will develop our own creative nonfiction toolbox through a series of reflections, creative exercise, and projects. We …

Bodies, Memories, Ghosts, And Objects Or Telling A Memory, Natsumi Lynne Meyer

Honors Projects

I think it started in December 2017, when my Mama sent me to Japan to take care of my grandparents, Baba and Jiji, alone. I had been to Japan almost every year since I was eleven years old, and several times before that too, but this was my first time without Mama. When Mama was there, Japan was filtered through her. I could poke bits of myself through her editing and approval. I could read street signs because of the way she read them, and I could understand my grandparents’ sighs from the timbre of her translation. That December, though, …

Return, Shasta Hecht

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This capstone project is a collection of nonfiction essays that work in collaboration to provide a profile of place. The place of focus is White Pass, the mountain the author has grown up on and experienced for the last twenty-one years. This collection is made up of essays that explore her physical, emotional, and spiritual connection to the land and community of White Pass, while also examining themes of family and identity. Each essay gives a different perspective in regards to the setting. The ultimate purpose of this project is to navigate the complexities of White Pass in regards to …

The Lights In The Dark: A Covid-19 Journey, Kristen Justice Palado

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

My project is entirely focused on the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, particularly when CSUMB moved to a virtual setting, and how a global pandemic brought a family closer together. COVID-19 was a terrifying disease that began in the Spring of 2020 and instilled in all of us fear, stress, and anxiety. Families were scared to go out and have family parties, schools shut down and abruptly moved to a virtual modality for teaching, and the mental health of the world began to decrease. For this project, I will be using my own voice and experiences to create …

Evading Oblivionland, Caitlin Faria

Honors Program Theses and Projects

When I initially started this project, I hoped to tell stories in genres that I love while exploring the impact my father has had on my life. Although I prefer to write fiction, the nonfiction essays of this piece show who my father is through my eyes as well as provide me with the space to explore and find words for my own fears of losing him one day. The fictional stories interwoven throughout also show how my father inspires my writing even when it does not directly involve him, or a character exactly like him. For example, my dad …

[They], Mary Alsobrooks

Poetry MFA Theses

A poetry collection centered around the exploration of identity through the people and places that shaped the poet's childhood.

A Group Of Hyenas Is A Cackle, Kristin Gallagher

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A GROUP OF HYENAS IS A CACKLE is a memoir about sisterhood, success, and self-worth. The memoir spans approximately twenty-five years in the memoir-speaker’s life and is divided into five sections. Book one explores her childhood through high school graduation, focusing on her experiences as the eldest sister in a hardscrabble, IrishCatholic family living in New England during the 1990s and its central defining eventthe death of her mother from a drug overdose. Book two examines a slice of adulthood in the protagonist’s twenties when she was a law student living in New York City with her sister. The remaining …

Own Way Girl, Melissa I. Aldana

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

OWN WAY GIRL is a memoir about growing up in a Caribbean family of women. The memoir covers the narrator’s tentative beginnings as she was adopted by a single woman in Barbados at three months old until she turns sixteen and learns the secret that has weighed heavily on both her birth and adopted mother. This memoir explores the narrator’s layered relationship with her adopted mother, her complicated relationship with her birth mother, as well family dynamics with her adopted grandmother and adopted sisters. It interrogates the nature of kin and blood ties and probes the ultimate question of what …

And The Light Shines On: Sic Luceat Lux Vestra, Ana Schnellmann

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Friendship In A Time Of Pandemic, Laura Reilly

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Lost Routine, Melissa Fritz

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Mother Superior, Brandon R. Hansen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Prologue /The Lake Within

I am a fisherman. Every time I raise my arm to cast, I’m searching for an answer.

What is a lake?

I throw my lure at the lilies of my childhood, the sunken log of my crib. With every cast I hope the truth will follow it back, this little piece of me I offer to the mystery.

My earliest memories are at the bus stop, where a shroud of mist swirled about me and I listed side-to-side, six-AM eyes drooping while I waited for that big yellow ship to bust through the fog and …

A Soul's Shape Is Beautiful, Alondra Orozco

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

A memoir engaged with the seminar's theme of Change, Transformation, and Transition. It follows my story and how I came to discover my true self. This is a coming-out story, with the purpose of sharing my experiences and potentially getting others to understand non-binary or transgendered people better. It delves into my personal thoughts and experiences, as well as transphobia from my parents. Since the story begins in my early childhood, the diction and writing style change throughout the story. I also incorporate the use of stream of consciousness to show my progression from cisgendered to a non-binary person.

Hurt To Love, Christa Kaye Jishelle Casidsid

Night Flight Journal

Family dynamics come in many different forms. Some are regarded by society as "healthy," others "toxic," but there are instances where there is a gray line. Once an only child grown to the older sibling, this daughter watches her family relationship. More particularly, she watches her parent that has been there by her side ever since she could remember. "Healthy" or "toxic" are words lost in confusion in her home. She cannot help but feel the pain of the actions and words from the years that built up in her struggle of endurance and martyr sacrifice.

Treatise, Scripture, Manifesto: Reckoning With "Love Cake", Lalini Shanela Ranaraja

Audre Lorde Writing Prize

This essay was written in response to Sri Lankan-American writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha's poetry collection Love Cake, as part of a directed study I undertook in Spring 2021. A goal of the directed study, titled "The Empire Writes Back" was to engage with and build upon work by writers from South Asia and the diaspora, of which Piepzna-Samarasinha is a vocal member. In this essay, I explore not only the sense of connection I feel with this poet and her body of work as a result of shared experiences of otherness, trauma, and nationhood, but also …

The Death Of Superman, Shane F. Mcfarlane

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN is an autobiographical novel that covers the years from 7 to 17 in the life of Shane McFarlane, who struggles to overcome the effects of his inner-city environment and an addict father in and out of incarceration. The title is a metaphor for the decaying presence of the narrator’s father in his and his older brother’s life and the resulting consequences of that absence.

With the narrator’s father in prison, new threats emerge, including his mother’s ruthless boyfriend and his brother’s attraction to the allure of fast money. The narrator must ultimately make decisions governed by …

Split At The Root, Robert S. Gryder

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Influenced by— and sometimes in conversation with— diverse literary voices such as Dorothy Allision (BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA), Harry Crews (A CHILDHOOD), and Mark Doty (FIREBIRD), SPLIT AT THE ROOT is a literary bildungsroman told primarily in the narrative mode. The memoir traces the narrator’s volatile beginnings in the trailer parks of rural South Carolina in the 1980s to the day he accepted, sight unseen, an offer of admission to Yale University, boarding a plane in 1993 for the first time in his life. This memoir explores the narrator’s quest for agency, deploying the essayist mode to interrogate along the …

Hidden In A Snail Shell, Zara Ana Kornfeld

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Snails are an often overlooked member of the Hudson River ecosystem, though play a critical role in supporting it. This Senior Project delves into the evolutionary history of freshwater snails as well as the roles they fulfill within their ecosystems. This project also considers the codependent nature of snails and the Hudson River and how that relationship will be impacted by Climate Change.

It Could Have Been Anyone, Mariel Ruth Cupp

Senior Projects Spring 2021

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

Skeletons In My Closet: A Collection Of Personal Essays And Short Fiction, Macey Howell

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

My thesis will be a collection of personal essays and short fiction centered on examining the ties between fashion and identity and told through a Gothic literary tradition. I seek to explore my identity by examining my personal style using the mode of the Gothic. Through this project, I will encapsulate my sense of style, and therefore my sense of self, in words and explore the nuances of my identity through creative nonfiction and fiction.

I have a distinct sense of style that is inseparable from my identity as a woman, as an artist, as a human drawn to beauty …

The Language Of Breathing, Brian Wallace Baker

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The Language of Breathing is an eclectic collection of 18 creative nonfiction essays that capture moments from the author’s life and attempt to give them meaning through narrative and metaphor. They deal with relationships, nature, faith, and often rely on background research to pair art, mythology, current events, and science with personal experience.

A Troop, A Raft, A Bed, Hanna Jane Guendel

Senior Projects Spring 2020

A Troop, a Raft, a Bed tells the interwoven fictional stories of three major animals (the mountain gorilla, the Adélie penguin, and the American eel) and four transitional animals (the white stork, the humpback whale, the common octopus, and the great white shark). The stories are told from the animals' perspectives, and are written with language that considers each animal's unique intelligence, mind, and behavior. These stories seek to communicate how animals around the world may be experiencing the various effects of climate change and global warming.

Softshell, Jamie Gray Chandler Gillette

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Softshell is a nonfiction project composed in hybrid forms. The narrative uses records produced by the body as well as those stored within the body — fossils, personal photographs, familiar sensations, instinctive gestures — to weave a story about a mother, as told by her daughter.

Chronic, Michelle Hart

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This piece of creative nonfiction explores chronic pain in American women. Through biased research, negligent medicine, and misinterpreted appointments, women are disenfranchised by the American medical industry. Specifically, women suffering from chronic pain face unprecedented challenges while trying to find a diagnosis or treat their pain. This thesis explores chronic pain and American medicine through the lens of nonfiction. By diving into the subjective nature of pain while working within the equally as subjective medium of nonfiction, Hart writes a story about living with an undiagnosed chronic pain condition. While presenting the faults of chronic pain treatment in America, she …