Creative Writing Commons^™

Behind The Veil An American Woman's Memoir Of The 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis, Debra Johanyak

University of Akron Press Publications

In Behind the Veil, Debra Johanyak weaves the personal with the historical in fascinating detail. Through her own story, a Midwestern woman married to an Iranian man and living in Iran during the hostage crisis, Johanyak provides the reader with sharp insights into similarities as well as differences between the two cultures. The memoir offers a thoughtful perspective on cultural chasms and the bridges we could build to conquer them. —Nahid Rachlin, author of Persian Girls, a memoir, and Jumping Over Fire, a novel

Debra Johanyak, a young American wife with an Iranian husband, gives a moving …

Conception: A Personal History, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

November 19 is Remembrance Day in Gettysburg, the day that Lincoln dedicated part of the battlefield as a cemetery for the Civil War dead in 1863. That year in July the dead lay on the battlefield, on the farmers’ fields planted with crops and in the summer-green woods where they had taken positions behind boulders and tree trunks. Some lay covered with dirt, and others just lay bare to the weather. When land for a cemetery was set aside, the townspeople moved the dead to proper graves.

As a citizen of Gettysburg more than a century later, I carry no …

Bloodlines, Pamela Toner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Bloodlines" is a collection of personal essays that focus on the process of remembering, imagining, and reflecting on the past through the lens of a perpetually shifting present. They consider situations ranging from mental and physical illnesses, from cancer to alcohol addiction, to career changes, to the often dysfunctional and displaced family ties that distance and adulthood have not severed. In "Searching," I write the narrative of the ongoing search for my birthmother, and how the search complicates the relationship with my adoptive mother, who always feared she’d lose me. Similarly, "Of Flesh and Blood" recounts and negotiates how hereditary …

Kin, Stacy Moskos Nistendirk

Stacy Moskos Nistendirk

No abstract provided.

Jack Kerouac Does Not Lie, Kyle Shrader

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Jack Kerouac Does Not Lie" recounts my pilgrimage in the summer of 2000, from southwest Florida to a canyon beach in California where Jack Kerouac—as I had read in his Big Sur—lost his mind forty years earlier. I was heavily influenced. Kerouac’s On the Road showed me what to do with myself. Big Sur showed me where to go. In the twentieth century Americans shifted their notions of the west coast from a means for sustenance to a symbol of post-war freedom. Kerouac seems to embody this momentum; the world and the burning spirit his work describes is a precursor …

Behind Blue Eyes: A Memoir Of Childhood Who Am I?: A Collection Of Essays, Glyn Parry

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

How should one approach childhood memories for the writing of literary memoir? Behind Blue Eyes is my childhood revisited. I have fashioned my earliest memories in order to tell a story. My story, and the story of my family. It covers the years between 1963 and 1967, when I was a boy growing up in the north-east of England. I made the decision from the outset to tell the story through the eyes of a child. This is an approach seldom taken, but one that has intrigued me for some years now. Could I sustain the voice of a four-year-old, …

Other People's Country: A Memoir; And, Developing A Trustworthy Narrator: An Essay, Maureen Helen

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis comprises two interrelated sections. The first section is a substantial piece of creative writing, which l have cailed 'Other People's Country: A Memoir, in the genre of travel memoir, and an essay. The memoir borrows techniques from fiction, drama and poetry to tell a story of a middle-aged, middle-class city nurse, who travels to a remote settlement at the edge of the Western Desert of Western Australia to provide health care for a fluctuating population of around 400 people, for whom English is a third or fourth language.

Writing that includes stories about vulnerable people from another culture, …