This is a creative writing: nonfiction thesis investigating how the Scripps College Dance Department came to be and serves a testament to the tenacity of the Scripps College Dance Department. This thesis explores different interconnected histories, regarding women's bodies, women's colleges and dance pioneers at the turn of the twentieth-century, to help explain why dance has the place it does in higher education, offering dance as a space for aestheticism in academia and focusing on the particular intersection of dance, aestheticism and women in a dance department at a women's college. Perhaps by looking at these histories, the current state of the Scripps Dance Department can be understood.

This collection of essays meditates on connection and how it is formed and severed. Several pieces consider lasting or arbitrary connections, like those holding together members of a family or the bridges joining two sides of a city. Some consider more tenuous bonds, such as the chance meeting of near-strangers or the moment shared between a child and a dying mouse. Indeed, many pieces consider the ways in which characters are bound to life – and to death.

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This is a collection of creative nonfiction writing. It includes an essay on capturing experience and perception, a piece of immersion journalism covering the inhabitants of a game store, and various examples of memoir.

PGP is a study of how we come into intimate contact with capitalism through our digestive tract. It is a study of the increasing valuing of protein in contemporary diet culture, focusing on how this phenomenon has resulted in mass-scale global soya production. Protein synthesis and distribution are rearticulated in this work as a set of molecular transactions enacted within/out bodies, moving loosely through ligaments and industrial machinery. PGP is a speculative exercise in communing with a damaged planet through our daily ingestions.

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THE IMPETUS IS FORWARD MOTION is a book of personal essays about the author’s childhood, teenage years, and beginning of adult life. The essays explore the themes of relocation, family, pets, art, and education with a focus on revealing what it means to be female in the modern world. The essays serve as an emotional description of a coming-of-age period of a member of the boomerang generation. The collection is more or less in reverse chronological order and begins with a recent account of a very long drive and ends with a familial truth that had remained a secret for a long time. The events and people in the essays are those who impacted the author’s life a great deal, in negative and positive ways. Half of the essays are written as lyric essays, after John D’Agata and Anne Carson. The style of writing and subject matter for the other half of the essays was partially inspired by the straightforward, conversational tone of contemporary essay collections Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay and Not that Kind of Girl, by Lena Dunham. In her essays, the author strives to not be like Sloane Crosley.

In Breathing through the Night, the author examines the moments of understanding and misunderstanding, the moments of fear, coping, and relief that occur during her husband’s deployment to Iraq and upon his return. The experiences of this military family serve as a magnifying lens through which the author explores means of coping and the role of communication in making meaning from memory, in shaping personal narratives within layers of story and history.

This collection of creative nonfiction encapsulates the author’s career as a burlesque performer in New Orleans. The goal of this thesis is to tell her story using the techniques of creative nonfiction – specifically, the memoir. This is not merely a story of her career – it is a piece about her relationships, the author conquering her fears, and how she rises up to meet her goals. Part I tells of how the author discovers this new world and how she finds her place in it. Part II is the author’s personal narrative of her revelation to her family. This story will introduce those who are unfamiliar with burlesque to a world of theatrics, sparkle, erotic subtexts, and this story needs the techniques of creative nonfiction to do it justice.