Creative Writing Commons^™

Ambient Light: Essays On Marriage, Motherhood, And Mental Health, Bonnie Losak

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

AMBIENT LIGHT: ESSAYS ON MARRIAGE, MOTHERHOOD, AND MENTAL

HEALTH is a collection of ten personal and lyric essays interspersed with poems

that speak to the subject or tone of the essay that follows. These essays examine

the narrator’s experiences as mother, wife, and daughter, and explore the manner

in which the different roles bleed into one another. The narrator’s impending

divorce and the events that coalesce around it shape these essays into a coherent

whole.

In the spirit of Brenda Miller’s lyric essays, the essays collected in AMBIENT

LIGHT: ESSAYS ON MARRIAGE, MOTHERHOOD, AND MENTAL HEALTH, use

rich, imagistic language …

Two Ways Of Burning A Cotton Field, David James Lindstrom

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD is an ethnographic memoir concerning the narrator’s experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, South America. The plot is structured around a moral crisis in his rural Paraguayan village. The narrator’s neighbor, a man in his late twenties, threatened to kill his partner and her two children. The Paraguayan police were made aware of the situation but did nothing. Peace Corps management also instructed the narrator to do nothing.

In TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD, this moral crisis is explored within the contexts of post-colonial power structures, including economic and …